Nov. 1: Chuck Schumer: Only GOP Cares About Antisemitism

Florida Jews leaving Democratic Party; The Kindergarten Intifada; The Beto O'Rourke of Venezuela

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The Big Story

The Washington Free Beacon reports that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) reassured Columbia University administrators that their antisemitism crisis was a partisan matter they could merely wait out. The senator’s advice is summed up in the headline: “‘Best Strategy Is to Keep Heads Down’: Schumer Advised Columbia’s Leaders to Ignore Anti-Semitism Backlash, Saying Their ‘Problems Are Really Only Among Republicans.’”

The article relays the findings of a new report on campus antisemitism from the GOP-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The 300-page report, which is drawn from more than 400,000 pages of internal documents from elite universities, includes a January WhatsApp conversation between Columbia’s then president, Minouche Shafik, and two members of the Columbia board of trustees, in which Shafik relayed a conversation she had with Schumer. From the Beacon:

Shafik, who resigned from her post in August amid a series of anti-Semitism scandals that roiled the school, texted board of trustees co-chairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman in January to inform them that she had met with Schumer. The top Senate Democrat, according to text messages obtained by the committee, “advised Shafik that ‘universities political problems are really only among Republicans’” and “recommended the “best strategy is to keep heads down.’”

Schumer’s private communications with university officials appear to have been reassuring to the embattled university officials, who also gleaned from the majority leader that they need not meet with Republicans. In text messages, Columbia board of trustees co-chair Greenwald and his predecessor Jonathan Lavine also expressed the hope that a Democratic victory in November could make their antisemitism problem go away. “Let’s hope the Dems win the house back,” Lavine wrote to Greenwald in response to a New York Times article on the committee’s “aggressive and expansive investigation into institutions of higher education.” “Absolutely,” Greenwald responded.

While this story reveals Schumer to be duplicitous (he would later publicly assail protester “lawlessness”), perhaps the biggest takeaway is that he was broadly correct: If Democrats win control of the House, there will be no comprehensive congressional report on campus antisemitism. With Republicans in power in at least one chamber of Congress, universities will be limited in their ability to cover up, downplay, or ignore the rise of antisemitism since Oct. 7. With Democrats, they have friends and mediators who address the issue as mostly cosmetic, which is how the universities themselves view it. As the committee report put it, university leaders “viewed antisemitism as a PR issue rather than a campus problem.”

On this topic, Democrat leaders and university officials were likely so cynical as to be naive. The “heads down” strategy might work if your problem really is just a “PR issue.” But in this case, there is a deeper rot, one ignored by university officials due to fears of offending Muslim and pro-Palestinian campus factions. But in the end, Schumer’s advice proved unhelpful to university presidents who hoped to avoid reaping the whirlwind. Shafik resigned in August, making her the fourth Ivy League president to step down since October 2023.

Read the Free Beacon article here.

And read the committee report here.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Michael Lind on the Obama machine

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The Rest

→Speaking of the partisan divide over the antisemitism issue, Nikki Fried, the Jewish chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, told Jewish canvassers over Zoom on Wednesday evening that her party was losing Jewish support in Florida. Here are Fried’s words, as reported by The Jerusalem Post: 

What has happened since then in American politics has made a lot of our Jewish brothers and sisters start to question the Democratic Party. I hear a lot about the Squad. I hear a lot about Kamala Harris’ policies, you know, what Joe Biden has or has not done.

Fried also brought up the partisan divide over campus antisemitism: 

You hear, of course, you heard during the campus protests “Oh, thank God Ron DeSantis was governor,” she said. “I mean, how many times have each of us probably heard that over the course of the last year? And so we are losing some of our Jewish voters.”

Comments like these, in addition to the Schumer revelations, demonstrate that the current divide in politics isn’t just over which party is superficially signaling more support for Israel and Jewish voters. Voters are noticing which politicians are taking action. 

