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The Democratic Party is no stranger to tsuris these days. It’s not just its failure to win working-class votes; it’s also its failure to convince its own base that it can stand up to Donald Trump and move beyond those moderate positions crafted in and for a time of less extreme challenges.
Next week, when the Democratic National Committee meets in Minneapolis, the party has an opportunity to show its disgruntled base—whose dismay is chiefly responsible for the party’s bottom-basement standing in the polls—that it can actually grapple with current realities. Of the various resolutions the DNC will consider, two stand out. One would ban corporate contributions and super PAC dark money from the Democrats’ 2028 presidential primaries. The second would put the party on record as supporting a ban on the provision of U.S. arms to Israel.
Let’s look at that second one first. It was authored by one of the DNC’s youngest members, the 26-year-old Allison Minnerly, whose day job is working for a Florida voter registration organization. And, for now at least, it is starkly counterposed to another resolution backed by DNC chair Ken Martin, which calls for an end to the Gaza war and the release of the remaining Hamas-held hostages, supports a two-state solution, but says nothing at all about limiting the shipment of U.S. arms to Netanyahu’s legions. Rather, it simply restates the positions of the Biden administration, which did nothing whatever to deter Bibi’s blood-drenched onslaughts and land seizures.
Martin’s resolution, says Jim Zogby, who’s been a DNC member for 32 years and was chair of its Resolutions Committee for 11, “could have been written four years ago. It’s completely out of touch with the current reality. Simply regurgitating the old Biden position is both wrong and insulting.”
It is also profoundly at odds with what rank-and-file Democrats want. Last month’s Gallup poll showed that Israel’s war on Gaza commands the support of just 32 percent of the American public, and a bare 8 percent of Democrats. Minnerly’s resolution “is an opportunity to get ourselves back where our voters want us to be,” its author told me. The party, she added, is “rarely handed an opportunity to embrace a policy so strongly supported by its rank and file.”
The predominant problem with the Martin-backed resolution, of course, isn’t what it says; it’s what it doesn’t say. In theory, there’s no reason why Minnerly’s resolution can’t be incorporated into Martin’s. In practice, there’s some pre-meeting discussion under way about doing just that, though that likely would require some alterations to both. The Minnerly text calls for a flat ban on arms transfers to Israel, while the Bernie Sanders resolution for which a majority of Democratic senators (by a 27-to-17 margin) voted three weeks ago called for a ban on offensive weapons only. Any such incorporation, not to mention bringing the unincorporated Minnerly resolution to a vote, is being fiercely opposed, of course, by groups like Democratic Majority for Israel. |
