Is Kamala Harris’s Democratic Party Big Enough for Both Bernie Sanders and Ken Chenault?

Plus, bookstore “canceled the event because I was a Zionist”; what the NYTimes won’t tell you about a Trump event

“Growing the economic pie”: Harvard Corporation and Berkshire Hathaway board member Ken Chenault speaks at the Democratic National Convention.

Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders—sandwiched between Senator Schumer, Governor J.B. Pritzker, and Douglas Emhoff on what seemed like “Jewish men” night of the Democratic National Convention—denounced the “billionaire class,” said we “need to get big money out of our political process,” and called for expanding drug price controls to “cut our prescription drug prices in half.”

Then a member of the Harvard Corporation, former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, got up to assert that Harris is “both pro-business and pro-worker.”

“She knows that a market-based America needs a strong and effective government,” Chenault said. “Kamala Harris believes in growing the economic pie.”

Chenault didn’t mention Trump by name, instead referring to “Kamala Harris’s opponent.”

“He does not believe in our democratic values,” Chenault said. I guess he could have been stating the obvious, that Trump is a Republican and thus does not believe in Democratic values, but it seemed pretty clear that he was actually accusing the Republican nominee of being hostile to lowercase-d democratic values. That has been a key line of attack by Democrats against Trump, even as the Democrats swapped their democratically elected nominee, Joe Biden, out for one, Kamala Harris, who didn’t get many votes when she ran for president in 2020.

Chenault called on voters to “repudiate the merchants of fear.” When he stopped speaking, the Democratic convention feed segued to a video warning that if Trump is elected people are going to lose their health insurance. Talk about merchants of fear.

Sanders also assailed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, saying that elections, “including primary elections,” should not be decided by billionaires. That got a cheer from the DNC crowd, though voters in Democratic primaries had democratically decided to dump anti-Israel far-left extremists Rep. Cori Bush and Rep. Jamaal Bowman for more mainstream and sensible candidates.

There’s a lot of policy distance between Bernie Sanders, who is a self-described socialist, and Ken Chenault, who took over from Harvey Golub at American Express and who serves not only on the Harvard Corporation but also on the boards of Berkshire Hathaway and Airbnb. If Harris gets elected, or even if she sits for an interview before the election with a reasonably competent journalist, she’s going to be forced to choose between the economic visions of Sanders socialism and pro-growth, pro-business Chenault capitalism.

The Democrats, by showcasing Sanders and Chenault, are trying to tell the socialist voters she is for them and the capitalist voters she also is for them. That could be a lie. If it’s true, it could be a sign of a politician so vague and eager to please that she lacks any core principles or beliefs, or of one so inexperienced that she hasn’t really yet thought things through. Harris would probably prefer to avoid having to choose between Sanders and Chenault. But to govern is to choose.

“Canceled the event because I was a Zionist”: Rabbi Andy Bachman, who I got to know and like when I was living in Brooklyn and he was the rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim, a Reform synagogue in Park Slope, has a Facebook post reporting that an event he was scheduled to participate in at PowerHouse Books in Dumbo, Brooklyn was abruptly canceled. He writes:

I arrived early and was told by the store staff that the event had been "canceled" and that I should call the author. When I spoke to Josh, who was on his way to the event with his family, he said the store told him that they canceled the event because I was a Zionist.

When Josh arrived he spoke to the store for a few minutes and when they refused to change their position, we all left.

This rank and delusional antisemitism is outrageous. Josh, who has spent years actively opposing Israel's policies against Palestinians, is one of the core aspects of the book and his own Jewish identity. In addition, I have been a longtime critic of the current Israeli government while certainly never disavowing the right of the Jewish state to exist and, when necessary, defend itself.

What we are now seeing is nothing short of Stalinist or Maoist thinking; a moral flattening of the political sphere; a social movement predicated on loyalty and purity tests that at this point can only tolerate, at best, one kind of Jew.

Even some on the left can see this is outrageous. The former mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, said, “Shouldn’t a bookstore in NYC be a place committed to hearing all voices? Aren’t the right-wing the ones who ban books, not us?” I think “all voices” is probably a bit too much: no owner of a bookstore should have to, or want to, host a book event featuring, say, a member of the Hamas terrorist group or a neo-Nazi. But to place in the “outside the realm of acceptable” box those who support the existence of a Jewish state in the land of Israel (which is what “Zionism” means) is anti-Jewish bigotry. 

(By the way, Bachman—and I—also think that Zionist Jews should be able to speak at bookstores even if they have not been publicly critical of Israel’s government and policies. In other words, if the price of admission to a space as a Zionist Jew is to denounce Israel's elected government or its policies, that's also not okay. It shouldn't matter. You shouldn't have to prove by your politics that you are a “good,” that is, publicly critical of Israeli government and policies, Jew to access a platform in a Brooklyn bookstore.)

Some people have a misguided self-blame or blame-Bibi reflex on this sort of thing—Netanyahu’s policies and Israel’s occupation have made Israel a pariah state to the point where Andy Bachman can’t even speak at a Brooklyn bookstore. I don’t see it that way at all. A more accurate read of it would be that the bigotry has been fueled by a lack of moral clarity by some people in power, especially on the left—college presidents and deans, New York Times opinion section editors, even President Joe “those protesters out in the street, they have a point, a lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides” Biden. 

SmarterTimes: Here’s the New York Times news article by Simon Levien and Michael Gold and an online Times headline about a Trump rally over the weekend in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania:

At a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Mr. Trump swung from talking points on inflation and criticisms of Democratic policy as “fascist” and “Marxist” to calling illegal immigrants “savage monsters” and saying that rising sea levels would create more beachfront property.

Calling what Trump is saying about inflation “talking points” is a way for the Times to dismiss the importance of it. When Biden or Harris call Trump a threat to democracy, the Times doesn’t label it as “talking points.” For voters struggling with the high cost of food and rent, Bidenflation isn’t a “talking point,” it’s an issue. Times reporter Levien is, according to his LinkedIn bio, a 2024 graduate of Harvard, where he was a news editor of the Harvard Crimson in its boycott-Israel era.

There’s a problem with the Times dispatch even bigger than the “talking points” tell, though, which is that the article totally omits the portion of the event where Trump brought a Hispanic immigrant to America onto the rally stage to speak in Spanish for a few minutes about the case for Trump and against Harris. I guess you can dismiss this as tokenism akin to the Jews trotted onto stage for cover at anti-Israel rallies, but given the polls indicating substantial Hispanic support for Trump, including in places that have been swamped by migrants, that’s probably not a fair comparison. Regardless, for the Times to report the “savage monsters” comment but not the fact that a Spanish-speaking immigrant was welcomed by Trump and his audience on the rally stage gives Times readers a false impression about Trump xenophobia or nativism.

It’s the sort of coverage you’d expect from a reporter who was assigned to go gather material that portrayed Trump as extreme and dangerous, rather than a reporter who was assigned to go report on what happened at the rally, even if it didn’t fit the preconceptions. Where were the editors?

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