A Society of Baruch Goldsteins

On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, armed and wearing his reserve uniform, walked into Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs and found a room in which dozens of Muslims were praying. Provoked by nothing but his own madness, he lifted a Galil rifle and opened fire on the innocents, unloading 111 rounds and killing 29 people.

Israel was stunned.

Israel’s Response to a Jewish Terrorist

“I am shamed over the disgrace imposed upon us by a degenerate murderer,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told parliament. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” Rabin added, addressing not only Goldstein, who had already been beaten to death by others at the cave, but of anyone who thought like him.

The prime minister emphasized the point, saying that people like Goldstein were “not partners in the Zionist enterprise” and “a foreign implant” and “an errant weed.”

“A single, straight line connects the lunatics and racists of the entire world,” Rabin said, condemning all forms of terror. He added that Goldstein was no better than a terrorist who kills Jews, saying,  “A single line of blood and terrorism runs from the Islamic Holy War member who shot Jewish worshipers who stood in prayer in the synagogues of Istanbul, Paris, Amsterdam and Rome, to the Jewish Hamas member who shot Ramadan worshipers.”

The condemnation crossed partisan lines. Benjamin Netanyahu, then leader of the opposition, deplored the violence as a “despicable crime” and expressed his “unequivocal condemnation.”

Rabbis in Israel, including the Chief Rabbis, and around the world, including the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, then Britain’s chief rabbi, condemned Goldstein. Rabbi Sacks said that “Such an act is an obscenity and a travesty of Jewish values. That it should have been perpetrated against worshippers in a house of prayer at a holy time makes it a blasphemy as well.”

The state took action. Goldstein had been a member of the Kach movement, founded by Meir Kahane, who was assassinated several years before. Already banned in 1992 from running for elections in the Knesset, the movement was outlawed altogether after Goldstein’s massacre. A special body of inquiry, the Shagmar Comission, was even set up to probe the events.

Aside from a  vanishingly small number of people who actually believed that Goldstein had thwarted a terrorist plot – he hadn’t – Israeli society was united in its outrage. Even now, decades later, as Israel has moved further to the right politically, Goldstein is still reviled. There has been a great deal of scandal around Itamar ben Gvir joining Israel’s government, because he was at one time a supporter of Goldstein. But even he, perhaps Israel’s most extreme politician, had to announce that he was no longer a supporter to gain office. He might be honest, an Israeli version of Democratic U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, who went from recruiting friends to the Ku Klux Klan to endorsing Barack Obama for president. Or ben Gvir could be lying; either way, aside from a few political outcasts, Israeli society rejects Goldstein’s legacy and those who support him.

Compare the above to the morally abject displays across a wide swath of Palestinian society this past weekend.

Palestinian society’s response to a terrorist

On Jan. 27, 2023, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, seven Israeli Jews, including a 14-year-old boy, were murdered by a Palestinian gunman in cold blood while leaving their synagogue in a Jerusalem suburb. The next day, another Palestinian terrorist, this one 13 years old, tried to kill a father and son who, luckily, survived.

Palestinian society’s response to the massacre of innocents at their place of worship was dramatically different from Israel’s. Instead of widespread condemnation, streets in the West Bank and Gaza erupted in celebration. Palestinians chanted and cheered, distributed candies, shot their many guns into the air, and even lit fireworks. And this was not the response of a small group of extremists: the streets were literally filled.

Read the rest of this article at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Jenna Ortega did the right thing. Will others?

In December, two articles appeared here asking which type of antisemitism was more dangerous for Jews: the kind promoted by Kanye West or Jenna Ortega. The comparison surprised many. The fallen-from-grace hip hop artist Kanye openly loves Hitler, while Ortega, star of Netflix’s Wednesday, seems a nice person who genuinely wants to help those in need. Judging by the controversy that ensued, the question was entirely warranted. The argument was never that Ortega’s an antisemite, but that antisemitism under the social justice guise of anti-Zionism is at least as dangerous as its other forms, because it is so easily accepted. The online outrage entirely validated the point.

The original article argued that Ortega was doing damage to Jews, especially young Jews on college campuses, by pinning a link to the “Decolonize Palestine” website to her Twitter profile. That site has the look and feel of a progressive social justice advocacy page, but the veneer masks a series of talking points completely aligned with Hamas’s.

As it turned out, Hamas agreed and began featuring Ortega’s words on its Quds News Network.

Importantly, the intent was never to demonize the actress. As both articles note, she seems to be a decent person who would honestly tell anyone who asked that she deplores Jew hatred; that’s what made “her hate” so terrifying. The hate was “hers” only because when you post something on social media, it’s yours. That Ortega is actually a good person fooled by slick propaganda made her post all the more frightening.

With the previous articles, the aim was that maybe only a few thousand people would read them and that someone on Ortega’s publicity team would take note. The hope of the second article was more specific, that someone from a Jewish organization would reach out and explain to Ortega, first, that Decolonize is a hate site and, second, the amount of harm this type of propaganda does, especially on college campuses, where anti-Zionists often protest any Jewish organizations, political or not.

For example, someone should have explained to the Scream star that, due to ideology like this, Dyke Marches, like the one in D.C. and the one in Chicago, barred Jewish pride flags, causing LGBTQ Jews to fear for their safety. Or that this ideology caused the Washington, D.C., Sunrise Movement, an environmental organization, to boycott a national demonstration for voting rights due to the participation of liberal Jewish groups, including the Religious Action Center. RAC is the Reform Jewish movement’s political action arm, which advocates for almost all the issues Ortega supports and routinely criticizes Israel. Or perhaps she could have been educated on how American Jewish youth often hide all signs of their Jewishness for fear of being harassed on college campuses.

Hollywood unfriendly to open friends of Israel

What happened behind the scenes is unknown, but, as it turns out, Ortega did the right thing. Or, at least, the closest to the right thing she could do that wouldn’t also be career suicide: she unpinned the tweet from the top of her Twitter feed, meaning that anyone who wanted to see it would have to scroll back to March. This effectively consigned the tweet to oblivion without causing anti-Zionist pages that embedded her tweet to become filled with “tweet deleted” messages, which would have led to outrage from a well-organized, powerful movement that would immediately turn on her. Despite the antisemitic trope, it is hard to support, or even openly not hate, Israel in Hollywood. Gal Gadot was nearly canceled simply for saying during a recent war initiated by Hamas that she wants Israel and its neighbors to find a way to live in peace.

