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BIDEN’S GAZA POLICY IS A LIABILITY FOR KAMALA HARRIS. SHE MUST
BREAK WITH BIDEN NOW  
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Mehdi Hasan
August 19, 2024
The Guardian
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*
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*
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*
*
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_ Harris must call for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel this
week. It’s a no-brainer. Refusing to would mean risking defeat _

,

 

The sitting Democratic president
[[link removed]] is not
running for re-election
[[link removed]].
His vice-president
[[link removed]] has inherited
his campaign
[[link removed]] –
and refuses to disown an unpopular foreign war. Robert
[[link removed]] Kennedy
[[link removed]] is
running for president. The Republican candidate
[[link removed]] is
a corrupt authoritarian
[[link removed]].
A Planet of the Apes
[[link removed](1968_film)] movie is
in theaters
[[link removed]].
And anti-war protesters
[[link removed]] are threatening
to disrupt
[[link removed]] the
Democratic convention in Chicago.

Am I discussing 2024 or … 1968?

Now, I’m far from the first columnist to make this
comparison. Plenty
[[link removed]] of
[[link removed]] pieces
[[link removed]] have
been published
[[link removed]] on
the uncanny and, yes, undeniable similarities between these two
consequential election years. “History,” as Mark Twain is said to
have remarked, “does not repeat itself. But it rhymes.”

Joe Biden [[link removed]], after all,
is the first president to announce he is not running for re-election
since Lyndon Johnson, 56 years ago. And just as Biden’s replacement
at the top of the Democratic ticket is his vice-president, Kamala
Harris [[link removed]], so too was
Johnson’s.

Vice-President Hubert Humphrey had been a popular, well-respected
senator
[[link removed]] from
Minnesota and one of the architects
[[link removed]] of
postwar American liberalism. He had served as a loyal deputy to
Johnson over four years, even publicly defending
[[link removed]] a
bloody quagmire in Vietnam on the president’s behalf that he himself
had privately opposed
[[link removed]].

Yet in August 1968, the “Happy Warrior”,
[[link removed]] as
Humphrey had been nicknamed, arrived in Chicago for the Democratic
convention depressed and demoralized, trailing his Republican
opponent, Richard Nixon, in the polls by a whopping 16 points
[[link removed]].
The war had become a millstone around his neck, and yet Johnson had
threatened to “destroy”
[[link removed]] his
vice-president if he dared take a different line on Vietnam. When
Humphrey in Chicago, as the official Democratic presidential nominee,
tried to insert a compromise “peace” plank into the party’s
platform that seemed to satisfy both hawks and doves alike, the
Democratic president called from his ranch in Texas to block him
[[link removed]].

In the wake of that disastrous convention, where police brutally
assaulted [[link removed]] anti-war
protesters on the streets of Chicago, the demonstrations against the
hapless Humphrey intensified. “Dump the Hump”
[[link removed]] was
on the gentler side; some protesters arrived at the VP’s rallies
with placards
[[link removed]] denouncing
him as “Johnson’s War Salesman” and a “Killer of Babies”.
One woman spat
[[link removed]] in
his face.

“Let’s face it, as of now we’ve lost,” Humphrey’s national
campaign director, Larry O’Brien, told him
[[link removed]] a
few weeks after Chicago. “Unless you change direction on this
Vietnam thing and become your own man, you’re finished.”

On 30 September 1968, Humphrey finally became his “own
man”, committing
[[link removed]] “$100,000
of the campaign’s dwindling funds to buy a half-hour on NBC
television”, and delivering a speech
[[link removed]] from
a TV studio in Salt Lake City calling for an end to the war. In his
address, Humphrey made clear that Johnson was still in charge of the
effort to reach a peace deal in south-east Asia, but by 20 January
1969, there would “be a new president” and “if there is no peace
by then” then there must be a “complete reassessment” of the
conflict because “the policies of tomorrow need not be limited by
the policies of yesterday”.

The vice-president laid out a four-point plan
[[link removed]] to
end the conflict. First, “a stopping of the bombing”. Second, “a
de-Americanization of the war”. Third, an immediate
“internationally supervised ceasefire”. Fourth, “free
elections”, which he described as “the ultimate key to an
honorable peace”.

It was a powerful intervention from Humphrey, aired to tens of
millions of Americans, which allowed the Democratic presidential
candidate to hit reset with the party’s base and, in particular,
with younger voters and people of color. “He was a new man from then
on,” O’Brien later declaimed
[[link removed]].
“It was as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. And the
impact on the campaign itself was just as great.”

Humphrey experienced an immediate surge in the polls, narrowing the
gap with Nixon. By election day, the final polls “pointed to a dead
heat”
[[link removed]].