→Abigail Shrier has a bombshell report in The Free Press titled “The Kindergarten Intifada,” which includes undercover video taken of a United Teachers Los Angeles meeting at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. No, this isn’t a teacher’s random inappropriate selfie video in some far-flung town that just happened to land on Libs of TikTok. This is the nation’s second largest teacher’s union chapter conducting a meeting on how to funnel crowds of students to anti-Israel protests without getting caught. 

The video, which begins with history teacher Ron Gochez explaining how to make the bringing of students to protests appear coincidental, depicts a planned conspiracy:

“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”

Gochez seemed quite focused on evading “the Zionists.” From Shrier: 

Seated at a keffiyeh-draped table, Gochez said, “Some of the things that we can do as teachers is to organize. We just have to be really intelligent on how we do that. We have to know that we’re under the microscope. We have to know that Zionists and others are going to try to catch us in any way that they can to get us into trouble.”

“Four years ago,” Shrier writes, “I was among the first journalists to expose the widespread incursion of gender ideology into our schools.” Now, she says, quoting a Catholic fellow parent, “They’ve moved on from BLM to gender unicorn to the new thing: anti-Israel activism. Anti-Israel activism is the new gender ideology in the schools.”

Read the full report here:

Abigail Shrier: The Kindergarten Intifada

→Quote of the Day:

Trump just wasn’t sure Guaidó was up for the job. In contrast to the “strong” Maduro, Trump thought Guaidó was “weak,” writes Bolton. The president began to refer to Guaidó as the “Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela.” 

That’s from a Wired report on “The Untold Story of Trump’s Failed Attempt to Overthrow Venezuela’s President.” The attempted coup, such as it was, was the brainchild of then U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, who thought—incorrectly, it turned out—that the Trump administration could dislodge Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro in favor of opposition leader Juan Guaidó. But in addition to Trump’s disappointment with Guaidó, there was, as Bolton discovered, an even deeper problem with ineptitude among the United States’ clandestine services. 

“The CIA is not the Mossad. It’s hunkered down, bureaucratic, and not daring,” Bolton told Wired. Another source said the CIA’s covert “democracy promotion” efforts in Venezuela were indistinguishable from overt efforts carried out by agencies such as USAID, describing them as “the most embarrassing bullshit ever” and “not even sinister” but “purely lazy.”

→A report in The New York Times, citing Iranian officials, states that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is preparing his security council for an attack on Israel but that the he doesn’t want to hurt Kamala Harris’ chances in Tuesday’s election: 

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. They said that military commanders were preparing a list of dozens of military targets inside Israel, but that the attacks would very likely happen after the American election because Iran was concerned that another spike of tension and chaos in the region could benefit former President Donald J. Trump in his re-election campaign.

→Tony Badran has a new article in Tablet on the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, now championed by the White House as a potential guarantor of Israel’s security. We link the article in the “Today in Tablet” section below, but we’ll quote it here:

Just how blatantly Hezbollah operated with UNIFIL’s blessing became clear after Israel launched its invasion of southern Lebanon on Sept. 30. IDF units operating close to Israel’s northern border uncovered the openings of elaborate, large-scale Hezbollah tunnel networks a few yards away from UNIFIL positions. It was clearly impossible for UNIFIL commanders not to have been fully aware of the construction of those positions and their use by large squads of armed Hezbollah militants who moved in and out. Needless to say, the construction and deployment of Hezbollah’s tunnel network, which made a mockery of UNIFIL’s supposed role in demilitarizing southern Lebanon, was never reported back to the U.N. through official channels or made public. Instead, UNIFIL paid local Hezbollah operatives and supporters to act as contractors and provide other services, essentially melding its functions with those of the terrorist army for which it was providing cover.