Calls for peace are “propaganda” for “ethnic cleansing.” That’s how these people think. Clearly, the anti-Zionist left/Hamas extremist grouping is dangerous to an actor, especially a rising celebrity.

Confirming the above, just after Ortega did the right thing, Twitter user Amir Amini posted a screen grab of the “Ortega vs. Kanye” article, dishonestly suggesting that the Times of Israel (the article and its headline are solely my own) was attacking Ortega for saying “Palestinians deserve to live.” Obviously part of a media campaign, his tweet was viewed 11.3 million times and retweeted 49 thousand times, creating such a controversy that Newsweek and others covered it, associating Ortega with Kanye not for a few thousand people who read the articles, but for millions who didn’t. This is an injustice to the actress, who took a step to right her mistake.

The Co-Founders of “Decolonize” Let the Truth Slip

Read the rest of this article at the Times of Israel. (No paywall)

Jenna Ortega becomes Hamas poster child, Jewish organizations silent

In a further illustration of what happens when people with seemingly good intent spread propaganda about things they don’t understand, Jenna Ortega, the American actress who rose to fame as Wednesday Addams on the eponymous Netflix series, has become – literally – a poster child for Hamas via their Quds News Network.

Shamefully, American Jewish organizations have said nothing.

Ortega’s Tweets

As noted previously, the actress shared a link to the “Decolonize Palestine” website. At first glance, it seemed in keeping with previous social media posts – she’s championed the cause of Planned Parenthood, Ukrainians, the women of Iran, and children in Iraq and Yemen. However, while she supports women rising up against Islamic theocrats in Tehran, the “Decolonize” link was essentially a list of talking points in line with Hamas, an organization funded in large part by Iran and which imposes an Iranian-style theocracy on Gaza. Some of what appears on the site has been disavowed even by the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, which the site calls “subcontractors for Israeli control of Palestine” (as does Hamas).

Lest anyone think that Israel’s new right-wing government is the problem, the “Decolonize” link Ortega promoted goes out of its way in its “myths” section to argue that this is wrong. Instead, any Israeli government, even if it were composed entirely of left-wing pro-Palestinians, would be the same, since, we’re told, “a colonial society will also produce a colonial ‘left’, and even a colonial ‘peace’ movement. This was exemplified by Yitzhak Rabin.”

Needless to say, the site is full of anti-Semitic tropes, portraying Jews as shadowy operators, lurking behind the scenes to exert control. Take any 19th-century anti-Semitic work, replace “Jew” with “Zionist,” and you’ll have something that looks like “Decolonize Palestine.”

Ortega’s tweet has been shared nearly 10,000 times, and has received more than 32,000 likes. For context, the top 25 percent of Twitter users receive on average only 37 likes and a single retweet per month. Each retweet and each like exposes the link to an even greater audience, and, because she has the tweet “pinned” to the top of her profile, people continue to see it for the first time each day.

The Face of a U.S.-Designated Terrorist Organization

Read the rest of this post at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Jenna Ortega vs. Kanye: Who’s more dangerous on antisemitism?

Who’s more dangerous to the safety of Jewish people, Kanye West or Jenna Ortega?

Easy, right? Kanye is an open Jew hater. He creates tweets that are both incomprehensible and threateningly anti-Semitic, spews Black Hebrew Israelite and Nation of Islam propaganda, and declares his love for Hitler and the Nazis. He even appeared to cause discomfort for even Alex Jones, the guy who attacked the survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting. Ortega, who plays Wednesday Addams in the current Netflix series, is, according to those who work with her, genuinely nice. While West uses his social media for self-aggrandizement, unhinged rants, declarations that he is a god, and, most troublingly, Jew hatred, Ortega uses hers to promote her work and humanitarian causes. She seems to genuinely want to help others.

And therein lies the problem.

The anti-Semitism of the well-intentioned but uninformed

West understands antisemitism perfectly well. He hates Jews. Whatever else is going on in his addled mind, that much is clear. Jenna Ortega presumably sincerely believes that antisemitism is evil, no less so than sexism, homophobia, hatred of Muslims, or other forms of racism and xenophobia. The idea that she promotes anti-Jewish causes would likely make her shudder. The problem is that, like millions of other well meaning Americans, she has no real understanding of antisemitism, and therefore is unlikely to recognize it in at least some of its forms. And, also like millions of other Americans, she likely doesn’t do much investigation into a cause before she posts it to social media. (The number of celebrities who at least in part handle their own social media is astounding.)

Earlier this year, someone forwarded a link to a group chat, horrified that “the girl from Scream” (the Netflix series hadn’t yet been released) would post something like it. (My friend, a Russian-speaking Israeli Jew, used far more vividly descriptive and colorful language which I avoid repeating here.) The link was to a Jenna Ortega Tweet that read simply “Decolonize Palestine,” with an embedded link to a website bearing the same moniker.

Decolonize? Was this a clumsy attempt at supporting a two-state solution? I clicked the link.

And I was horrified.

Check out the rest of this post at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Still “watching the world wake up from history”

Recently, I dusted off a copy of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, first published in 1992. What I found is that, despite the derision the idea of history’s end has received over the past few decades, Fukuyama’s book is in retrospect a surprisingly prescient work that helps to make sense of the current period.

Recently, I dusted off a copy of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, first published in 1992. Despite the derision the idea of history’s end has received over the past few decades, Fukuyama’s book is turned out to be a surprisingly prescient work that helps to make sense of the current period.

The end of history

The first part of Fukuyama’s argument is well known. Basing himself on Hegel and, especially, the interpretation of Hegel by the German philosopher’s student Alexandre Kojève, Fukuyama argued that history wasn’t just a bunch of events that happened one after the other. Instead, history advanced in a progressive direction. The outcome, or natural endpoint, of history was liberal democracy, the kind enjoyed by citizens of the United States, France, and other countries.

While Fukuyama was criticized for positing the American model as history’s outcome, he never did so, instead seeing liberal democracy more broadly defined, as some kind of parliamentary system that allows for citizens to express their desires politically and a market economy economically, all accompanied by the rule of law.

In 1989, when Fukuyama first wrote the essay that later became the book, liberal democracy was obviously triumphant. The Berlin wall had just fallen, the Cold War had ended, and the NATO alliance was the victor as the Soviet Union bowed out of superpower status. China was convulsed by uprisings, and the Communist Party there only maintained its grip on power through sheer brutality. Over the course of the next three years, Communist states fell quickly and dramatically, the culmination of what political scientist Samuel Huntington later declared “the third wave” of democratization.

