There’s a gathering sense that President Biden’s response to the war in Gaza may cost him the 2024 election. A recent Gallup poll showed that his support among Democrats has slipped 11 points in the past month to 75 percent, the lowest of his presidency. On Friday my colleagues in the newsroom reported on a growing backlash against Biden coming from young and left-leaning voters.
Does this mean that standing with Israel could be politically fatal for Biden? I don’t think so, and to understand why, it’s important to understand the core responsibilities of an American president.
In 2012, when I was a partisan supporter of Mitt Romney, there was one message from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign that I thought made the most succinct and persuasive case for his second term. It was delivered most memorably by then-Vice President Biden, of all people, at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. He said that Obama had “courage in his soul, compassion in his heart and a spine of steel,” and then Biden delivered the key line: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.”
If you were an arms manufacturer (military industrial complex) and needed a controlled environment to test out various surveillance, antipersonnel, nonlethal (we all know these can be lethal) gear (and various software for face recognition, sigint, predictive modeling, etc) in various settings, it’s hard to imagine a “better” set up.
Where are they going to go?
How easy is it to control the supply of everything going in so you know what you are up against?
How simple to watch the area with satellite imagery?
How risky to get too involved know Israel has nukes and the US in its side?
My mind goes there sometimes. A lot of gear comes out of Israel “because they need it”.
Now, look, I am not antisemitic. I’m just a person who has seen enough to know that no normal person wakes up the morning and wishes the world they are raising their kids had more violence. That’s the work of sociopathic business people and their government pals craving power. It has nothing to do with the average persons culture, social status, or ethics.