—PM

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The UN’s Kosher Stamp for Terror, by Tony Badran

Like UNRWA in Gaza, UNIFIL in Lebanon underwrites terrorists while safeguarding the underground bases in which they store weapons and plan to murder Israelis

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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The Obama Machine

No matter who wins or loses next week, we can look forward to four more years of Chicago on the Potomac

by Michael Lind

Of all the things that are at stake in this year’s presidential election, one of the most important is the legacy of Barack Obama. Early in his presidency, seeking a phrase comparable to “the New Deal” or the “New Frontier” or “the Great Society,” Obama and his allies used “the new foundation.” The label was quickly dropped, but in his two terms Obama did in fact lay a new foundation for the Democratic Party. During Obama’s presidency the Democratic Party—a loose coalition of regional and local and ideological factions from the 1830s until the 2010s—became a homogeneous, centralized political machine, a version of the modernized Chicago machine with the help of which Obama rose to power.

The single term of Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, was more or less a third Obama term, and the presidency of Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice president, would be a fourth, if she is elected. In hindsight, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were transitional figures, between the New Deal Democratic Party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, and the "new foundation" party of Obama, which, despite the legacy name “Democrats,” is a new national party that at the same time is the first national machine.

According to to Dick Simpson, who is both a political scientist and a veteran of Chicago politics:

A political machine, like the one that has dominated Chicago for most of the last 150 years, is a political party characterized by patronage jobs, favoritism, nepotism, precinct workers, and party loyalty. It seeks to control government by winning elections, but it inevitably has, as a byproduct, political corruption. Political machines are strongly hierarchical, usually centered on a political boss who controls the party and local government. Political machines historically have been involved in voter fraud as well. The dominant machine political party tends to control all units of government and suppress reforms.

Sometimes it is claimed that the old urban machines withered away as a result of suburbanization and other social and economic changes. Some of them did fade away, like Tammany Hall in New York City.

But others like the Chicago Democratic machine adapted and survived, making the transition from industrial-era political machines to information-age political machines. The Daley machine in Chicago, established by Richard J. Daley, who was mayor and Cook County political boss from 1955 until his death in 1976, was inherited by Richard M. Daley, who followed as mayor even longer than his father, from 1989 to 2011. According to Dick Simpson, the expert on Chicago politics, the younger Mayor Daley used “contributions from the global economy to hand out lucrative government contracts and other economic favors to corporations and big campaign contributors.”

The career and associates of Barack Obama illustrate the transition from the old urban Democratic political machine to the new-model machine, reliant more on foundation-funded nonprofits than on city patronage employees, depending in campaigns on mass media and online media rather than volunteers who knocked on doors, and funded by national and global corporate and banking interests and billionaire oligarchs.

One of the elder Daley’s sons, William M. Daley, who was U.S. secretary of commerce under Bill Clinton, became chief of staff for Barack Obama, whose previous chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, then succeeded William’s brother Richard as mayor of Chicago, keeping things in the extended Chicago Democratic family. Chicago native John Podesta ran Obama’s presidential transition. Valerie Jarrett became one of Obama’s three senior advisers in the White House. Obama’s top consultant in his 2004 race for the U.S. Senate from Illinois was David Axelrod, who became chief strategist for Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and a senior adviser to the president. Axelrod had been a campaign adviser for Chicago Mayors Harold Washington and Richard M. Daley. Chicago on the Potomac.

Obama rose to power at breathtaking speed and presided over the coalescence of what is in effect a new national political organization partly because of his own talents, but mainly because of his position at the intersection of both old and new power bases in urban Democratic politics in Chicago and big cities nationwide. In the new Democratic dispensation, groups that have often been at odds in municipal politics—urban machines historically dominated by “white ethnics” and challenged by African American politicians and reformers, unionized public employees, and foundation-subsidized activists—have come together in a new synthesis, symbolized by Obama himself—a protean figure with links to the Ivy League and liberal intelligentsia, the Black community, the foundation world, Hollywood and tech, and finance donors and companies.

Writing about Obama in 1996 in The Village Voice, the Black Marxist scholar Adolph Reed described the young Obama without naming him:

In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program—the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance.