History’s rebirth?

In the intervening years, however, the picture became muddied. Some of the post-Soviet states went through a period of “democratic backsliding,” in which they reverted to autocracy, as did Venezuela and a few other states. After 9/11, another of Huntington’s ideas, that the world would cease to be torn by ideological divides and would become defined by “civilizational” struggles. seemed to take on new credence. Two of the “civilizations” Huntington outlined, the Islamic and the Western, appeared to be the world’s major faultline, while the “Orthodox” (the Orthodox Christian states of the former Soviet Union and several of its allies) seemed to be only slightly less antagonistic.

The Arab Spring of 2011 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, as well as the less antagonistic relationship between the Muslim and Western world (note, especially, the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab Muslim states) essentially put the clash of civilizations theory to rest. But there was another challenge to Fukuyama’s “end of history” theory.

For Fukuyama and his reading of Hegel through Kojève, history didn’t progress in some sort of pre-ordained and mechanical way as it does in the Marxist interpretation of Hegel. Instead, liberal democracy is the end state simply because it works better than any other model tried. By spreading out decision making both economically and politically, it allows people to participate in the affairs that interest them and avoids disastrous mistakes of policy like those the Soviets often made. The then-rising “China model” of authoritarianism challenged the theory, however.

The China model

Disappointed that government wasn’t “getting things done,” especially in the early 2010s, many western intellectuals looked to China and saw the benefits of an authoritarian state. Perhaps, they wondered, by limiting the mess of democracy, technocrats in China were able to move their society forward rationally and impartially, elevating only the best people to leadership through a meritocratic model. “I disagree with the view that there’s only one morally legitimate way of selecting leaders: one person, one vote,” Daniel Bell said at an Asia Society discussion entitled “Can the China Model Succeed?”

Then the pandemic happened, and, for a while, and despite ample evidence that the Chinese authorities mismanaged the outbreak from the beginning (despite heroic work done by Chinese doctors and scientists), Western public health experts began to fawn over China. Greg Ip argued that the “Zero-Covid” policy “held lessons” for others in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Public health experts from Duke and UC-San Francisco wrote in Time that China’s response was “100 times better” than that of the United States.

The late 2010s were a bad time for liberal democracy, with the chaos of Trump’s presidency followed by the similar chaos of Biden’s presidency, unable to deal with crime or inflation or virtually any other problem the U.S. faced; Brexit in the United Kingdom; anti-liberal democracy parties elected into governments in a host of Western democracies, including Brazil; and so on. But then things changed.

1991 redux?

In 2022, around the world, people began again fighting in earnest to free themselves from tyrannical systems. As the year began, Russia invaded Ukraine.Though most everyone thought Russia’s invasion appalling, they also expected Putin’s onslaught to succeed relatively quickly. Then the Ukrainians took history into their own hands. Surprising the world and, perhaps, even themselves, the Ukrainian people united together to issue a forceful response to the Russian aggressors. Instead of quickly annexing Ukraine, Russia was forced into a long slog.

Russia had expected the various factions in Ukraine, constantly fighting each other – as the current political factions in the United States fight each other – would fold. Instead, they put aside their differences and began to save their country.

As the Ukrainians inspired the world, the Iranian regime arrested and murdered a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini for the “crime” of not wearing her hijab “correctly.” The evil act proved the spark that set off the Iranian tinderbox: across Iran, women, and then men, rose up, demanding an end to their oppression. Across the nation, the morality police and other regime thugs responded in the harshest ways possible, gunning down protesters – women, children, men – in the streets. And yet the Iranians keep fighting: in the streets, on TikTok, on Twitter, everywhere, they fight. Even the Ayatollah’s own niece condemned the regime, signaling a total loss of legitimacy. Backed into a corner, the theocracy has just announced it would abolish its morality police, and now even the hijab law is under review.

The people of Iran are still fighting, likely for liberal democracy.

And now, even China, the prize of the authoritarian model, has erupted in protests unheard of since 1989. As demonstrations raged against the harsh “Zero Covid” police that so enchanted Western technocrats months ago, Chinese authorities cracked down, with videos flooding social media platforms depicting the barbarity. And now, China has begun to back off, easing restrictions. While it’s unlikely that the Communist Party will fall anytime soon, the luster of the China model has been removed.

There is no civilizational struggle and the authoritarian model is not a path anyone wants to follow; those who live under it do so until they have a chance to overthrow it. Despite the detours, we’re still at the end of history.

The other part of Fukuyama’s argument

Part of the reason some have rejected the “end of history” thesis is because of the problems that have become so common liberal democracies, as mentioned above. But these are issues that Fukuyama mentioned in his book (though, not the original article, suggesting that many of those disparaging the book never read it). Challenges that we face are challenges listed in the End of History: income inequality, political decay, and the fraying of social bonds, and the human need for recognition.

A sizable portion of End of History is dedicated to a discussion of thymos, the human need for recognition. Thymos was the impetus for much of history’s forward movement, according to this understanding of Hegel. The fact that some are so driven for status and recognition that they would fight and kill for some cause led to the acts of valor (or butcherie, depending on the moral viewpoint and the actions carried out) that caused war, revolution, and so on. Fighting against oppression is often caused by an injury to one’s thymos: Fukuyama gives numerous examples, including a speech by Vaclav Havel, in which the latter describes the injury to his self-esteem done by Czechoslovak communism.

The question Fukuyama posed about the future of liberal democracy: what happens in a system where thymos isn’t, and can’t be, a motivating factor? Will society become composed of “men without chests,” satiated consumers with no will to fight? As Alexis Carré notes in Foreign Policy, Western Europe, long stable and under the defense of the United States, has weapons but no warriors.

Given the discussion of thymos and the quest for recognition by others, it is hard to understand why so few have made the connection between End of History and the current period in the Western world, in which identity politics, including white identity politics, has come to the fore so prominently. Even those not consumed by identity overtly have become quite tribal in their partisan allegiances. Keyboard warriors, unable to fight on the battlefield, rage-type on Twitter. Is it any wonder that one of the biggest controversies of the day revolves around who gets to say what on a social media platform? 

The book suggested the general dynamics of this world decades ago.

History is still over, and Fukuyama’s work has been vindicated. Regardless of any challenges, the liberal democratic system has proven itself to be the best system possible because it best meets the needs of those who inhabit it. No other system, looking back centuries, has been able to outlast it. Where there is no liberal democracy, people are fighting for it.

