Kamala Harris’ VP pick, Tim Walz, completes the progressives’ takeover of the Democratic Party
The media’s drooling over Kamala Harris for making Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz her running mate exposes the big picture: Democrats are offering voters the most far-left ticket a major American party has ever devised.
All the DEI boxes are checked, but there is no ideological or political diversity.
They are two people who are physically different but share a single radical viewpoint.
The contrast with just four years ago is stunning.
Then, Joe Biden was depicted as a centrist who picked Harris because of her biracial status and gender and also because she checked the progressive box with her left-coast policies.
The aim reflected the traditional goal of most veep choices: Broaden the party’s reach with a ticket that appeals to different constituencies.
Yet with Biden off the stage, Dems inexplicably are lurching even harder left.
As such, the progressive ticket for 2024 completes the takeover by what was a relatively minor faction not so long ago.
Don’t dare disagree
It’s also a reflection of the cancel culture sweeping college campuses — no disagreement allowed.
The selection is all the more perplexing given that Biden was far more of a leftist than advertised — and the public didn’t like it.
He and Harris embraced open borders and blowout spending on green fantasies that raised gas prices and sparked inflation.
They also force-fed the nation a diet of radical cultural leaps.
It turns out that putting boys in girls’ bathrooms isn’t popular.
Who knew?
Their zealotry earned the duo a withering thumbs-down from voters long before Biden’s ouster.
His 36% approval rating reflected unhappiness with the administration’s policies more than anything else.
So now Dems are offering a double dose of the same agenda already rejected by the vast majority of Americans.
Brilliant, just brilliant!
Although Politico reports that Harris picked Walz because she “just really liked him,” it’s also true he looks and sounds like the type of Midwestern family man Dems desperately need to attract.
Walz got extra points for calling Donald Trump and JD Vance “weird,” a word the Dem echo chamber pounced on as an alternative to labeling them “threats to democracy” after the assassination attempt on the former president.
But the optics Walz brings belie his far-left politics, as demonstrated by his soft-headed sympathies for the rioters and arsonists who caused deaths and mass destruction in Minneapolis following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.
It is now a given that Walz’s delay in deploying the National Guard gave marauders extra time to wreak havoc and ruin.
Hundreds of businesses and buildings were damaged or destroyed, at a cost of more than $500 million, in riots that CNN infamously labeled “mostly peaceful.”
The fact that Harris called for donations to a bail fund for those arrested there speaks to how she and Walz are two sides of the same coin.
A choice Harris didn’t make also reveals how she would govern.
Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, wanted the veep slot and, had he been picked, likely would have secured the swing state’s 19 electoral votes for Dems.
But Shapiro, who is Jewish and a defender of Israel even though he despises Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would have provoked howls of damnation from the party’s antisemite caucus.
When Shapiro denounced the virulent antisemitism on campuses, he was labeled “Genocide Josh,” revealing the far left’s extremism and ignorance.
Antipathy toward Israel
Given his Pennsylvania advantage, the decision by Harris to pass on Shapiro suggests her antipathy toward the Jewish state runs dangerously deep.
It’s also telling that Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a vicious antisemite, praised her choice of Walz over Shapiro.
As I wrote recently, Harris has been consistently far more critical of Israel than Biden, who has run hot and cold since the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion.
As early as December, Harris said our ally “needed to do more” to protect Gaza civilians, telling a Dubai audience that “international humanitarian law must be respected.
Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”
She added the caveat that Israel has a right to defend itself, but her criticism came close to accusing Israel of war crimes.
She also broke new ground in March when she demanded an “immediate cease-fire.”
She insisted that “people in Gaza are starving,” a false claim made by pro-Palestinian activists and Jew-haters everywhere.
To underscore her hostility, Harris refused to preside over Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress last month.
She later met with him, then issued another condemnation that his team said went far beyond anything she said in private.
The upshot is that Trump has numerous openings where he can draw contrasts on policies and records, but it remains frustratingly unclear whether he will seize them.
It’s hard to remember now, but just weeks ago, there was widespread belief that the former president was in control of the race and could win the popular vote and a landslide in the Electoral College.
Now most polls show the contest is a virtual tie, with Harris closing the gap nationally and in battleground states.
Although much of that change was generated by Dems’ enthusiasm for anybody but Biden, it’s also a fact that Trump has veered off course.
After a well-run, successful GOP convention, he managed to turn what should have been a beneficial appearance at a gathering of black journalists into a disaster.
His discourse on whether Harris is actually black as opposed to being the biracial offspring of a black father from Jamaica and a mother from India was so bizarre that it defies explanation.
What voter sitting on the fence would see that cringey performance and say, “Bingo, that’s the guy I want in the White House”?
The correct answer is that there is no such voter.
But there are surely many voters for whom the event reinforced their doubts about Trump.
Trump’s useless feud
He pulled another dead rabbit out of a hat in a weekend appearance in Georgia when he renewed his attacks on the state’s GOP governor, Brian Kemp.
Their feud goes back to the 2020 election, when Trump believed the governor and Georgia’s Republican secretary of state should have helped him carry the state, which Biden narrowly won.
Those efforts led to the election-tampering indictments of Trump and others brought by Atlanta DA Fani Willis.
The case is in jeopardy because of Willis’ blatant misconduct, but it serves no good purpose for Trump to remind voters of his feud with Kemp and how it began.
In my interview with Trump the day after he was nearly murdered, he insisted he was committed to lowering America’s overheated temper and trying to find a basis for consensus.
Of his narrow brush with death, he said, “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be dead.”
The implication was that he had been spared for a higher purpose.
More than three weeks later, his coarse, name-calling, aimless campaign suggests he still hasn’t found it.
