Vice President Kamala Harris is faced with a choice of who to pick for her own running mate this year — and a key figure who has emerged as a favorite is Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), lauded for both his oratory skills and his intense popularity in his home state, a mandatory battleground Democrats need to win.
But not so fast, wrote Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon for Salon: there is a key liability that comes with him.
In fact, they argued, if Harris selects him, it could open the door for a rerun of one of Democrats' most infamous and disastrous presidential cycles.
"The most divisive issue among Democrats is the U.S.-enabled Israeli war against the civilian population of Gaza. To unify the party and defeat Trump’s MAGA forces, Harris needs to distance herself in a meaningful way from Joe Biden’s Gaza policy," they wrote.
Shapiro, on the other hand, would do little to help in that regard, as he has taken a hard line against Gaza protests in his state and dragged his feet on calling for a ceasefire at a time when many other Democratic governors were doing so.
The whole thing, they warned, sets up a rerun of Democrats' humiliation in 1968, another election where an unpopular war divided the party — albeit in this case one the U.S. was directly waging, rather than one they were simply trying to mediate on behalf of one participant.
"Parallels are apparent with the pivotal events of 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson — increasingly unpopular among Democrats and others because of his Vietnam War policies — stunned the political world by announcing he would not seek re-election," they wrote.
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"At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the party nominated LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey — who had not even run in the primaries — as its standard-bearer. Humphrey’s halting efforts to distance himself from Johnson’s policies were too little, too late, and he was unable to connect with many of the dedicated Democratic activists and voters who were opposed to the war. After failing to detach himself sufficiently from LBJ's war, Humphrey lost a winnable election to Republican Richard Nixon."
Should Shapiro be on the ticket, they wrote, it could cause another upsurge of antiwar protest against Democrats at the convention — which, ironically, happens to again be in Chicago this year.
"A broad coalition to defeat Donald Trump and the fascistic MAGA movement is exactly what we need," Cohen and Solomon concluded. "Making Josh Shapiro the nominee for vice president would create internal conflict within that coalition, which is exactly what we don’t need."