As Jesus Jones put it, we’re all still “watching the world wake up from history” in China, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, and other places where it’s not fully over. The rest of us, residing where history still lies dead, have to solve the challenge thymos poses in liberal democracy.

Netlfix’s Farha: irredeemable anti-Semitic propaganda

If you make it through the entirety of Farha, the controversial Jordanian film about a young Palestinian girl during the conflict of 1948, and then watch the credits, you’ll find something curious. The extras are listed as residents of the “Gaza Refugee Camp” in Jerash, Jordan. This movie, supposedly in solidarity with the plight of Palestinian Arabs, was made in and financed by a country that keeps hundreds of thousands of them locked in refugee camps. The filmmakers, along with the Jordanian and other governments, care less about Palestinians than about using them as a tool to demonize Israel and Jews.

Farha is nothing more than propaganda, and boring propaganda at that. The film is grotesquely one-sided, even slanderous, in its depiction of the military units that later became the Israel Defense Force. While the situation around the creation of the State of Israel and the conditions that led to the hundreds of thousands Palestinian Arabs displaced from their homes are varied and complex, Farha paints a Manichean picture, in which benevolent Arab villagers are mercilessly slaughtered by carnage-loving Jews.

The plot, centering on the eponymous teen girl, is simple. Farha wants to leave her village in Mandatory Palestine to go study in the unnamed “city,” presumably Jerusalem. Alas, it’s 1948, and the devious Jews attack her town. Though her father tries to send her away with her uncle and his family, she flees the escape car to stay with him. To keep her from danger, he locks her in a food storage cellar, promising to return. The rest of the movie tediously chronicles Farha’s days in the cellar. For most of the movie, the viewer desperately waits for anything to happen while watching a girl mill about in a basement. Farha cries, goes to sleep, wakes up, her lamp runs out of oil, she runs out of water, she collects rainwater, and on and on…and on.

While supposedly based on true events, there is very little actual historical detail presented. Early on, Farha and her cousin see a convoy of British soldiers as they are leaving the country, prompting her and other village kids to mock the soldiers and cheer their withdrawal. The average American, unfamiliar with the conflict, must surely wonder: why are these British soldiers there? Why are they leaving? Those who know a bit more might suspect that the villagers were cheering some kind of Arab victory in pushing the British out. That seems to be the notion the filmmakers want to present, but it’s a false one. Few Arabs actually sided with the British – indeed, Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was an open supporter of Hitler and recruited Arabs to fight in the Third Reich’s army – but the Jewish military organizations the film slanders were the ones who actually expelled the British, as documented in Menachem Begin’s The Revolt.

The film’s fudging of the historical record is the least of its flaws, however. Much more important is the blood libel. In the film’s central scene, Farha, watching through an opening in the cellar door, sees Jewish soldiers capture an Arab couple from the village. The Jews – the filmmakers, who aim for historical accuracy nowhere else, do not neglect to ensure that the proto-IDF are speaking Hebrew – laugh and taunt the woman. Believing her to be pregnant, the fighters place a bet as to whether the baby is a boy or a girl, deciding to gut her to find out. However, a baby cries out from above; they realize the woman has actually just given birth and hidden the baby. The Jews then find the newborn and their two other children. After more taunting, the soldiers line everyone but the baby against the wall and shoot them.

As they prepare to depart, the commander tells his subordinate to kill the baby, but not “to waste a bullet.” The soldier places the baby on the ground, throws a towel over it, and leaves. Later, when Farha breaks out of the cellar, she finds the baby dead, covered in flies.

Farha is one-sided and engages in blatant antisemitism: but is its core story true? Probably not. According to the film’s opening, it was “inspired by true events.” But “inspired” is a weasel word; which part was true, and which was simply inspired? And of the events that the filmmaker actually believed to be true, was it really? Perhaps there was a girl who hid in a food cellar. There is no documentation of anything that happened, and new scholarship tells us that many well-known “truths” of Israeli brutality were nothing more substantial than rumors that swirled during wartime, later amplified by various interests. 

What’s more, filmmaker Darin Sallam said that there were “parallels” between her film’s story and the life of Anne Frank. This analogy is by definition antisemitic, as the logical conclusion is that, if this girl is Anne Frank, the Israelis are to be taken as the Nazis. According to the definition of antisemitism agreed upon by the United States and dozens of other countries, comparisons between Israelis and the State of Israel to Nazis is antisemitism.

Liberal democracies tend to produce better movies than authoritarian regimes. Compare, for example, this misfortune of a film with the Israeli series Fauda. The latter, about the current stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is layered and rich, and every character on any side is a multi-faceted human being with complex motivations. Fauda is not without bias; it is as pro-Israel as Farha is pro-PLO. The difference is that in the world of Fauda, the Israelis are on the right side of the conflict, but they are imperfect, and the Palestinians are real human beings caught between sides in a situation they wouldn’t choose for themselves. In Farha, the Arabs are good and the Jews are monsters who like to kill.

Given that Farda’s “true” story is highly unlikely to be so, the closest we come to a crime against humanity is the producers and Netflix causing anyone to endure this film. Stripped of its anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment, the film is just a bore, its brief 92-minute runtime seeming to stretch to hours.

The libel against Jews and Israel is clearly the only reason anyone has taken notice of this film. Admittedly, lead actress Karam Taher turns in an excellent performance, but even that cannot rescue what is ultimately a wretched propaganda film with no redeeming values.

Neither the Democrats nor MAGA won yesterday

Yesterday was bad for Democrats. They won, or, at least, they didn’t lose as badly as expected (results still too close to call), probably maintaining control of the Senate and losing the House by far fewer seats than expected. This is a victory, to be sure, but it’s a pyrrhic victory, setting the stage for a 2024 decimation of the Democratic Party at both the executive and legislative levels.

By all accounts, the Democrats should have seen a resounding defeat yesterday. Off-year election cycles routinely deliver bad results to the governing party, and the most important indicators – crime, the economy, etc. – favored an opposition party over a governing party. Combine that with a president who’s quite obviously non compos mentis, and the expected result is, as George W. Bush once described it, “a thumpin’.” But that didn’t happen, so the obvious question is: Why?

Why were the Democrats able to defy the odds and pull off what amounts to a victory? Only two real options are available: the Democrats did just about everything right, or the Republicans did just about everything wrong. If Democrats are being honest with themselves, it should be obvious to them that the electorate voted against the Republicans, not for the Democrats. If there was widespread content with the Democrats, the polls don’t show it. They don’t show it in the presidential approval rating or in confidence in Democrats’ ability to handle key issues like crime and inflation; the Democrats don’t even fully dominate the area they’ve tried to make their key issue: protecting democracy (though, to be sure, this is an area where they beat the Republicans).