Few now remember that the 1968 presidential election, in terms of the
popular vote, was super-close. Nixon defeated Humphrey by less than a
percentage point
[[link removed]],
or about 500,000 votes. The question is: what if the Vietnam war
hadn’t dragged him down? What if he had been willing to break with
Johnson over Vietnam much earlier than he did? Would the US have
avoided Nixon, Watergate and the rest? Had he stood up to Johnson
“over Vietnam in 1968”, writes
[[link removed]] Humphrey’s
biographer Arnold Offner, “he might have won the presidential
election”.

The war, agrees Yale historian Michael Brenes
[[link removed]],
“alienated Humphrey from liberals, civil rights activists and young
Americans – the same people who, for decades, had loved Humphrey for
his support of racial justice, full employment and the labor movement
– and ultimately cost him the presidency in 1968”.

Has the 2024 Harris campaign learned any lessons from the 1968
Humphrey campaign?

To be clear: Gaza isn’t Vietnam. There is no military draft and US
troops are not bogged down in rice paddies 8,000 miles from home. And
Harris, unlike Humphrey, is leading right now in most of the polls
[[link removed]].

Complacency, however, would be a huge mistake for the Democrats.
Harris, ideally, needs to maintain a sustained two-point lead over
Trump to overcome the pro-Republican bias
[[link removed]] of
our broken electoral college. Despite her clear momentum, she
continues to struggle
[[link removed]] in
the key swing state of Michigan, where “Uncommitted” voters
are demanding
[[link removed]] a
Gaza ceasefire paired with an arms embargo on Israel.

Agreeing to such a demand should be a moral, geopolitical, and – for
the Democrats – electoral no-brainer. Gaza may not be Vietnam but
Harris should, nonetheless, be distancing herself from Biden on Gaza
in the same way that Humphrey distanced himself from Johnson on
Vietnam. She should be advocating for all four of the steps that he
advocated for in Salt Lake City, beginning with a call for an
immediate halt to the horrific Israeli bombing of Gaza’s schools
[[link removed]], apartment
buildings and refugee camps
[[link removed]].

Crucially, however, she should do it more than a month before he did;
she should do it in her acceptance speech to the Democratic national
convention
[[link removed]] in
Chicago on Thursday night. (“I fear she will be Humphrey and break
too late,” one prominent House Democrat texted me last week.)

What does she have to lose? As the Financial Times pointed out
[[link removed]] last
month, the polling suggests there is “less downside” on Gaza than
one might expect: “a Democrat who is soft on Israel (as Biden is
seen as having been) loses support on the left, but a candidate who
takes a more critical line wins those voters back without losing votes
among moderates.” A poll last week
[[link removed]] from
YouGov and the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) showed
over a third of voters in three swing states say they are more likely
to vote for the Democratic nominee if they pledge to withhold weapons
to Israel, while only 5 to 7% said they would be less likely to do so.

So what is Harris waiting for? More anti-war
[[link removed]] hecklers
[[link removed]] at
her rallies? Even more civilian deaths
[[link removed]] caused
by Biden administration-supplied munitions?

Some might say that it is impossible for a serving vice-president to
go against the sitting president, even a deeply unpopular
[[link removed]] sitting
president, on a major foreign policy issue. They would be wrong.
Humphrey did it – he just did it too late in the campaign to reap an
electoral advantage.

Harris is in a much stronger position than Humphrey. Biden would never
dare try to humiliate her the way that Johnson regularly did to
Humphrey. (On one memorable occasion, the then president insisted
Humphrey continue reciting aloud from a draft speech of his on Vietnam
as Johnson walked into a toilet: “Keep talking Hubert, I’m
listening.”
[[link removed]])

Humphrey spent much of 1968 defending both Johnson and the war. He was
less a candidate for change and “more like a son who feared a
punitive father”, to quote
[[link removed]] Offner.
“I don’t even know who Johnson would prefer as the next
president,” the fearful vice-president told
[[link removed]] the
Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, “Nixon or me.”

Harris is not Humphrey. Gaza
[[link removed]] is not Vietnam. 2024 is not
1968. Nevertheless, the similarities that do exist are too glaring to
ignore.

Biden may want to continue sending
[[link removed]] more and
more weapons to an Israeli government accused of war crimes
[[link removed]] at
the international criminal court and of genocide
[[link removed]] at
the international court of justice, but Harris should take a different
stance – a bolder stance, a stance that is more in line with
her party’s base
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as well as with the American public
[[link removed]] at
large.

The current vice-president would do well to recall the words of the
then vice-president
[[link removed]] after
his narrow defeat in 1968. “I ought not to have let a man who was
going to be a former president dictate my future.”

_Mehdi Hasan is the founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo
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* Joe Biden
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* War on Gaza
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* Kamala Harris
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* arms
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* 2024 Elections
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*
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