From his base in the progressive technocratic foundation world, the young Obama ingratiated himself with the existing Daley electoral machine. It is often claimed that Barack Obama, an outsider in Chicago with a white American mother and a Kenyan father who was raised by his grandmother in Hawaii, was not part of the Daley machine. It is true that the machine did not support Obama early in his career, when he was backed by liberal “independents” in Hyde Park, part of his state Senate district and home to the University of Chicago. But Obama acquired mentors like Emil Jones, the president of the Illinois state Senate and a major power broker.

And he was careful not to offend the mayor. In 2005, an hour after he told the Chicago Sun-Times that the federal criminal investigations into Daley machine corruption “give me huge pause,” Obama called the Sun-Times to amend his remarks, saying that Chicago had “never looked better.” In the following year, Mayor Daley issued an unusual primary endorsement of Obama, and Bill Daley became a senior adviser to Obama’s campaign. In the 2006 Chicago mayoral election, Obama, then U.S. senator and presidential candidate, endorsed Daley, who had been in power for 18 years, for reelection against two African American candidates for mayor, Dorothy Brown and William Walls.

In 1991 Valerie Jarrett, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Daley, hired Obama’s then-fiancée Michelle Robinson, met Obama, and introduced the couple to well-connected and wealthy Chicago Democrats. Later she became one of three senior advisers to President Obama.

According to a 2008 report in Time, “Michelle Obama’s stint at the mayor’s office gave her, and her husband, access to Chicago’s political class. Combined with her own Southside roots—she went to high school with Santita Jackson, the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s daughter—Michelle’s job gave her husband entrée into the best political machine in Illinois, augmenting her ties to Jackson’s powerful civil rights group, Rainbow Push.” After only 18 months, Michelle moved from the mayor’s office to lead the Chicago branch of a progressive nonprofit, Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program. Michelle became associate dean of students at the University of Chicago and was appointed to the board of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and six corporate boards. By 2007, at the age of 43, her university and corporate board salaries added up to half a million dollars a year.

Educated at Harvard Law like Obama, whom she met when they both worked for the law firm Sidley Austin in Chicago, Michelle Obama herself was the daughter of a city employee, Fraser Robinson, a precinct captain for the Daley machine. According to Liza Mundy’s Michelle: A Biography: “As a precinct captain, you could expect, in return for this political policing a city job. In fact, doing ‘volunteer’ work was almost the only way you could get one … Daley kept a file cabinet with a list of jobs in it and was said to know the names of everybody who held them.”

A third power base, after the nonprofit sector and the Daley machine, was the Black community, which in Chicago as elsewhere had its own “organic” intellectuals and leaders in the form of Black Protestant pastors, not foundation-designated reformers leading “astroturf” NGOs or individuals appointed to be racial spokespersons by The Atlantic or The New York Times. Obama sought credibility with that Democratic constituency by joining the congregation of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. After modifying Wright’s phrase “audacity to hope” to become the title of his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic national convention and of his bestselling second book, Obama resigned from Wright’s church and denounced his former mentor after Wright’s inflammatory attacks on the U.S. became a liability for Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign.

After the nonprofit-industrial complex, Chicago pols, and the overwhelmingly Democratic Black electorate, Obama brought Silicon Valley and Wall Street into his campaign and his new party. Donors in tech, finance, and Hollywood showered Obama with so much money that, in 2008, he abandoned the public campaign finance system—the proud creation of earlier Democrats concerned about plutocracy in politics—in order to be able to raise campaign cash with no limits. Outraging old-fashioned populist and liberal Democrats, Obama staffed his administration with Wall Streeters like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and appointed Erskine Bowles, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and a private equity magnate, to co-chair the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The Simpson-Bowles Commission recommended cuts in Social Security benefits that both parties in Congress rejected.