Throughout the race, the Democrats broadcast their lack of faith in their standing with the voters. While Biden was making speeches arguing MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy, other members of his party were openly funding the most extreme of these threats, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. A cynical move, ostensibly fighting for democracy while funding democracy’s supposed gravediggers, but it worked. With a few exceptions, almost all of the Trump-favored extremists, including those the Democrats helped to beat out over their moderate, regular Republican, challengers, lost. But therein lies the problem for the future.

Victory leads to complacency, while defeat leads to soul searching, as was the case in 2020, when Democrats like Abigail Spannberger forcefully questioned the “defund the police” slogan with which the Democratic Party had become too comfortable. Recall that 2020 was a defeat for Democrats in the same way that 2022 is a victory: while this time they didn’t lose by as much as they would have been expected to, two years ago they didn’t win by nearly as much as they should have. Indeed, the only reason they won a “majority” (really, 50-50 plus the vice president’s tie-breaking vote) of the Senate was because Trump went to Georgia and convinced Republicans their votes didn’t matter, because the election was “rigged” and “stolen.”

Now, the election results have made the Democrats complacent, while the Republicans search their souls, along with their strategic playbook. While many have been arguing that Trump is an albatross around the Republicans’ collective neck, yesterday made it clear that he’s not an albatross, but a noose. The candidates Trump picked lost yesterday, but in places where the former president didn’t interfere, Republicans fared much better. Georgia’s Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is locked in a dead heat with Republican Herschel Walker, an unhinged figure who was endorsed by Trump. Walker could win, but Democrats only need to look elsewhere in Georgia to see something that should terrify them: Brian Kemp, a conservative Republican who Trump declared an enemy, destroyed Democratic superstar Stacey Abrams in the race for governor, 54-46, despite few problems and high turnout.

One could look also at New York’s 17th Congressional district. There, Sean Patrick Maloney was defeated by Republican state legislator Mike Lawler. Lawler, despite having been a Trump delegate to the RNC in previous times, sought to distance himself from Trump and focused his campaign on crime and inflation. Lawler’s website, especially its foreign policy section, shows a candidate at pains to paint himself as a strongly conservative – not an America Firster. And Maloney should have won easily: there was some redistricting, but Biden won the general area of the district by 10 points – and Maloney is chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the organization that’s responsible for raising and doling out money to the party’s Congressional candidates. No DCCC member has lost in four decades.

Other examples abound, but the most important is in Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis handily beat Democrat Charlie Crist. Trump has been strongly, and publicly, signaling that he hates DeSantis, holding a rally at the same time as the Florida governor and warning DeSantis not to run for president because, “I know more about him than anybody — other than, perhaps, his wife.” Were DeSantis to run, Trump said, the Florida governor “could hurt himself very badly.”

So far, DeSantis hasn’t hurt himself at all. He’s been able to build a huge base of support in Florida, straddling the lines between competent administrator (If he runs for president, he’s sure to point to his handling of the pandemic, as compared to the disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, responsible for the state’s nursing home scandal), conservative, and Trump-style troll (as evinced in his apery of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s transport of undocumented immigrants to blue states).

Coming days will reveal more information about how Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters cast their ballots, but they are clearly shifting Republican – and DeSantis has made huge headway with, at least, Hispanic voters in his state, beating Biden’s share of that demographic’s vote in 2020. While commentators then pointed to Cubans and Venezuelans fearing the stated socialism of AOC, Sanders, and their bloc, the same explanation doesn’t hold now. DeSantis won 50 percent of all Hispanic voters in Florida, and a whopping 55 percent of Puerto Rican voters in the state.

The Florida governor is clearly the rising star in the Republican Party, and, if that dynamic isn’t halted, it likely means an eclipse for the Democrats. DeSantis might actually be able to purge the GOP of Trump’s influence, or at least to wrest control from him. That, combined with the quite obvious rebuke of Trumpism by the voters, can expunge MAGA and rob the Democrats of their key talking point in 2022. In 2024, they’ll have to focus on their record and the state of the country, and economists are still predicting a recession.

And if DeSantis becomes the Republican nominee, Biden would not stand a chance. Biden won in 2020 by promising not to be Trump. While Biden and the Democrats didn’t seem to get the message, it was pretty clear: voters wanted simply a return to normalcy, to pre-Trump politics. They didn’t want a lurch to the left or to the right; they wanted to make America normal again. Biden hasn’t done that; everyone who’s honest admits that there’s something terribly amiss in the Biden administration’s handling of almost everything, and the president isn’t even able to hold his own against friendly interviewers. How will he perform against DeSantis who will, after winning the primary and hew moderate? DeSantis is a fairly skilled orator, full of facts and figures, easily able to defeat Biden in a debate.

Each party has work to do. For Republicans, the steps forward are clear: expunge Trump’s influence. For Democrats, the work is clear, but both the problem and the necessary steps forward are obscured by the fog of victory. Recent Democratic statements seem to indicate that Biden and his inner circle, as well as many legislative Democrats, believe that there has been a vindication of their policies, encouraging them to simply keep doing what they’ve done for the past two years. That, though, is a path to electoral disaster. As for the actual steps the Democrats should take moving forward, George Will has some decent suggestions.

If Trump is gone, a winning strategy will no longer consist of not being Trump.

Appoint Eric Batista City Manager Now

For some reason, the left wing of Worcester’s city council has become so enamored of a specific way of searching for the city’s chief executive that it eclipses the goal of filling the spot with the right person. The term “national search” is repeated as nauseum with a sort of fervor that borders on the religious, as if this particular ritual were an end in and of itself.

But why? The answer isn’t readily apparent.

The Worcester Public Schools Superintendent Example

Adherents of the national search ritual point to the selection earlier this year of Dr. Rachel H. Monárrez to replace the outgoing Maureen Binienda as superintendent of the Worcester Public Schools, which took place only after a painstaking national search was conducted by the school committee. If the city needed a national search for a school superintendent, why shouldn’t we conduct a national search for our chief executive, the city manager?

The answer is straightforward: the Worcester Public Schools are failing, while the city itself is not. The schools system isn’t in dire straits because of Binienda or any policies she implemented; it has been for decades, and there’s no clear reason why. At least as far back as the 1980s, the system was a mess. During my four years of high school alone, during the 1990s, gym classes were ended for all juniors and seniors (too expensive), a period was cut from the end of the day to save money, and the state considered de-accrediting Worcester’s schools. The air was so toxic in North High at the time that, just after I graduated, the state threatened to shutter the school unless the city intervened and did something about the strangely-thick air permeating the windowless basement classrooms. The city obliged, setting up large blowers to circulate air down the hallways and outside.

The financial situation during that period was so bad that the school committee called a snow day – in June of 1989. This gave students and teachers time off to lobby at the statehouse for more funding. Hundreds of kids and our teachers descended on Boston to implore Governor Dukakis to send more money our way.

Now, years later, the schools have received more money, and the school committee has allocated funding to replace all the high schools with modern, non-poisonous buildings, starting with Worcester Vocational High School, now Worcester Tech, and then North High. Despite controversy during her tenure over her position that poverty was a more important issue than structural racism, Binienda’s tenure saw some innovative changes.

Despite these changes, Worcester public schools are still, to put it mildly, troubled. Out of the 24,000 or so high schools in America, North High ranks somewhere between 13,383rd and 17,843rd, according to U.S. News and World Report. These are national rankings, so thank you to Mississippi and Alabama. Other schools in the city aren’t much better: the number one school in the district, University Park, is number 82 in Massachusetts alone, and prepares only about 48.5 percent of its students adequately for college – less than half. The corresponding figure for other schools in the city is between 18.5 percent to 32 percent, or below a fifth to just under a third. Reading and math grade-level proficiency is also abysmally low.

Worcester’s schools have improved incrementally, but they have been bad for decades. There have been multiple superintendents over these years, and there have always been brilliant students, educators, and administrators in the city’s schools. Clearly something has to be changed on a systemic level. It therefore makes sense for the city to engage in a national search, specifically to find someone from outside the school system, who can look at the way it functions, look at its culture, as an objective outsider, in order to make the changes that might be both necessary and painful to those who’ve come of age in the school system professionally.

Worcester isn’t its School System

Worcester, though, is actually already moving in the right direction. Anyone who remembers this city in the 1980s or 1990s can attest to that fact. In the 1980s, Worcester was a decaying mill town. The New York Times described it that way when its reviewer wondered why Bruce Springsteen would open his tour here, leading to a quixotic boycott of the Gray Lady, even though no one really thought the description was wrong.

From the 70s through the 90s, the population was shrinking, reaching a nadir of around 160,000 residents, 40,000 people less than lived here in the middle of the 20th century, and nearly 50,000 people less than call the city home now. Despite an attempt to revive downtown with a mall – twice, first with the Worcester Galleria, and then with the Worcester Common Fashion Outlets – the common refrain was, “Would the last person to leave downtown Worcester please turn out the lights?”

No one wanted to be here; the selling point on Worcester that colleges offered was nothing more than its proximity to other places. “Don’t worry about Worcester! We have a lovely campus with a big fence, and you’re not that far from Boston or Providence, or even NYC!” I recall students at Clark (where I attended briefly in the 1990s, before, like so many thousands of others, leaving town) expressing their despair at not having learned more about Worcester before deciding which school to go to – and making an alternate decision. Now, students come to Worcester and – almost unheard of even a decade ago – actually stay here.

City Leadership and the Renaissance

The beginnings of the “Worcester Renaissance” pre-date the tenure of Ed Augustus, the city manager who recently resigned, leaving open the current vacancy. Union Station, for example, was remodeled in 2000, before his time as manager. However, it was during Augustus’s tenure that the city’s changes took root and, for the first time, actually seemed permanent.

While Augustus was in office, the quality of the city, and of its government, were strong and were continually improving. During the height of the pandemic, America was subjected to bizarre, rambling press-conferences in which the president and his advisers said nonsensical things (maybe try a little bleach?), and the national health apparatus confused everyone by issuing contradictory rulings (don’t wear a mask, masks are okay, definitely wear a mask, any mask is good, only these kinds of masks are good, if you have a vaccine you don’t need to wear a mask, no, never mind, you do, and stay inside, church services are illegal, outdoor events are illegal, you should go to these demonstrations though, don’t get together…). In Worcester, Augustus, along with Mayor Joe Petty, and chief doctor Michael P. Hirsh, sometimes with public health commissioner Mattie Castiel, held daily press conferences that were pleasantly boring. The city leaders worked around the clock to make sure we had the information we needed, to provide the best possible guidance based on the information they had been given, and to generally make Worcesterites feel like they were in good hands, at least locally.

Now, as the pandemic recedes (hopefully), the city has rebounded. 

After Augustus retired this past spring, Eric D. Batista became acting city manager. Appointed by Augustus, Batista has moved up the rungs of city management. Hired as a project manager, he became the director of operations and project management, then moved up to lead the city’s innovation office, and then on to assistant city manager. Raised in Worcester, a graduate of North High School (according to speakers at the recent city council meeting), Batista obviously knows the city well.

Batista spent a decade in city government, watching and assisting in the improvements, most recently as assistant city manager. If the city were in turmoil, or were heading in the wrong direction, or was decaying in the way that it was during the 1980s and 1990s still, then we would need to carry out a national search, to look everywhere to find someone who could help us to break us out of the municipal malaise. But the city leadership, Augustus and others, have already done that – with Batista’s assistance.

Considering the above, it becomes clear that there is no need for an expensive – some say $100,000 – national search to find a replacement for someone already doing solid work, and who has been trained, gaining increasing responsibility, over the course of a decade on the job. There is no virtue in hiring from without. Studying organizations, scholars at the Wharton School of Business say that internal hires tend to do better in their first two years than external hires, for several reasons, including getting “up to speed,” meaning, largely, building relationships. While external hires might do better after a couple years, they are also more likely to leave before that period is up. Others note that with when hiring from within, there’s less risk – you know what you’re getting. Also worth noting: in corporate America, corporations that are doing well don’t generally replace an outgoing CEO with someone from outside. For example, Coca Cola’s CEO, James Quincey, worked his way up the management chain, making his way to COO and, now, to CEO. Those who read the business pages know that it’s the ailing businesses that make headlines by replacing their CEO with someone from another, more successful, firm.

Why should Worcester break with good practice?

Where is “the best”?