For its part, Silicon Valley provided not only donations but also expertise, with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Google CEO Eric Schmidt volunteering to work on Obama’s campaigns. According to the Tech Transparency Project, “Schmidt was intimately involved in building Obama’s voter-targeting operation in 2012, recruiting digital talent, choosing technology and coaching campaign manager Jim Messina on campaign infrastructure. The system was credited with helping Obama achieve his unexpectedly large margin of victory.” Schmidt was appointed to Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and visited the White House frequently in the Obama years.

Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who died in office in 1945, Obama as ex-president has continued to be one of the major power brokers in the new Democratic national machine that came together during his two terms in the White House. Obama is widely credited with being one of the powerful Democrats who exerted pressure to end the presidential campaigns of Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg in 2020, in order to “clear a lane” for his more electable former vice president, Joe Biden, to thwart the bid of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination. And according to reports Obama also favored an end to Joe Biden’s apparently doomed bid for reelection in the summer of 2024 and his replacement by Kamala Harris.

Roosevelt’s unwieldy coalition of agrarian populists, working-class immigrants, urban political machines, small-town capitalists and boosters, and Southern segregationists collapsed in 1948, splitting into three parties—the rump Democrats with his former vice president, Harry Truman, as the victorious chief, the Progressive Party, headed by Henry Wallace, FDR’s previous, unceremoniously dumped vice president, and the Dixiecrat States Rights Party. The New Deal coalition was cobbled back together again to win victories in 1960 and 1964, only to collapse beyond repair as a result of George Wallace’s right-wing populist bid for the presidency in 1968.

In contrast, the coalition assembled under Obama has remained intact, through Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 and Biden’s victory in 2020. There have been gradual changes in the electoral base, to be sure. In the last few national elections, more Hispanics and Blacks have voted Republican and the Democratic deficit with white working-class voters has continued to grow. But the Obama Democrats have sought to counter these losses under Biden by importing around 10 million quasi-legal immigrants, at a time when all immigrant groups prefer Democrats to Republicans. And Biden and Harris have both reached out to country-club Republicans who are appalled at the takeover of their party by Trump and his vulgar supporters, with Harris doing what once would have been unthinkable for a Democrat—praising Dick Cheney as a model American statesman.

Urban political machines were only one of several components of the New Deal Democrats. In today’s much more urbanized America, populous Democratic cities are far more important. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won every state in which a single metro area accounted for half of the state’s population, with the exceptions of Georgia and Arizona. In 2020 Biden won those two states as well, making a sweep of every one-metro-dominant state.

Merely by growing the urban share of the national vote, while minimizing defections, the post-Obama Democrats can grow their way to political hegemony. In 2024, 76% of Americans in the 100 most populous cities lived in cities with Democratic mayors, while only 16% had Republican mayors. Among the biggest 20 cities, 17 had Democratic mayors, two Republican mayors, and one independent. At the beginning of 2023, before Mayor Eric Johnson of Dallas switched to the Republicans, nine of the 10 cities with the largest populations had Democratic mayors, and the tenth, San Antonio, had an independent mayor, Ronald Nirenberg, who was indistinguishable from a progressive Democrat in his views. In 2000, four of the same 10 cities had Republican mayors.

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, the Democrats had lost three presidential elections in a row, allowing “New Democrats” like Clinton to break with party orthodoxy and try to win over some Republican voters. In contrast, a Harris victory, even if accompanied with a Republican Congress, might lead the post-Obama Democrats to double down on their mix of cultural leftism and economic neoliberalism, convinced that they enjoy a new and sustainable Democratic presidential majority and the power to achieve goals by executive order if they cannot be achieved by congressional legislation. And nothing short of a landslide loss of the popular vote this year will convince the Obama Democrats to rethink their strategy or reach out to alienated voters, as opposed to tweaking their rhetoric and targeting a few groups in swing states in 2028. There is no reason to believe that the new foundation of the Democratic machine that was laid by Barack Obama is going to crack or crumble any time soon.