Some argue that if we don’t have a national search, there will be a cloud hanging over Batista, since we won’t know if we have “the best.” How can this be? Is there a cloud hanging over the Coca Cola CEO, since he was hired from within? Or of Wendy’s?  Or of a myriad other successful corporations? Why must we have an obsession with finding someone from outside? Is there a cloud hanging over, say, any of the district councilors because voters didn’t entertain the possibility of electing someone from outside the district? Are at-large councilors therefore superior in quality to district councilors?

One could become philosophical, and wonder if anyone is “the best” for anything. Perhaps the best manager for the city of Worcester is not in America; why limit the search to the United States? Maybe the perfect manager is in Toronto? Perhaps London offers the best city manager. Maybe they are in Cape Town or Perth or Shanghai? (Actually, scratch Shanghai.) There are 7 billion people in the world; there is no way that we can interview all of them, even if we narrow that down to the few tens of millions who are trained in public management. Perhaps your spouse isn’t really the best for you; did you conduct a national search, or did you limit yourself only to people you happened to come into contact with? This is extreme, but it is the natural logical conclusion that we come to if we follow the logic that we have to run a national search just to be sure.

Transparency

Others have argued that there could be a perceived lack of transparency. Where is this lack of transparency? The process is fairly straightforward:

  1. Batista applied for the job of project manager with the city and was hired in for that role in 2012.
  2. He did a good job, so Augustus promoted Batista to chief of Operations and Project Management in 2015
  3. Seeing that Batista continued to do good work, Augustus promoted him to Director of Innovation in 2019.
  4. Apparently highly impressed, Augustus promoted Batista to Assistant City Manager in 2021.
  5. Augustus resigned as city manager, and the council asked Batista to become Acting City Manager.
  6. Impressed with his work in the actual position needing fulfillment and with the decade’s worth of work that Batista has performed for the city already, people began to think that Batista should simply maintain the role and save the city the costly $100,000 search.
  7. In line with public sentiment, Mayor Petty proposed that the city council just go ahead and hire Batista to the position.

Where’s the lack of transparency? Judging by the council meeting earlier this week, the public is well aware, and supportive, of Batista’s becoming city manager. While a few spoke in favor of a national search, many people from the community, including community leaders like Rev. Jose Perez, spoke in favor of Batista’s appointment to the position.

Worcester is doing well, and after many decades, it is moving forward. For many of us who grew up here, this is the first time we’ve ever seen or heard of people wanting to move to the city, of news outlets in major markets actually trumpeting what Worcester has to offer. For the first time in years, many of us go downtown to do something fun, or actually have a choice of where to go to eat. We have attractions to show out-of-town visitors that don’t solely involve boy-on-turtle sex.

There is no reason to change direction, and, for that reason, there is no reason to carry out a national search for a city manager. It is in the interest of the city to keep the “renaissance” moving forward, and appointing a city manager who worked so closely with Ed Augustus, the man responsible for guiding so much of it, is the best way to do that.

The council should do what’s right for Worcester, and appoint Eric Batista city manager now.

Biden’s tweet reveals dangerous policies

For the duration of former President Donald Trump’s term, the news media constantly highlighted his low-brow, stream-of-consciousness tweets. Given that they represented a direct insight into the inner workings of an American president’s thought process, they were dangerous. President Biden’s tweets, not written by the president himself, come from his communications team and are vetted by the “adults in the room” widely perceived to be missing during the Trump administration. These more traditional presidential statements represent a different type of problem: the administration’s actual policies.

Take, for example, Biden’s tweet yesterday, March 11:

The Biden team's tweet. Someone wrote, on behalf of @POTUS, “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”
President Biden’s March 11 tweet, representing official policy of the United States.

 

Someone wrote, on behalf of @POTUS, “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”

Since this Biden tweets are official, vetted policy, not stream-of-consciousness ramblings, this tweet might have been worse than anything Trump ever thumbed.

We will defend “every inch” of NATO territory, Biden says, but we won’t fight Russia in Ukraine. Why? Because a direct fight between NATO (one has to assume Biden also means any direct fight between the U.S.) and Russia “is World War III.” This gives rise immediately to important questions. Does Biden really mean that the U.S. will participate in World War III over Poland but not Ukraine? We’ll endure a nuclear winter for Estonia, but not non-NATO Sweden? (Another obvious question is why Ukraine was never admitted to NATO, given that it gave up nuclear weapons only after the U.S. and UK signed off on a guarantee [PDF] that its territorial integrity would be protected.)

Beyond the questions of NATO and non-NATO, why did the president and his administration think it was necessary to say – again – that the U.S. would not fight Russia in Ukraine? Perhaps that is the strategy of the administration, and perhaps there is some logical merit to it. But what is the point of saying so publicly? Why announce to the world, to Putin, that the U.S. has already decided not fight Russia in Ukraine? Why not leave some ambiguity? Why give Putin this assurance that, even if he were to use chemical, biological, radiational, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons on Ukrainian civilians, America would not step in?

Putin has been making not-so-thinly veiled threats by noting that Russia is a nuclear power, and they seem to have had their intended deterrent effect on Biden. Why else would the American president respond by unilaterally taking any tool off the proverbial table? By disarming? America is also a nuclear power, and a superior one to Russia. We have a triad of air, land, and sea nuclear capabilities. Just one American nuclear submarine would be the world’s sixth largest nuclear power if counted separately, and each is virtually undetectable to the Russians. A single American nuclear submarine could potentially wipe out all of Russia’s nuclear capacity, and there is little that Russia could do to stop it. No one wants to think about nuclear war (except Putin), but taking all military options off the table destroys these weapons’ deterrent effect and makes the use of CBRN warfare against Ukraine more, not less, likely. Biden doesn’t have to threaten nuclear war; he could simply keep quiet or, if asked what the U.S. might do if Russia used CBRN weapons, simply respond, “All options are on the table,” the common refrain of American presidents when presented with such questions.

The implications of Biden’s tweet go far beyond Russia and Ukraine. Most obviously, it is highly unlikely that Putin will be content to stop with a victory over Kyiv. If he wins there, he’ll move on to other states. Beyond Putin, how are statements like this understood in Beijing? If a fight between nuclear powers “is World War III” and must be avoided for all states with which the U.S. has no mutual defense agreement, what does that mean for Taiwan? There has been no mutual defense treaty between the U.S. and Taiwan since 1979, when the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty was replaced by the much weaker Taiwan Relations Act, which only requires the U.S. to provide Taiwan with weapons. Beijing knows that, aside from a military confrontation, the United States has very few options to deter aggression by China. While the world has mobilized to punish Russia through devastating sanctions, the same would not be true after a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Vietnam, or elsewhere. Russia has oil, but China and the western world are far too economically intertwined, and the U.S. is currently far too dependent on China’s economy, to entertain any fantasy of punishing Beijing economically.

There are a remarkable number of countries who are U.S. allies with whom we have no mutual defense treaty. We only have actual defense pacts with the NATO states, most of the western hemisphere (though notably not Mexico), the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan. There is no mutual defense treaty with Israel, our strongest Middle Eastern ally, constantly under threat, including from Russian-backed forces in Syria. Nor is there any defense treaty with Sweden, Finland, the already-mentioned Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, or a host of other strategically or morally important countries.

Apparently, the U.S. will not fight militarily for any of them, at least not with Russia or China.

A single presidential tweet raises all these questions. But the tweet is not isolated; it is part of a larger problem that pervades the whole Biden administration, which seems to think that an unjust peace is better than a fight for American security, democracy, and the sovereignty of small states. All these beliefs were implied by Biden’s continuation of Trump’s plans to “end the forever war” in Afghanistan, as well as in many other instances, including Biden’s desperate attempt at an Iran nuclear deal – with Russia as the guarantor.

In 2024, we need to find someone who is neither from the “end forever wars” wing of the Democratic Party or the Trumpian populist or “national conservative” wing of the Republican Party. The former rejuvenated the Taliban and handed Afghanistan over to it before its green light by tweet to Moscow and Beijing; the latter actually supports Putin as an “anti-woke” role model.

America – and the world – deserves better.

Image: 2021 stock photo of U.S. President Joe Biden speaking at a NATO meeting. Patrick Semansky/AP

Team Biden vs. Manchin: the Democrats’ suicidal impulse

The problem isn’t Joe Manchin.

Perhaps the biggest campaigners for the Republicans in 2022 and 2024 will turn out to be America’s top Democrats. It is hard to imagine any strategy, insofar as they have one, that would better ensure Democrats’ loss of both houses of Congress and the presidency than that which the president and his allies are pursuing right now.

“If his comments on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort [to come to an agreement on the president’s signature Build Back Better legislation], they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a Dec. 19 statement.

While the statement’s blistering language sounds like something a presidential administration might have said about a member of the opposition party, Psaki was directly attacking, on the White House’s behalf, President Biden’s former colleague and co-partisan, Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.V. The White House was irritated that Manchin said Dec. 19 on Fox that he would not support Biden’s more than $2 trillion “Build Back Better” bill (BBB), citing spending and inflation worries.

Putting aside the Trumpian notion that a representative’s commitments should be “to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate,” the statement is still jarring. One could only look to the Trump administration to find such a blatant example of a president – Psaki speaks on behalf of the chief executive – attacking a member of his own party, especially an administration suffering so grievously in opinion polls in the run-up for what will be a desperate fight to hold onto either of the houses of Congress. It is hard to imagine Obama speaking in such a way to Blue Dog Democrats during his administration’s quest for the Affordable Care Act, or George W. Bush issuing such condemnations against other Republicans.

Not only did Biden’s press secretary attack Sen. Manchin, but Congressional Democrats piled on as well.

“We all knew that Senator Manchin couldn’t be trusted,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said on MSNBC. “The excuses that he just made I think are complete bullshit.”

Also on MSNBC, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said, “I think what Sen. Manchin did yesterday represents such an egregious breach of the trust of the president.” She went on to say that Democrats “should take the kid gloves off.”

Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, said of Manchin, “If he doesn’t have the courage to do the right thing for the working families of West Virginia and America, let him vote no in front of the whole world,” seemingly unaware that speaking on television is much more “in front of the world” than is casting a vote in Congress.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would schedule a vote on the bill, “so that every member of this body has the opportunity to make their position known on the Senate floor, not just on television.”

While Sanders and Schumer apparently hope to shame Manchin into voting for the bill, and while Psaki, Ocasio-Cortez, and Biden seem to think Manchin has an obligation to the president, the reason for the West Virginia Democrat’s “no” vote is clear. A recent poll of voters in his home state, where Biden lost to Trump by 40 points, shows that 74 percent of respondents support Manchin’s handling of the bill. The same poll showed Biden with a 33 percent approval rating in West Virginia, while 61 percent approve of Manchin.

In essence, the president and the Democratic legislators are vehemently condemning Manchin for representing his constituents. While Biden might think it is the duty of a senator to represent the president, one can only wonder what such thinking says about Democrats’ campaign plans for 2022. Good campaign slogans don’t usually highlight unquestioning loyalty to the party line or the candidate’s willingness to work against the stated interests of his or her voters.

This past weekend, the Democrats’ lack of strategy could have charitably been described as misguided. Now, in the light of new information, the administration and its allies seem positively unhinged.

The Washington Post reported Dec. 20 that Sen. Manchin had actually sent a new proposal to the White House the previous week. Included in it was most of what was in BBB, including universal pre-K and more than half a trillion dollars for environmental protection.

So much for the claim that the senator was merely working at the behest of evil coal companies (and, one supposes, their evil supporters who comprise most of West Virginia’s electorate).

What Manchin did leave out of his proposal was billions of dollars for the popular child tax credit, or CTC. This was also the apparent source of Manchin’s anger: someone in the White House apparently leaked to the press that Manchin wanted to do away with the credit, which explains his testy exchange with a Huffington Post reporter, in which he said, “You’re bullshit. This is bullshit.”

Shortly thereafter, Manchin was on Fox saying he’ll vote “no.”

Of course, leaking the CTC proposal in a move to embarrass Manchin was pure stupidity, as cutting it from the bill might have been good politics. The CTC is just about the only part of BBB that has bipartisan support and that could stand on its own and likely get past the 60 votes needed for cloture.

The bumbling and ineptitude of the White House in first leaking information to embarrass a senator from the president’s own party, and then going on to attack him in a public statement, along with the subsequent infighting within the Democratic Party won’t hurt Manchin. If anything, it helps him; In a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump, public condemnation from Biden, Ilhan Omar, and others can’t help but boost the senator’s support.

On the other hand, the stupidity of the president, his administration, and legislators, help to further ensure that the Republicans win back control of the Senate and House on a scale not seen since the Gingrich Revolution.

If the Democrats start acting smarter, they might be able to maintain either the House or Senate. If they don’t, they’ll be annihilated by the voters.

Image: Stock photo of Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.V., via the West Virginia Conference of the United Baptist Church.