DNC Day Four: Does Kamala Dream of Electric Sheep?

---

---

The Big Story

CHICAGO – Kamala Harris is for the people. Kamala Harris loves America with all her heart. Kamala Harris will lead with joy, but also strength, and perhaps strength through joy, which you definitely shouldn’t translate into German and then Google. Kamala Harris knows that Israeli women were raped, but also that what has happened in Gaza is devastating, which is why she will secure a deal to end the fighting and bring the hostages home. Kamala Harris will always stand up to Iran, unlike Donald Trump, who cozies up to tyrants and dictators. Kamala Harris will create opportunities for the middle class, because she knows what it means to be middle class. Kamala Harris will be a president for all Americans, not just for the rich. Kamala Harris holds predators accountable. It’s personal for Kamala Harris. 

At some point in the third or fourth hour that your humble Scroll correspondent spent sitting on an empty ABC News camera box wedged in a far corner in the upper deck of Chicago’s United Center (logistics were, again, a disaster, attendance having been boosted beyond capacity by false rumors that Taylor Swift or Beyonce would make an appearance) it struck us, like a diamond bullet through the forehead: None of it matters. None of what Kamala Harris says matters. None of what Leon Panetta says matters. None of what any of the other speakers on Thursday night—P!nk, Ella Emhoff, Mark Kelly—matters. The “policies” don’t matter. The “pivot to the center” doesn’t matter. Kamala Harris doesn’t matter. None of it matters. It isn’t real. 

The conventions of American politics dictate that a party must have a nominee—a living, breathing, “natural-born citizen” of a certain age—and so the party has Kamala. A nominee, also by convention, must have policies, and so Kamala “outlined” her “policies” on Thursday night. Americans are unhappy with four years of high inflation, anemic economic growth, uncontrolled illegal immigration, and a string of foreign policy disasters, brought to you by the administration in which Kamala currently serves as vice president. No problem; the Democrats will simply pretend that Trump is the incumbent and run against that. Joe Biden was, until June, the greatest American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with a mind so sharp he routinely flummoxed experts, and a well of energy so boundless that he left much younger aides struggling to keep up. Then, overnight, Biden was a walking corpse, and then he was gone. Joe who? 

The words are just messaging, or what Tablet News Editor Tony Badran likes to call “lol words”—they have no relation to reality. The party faithful understand that they’re not voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, they’re voting for the party, and whatever the party decides will be all right with them, whether or not that has any relation to what is being “promised” today. As Michelle Obama put it Tuesday night, “This is not just on them. This is up to us.” The Democrats’ big gamble is that their near-total monopoly on America’s messaging and communications apparatus will be enough to create a new reality, completely independent of the one we live in, that convinces just enough people to drag Kamala over the finish line. Then we can revert to what we had before Biden died on stage: party rule behind a ceremonial figurehead, whose job is to sell decisions made by others to the public.  

IN THE BACK PAGES: Armin Rosen on the Democrats’ attempts to court Jews at the DNC

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

Back to School in Wartime, by Hillel Kuttler

Students in Sderot navigate emotional challenges—and missile attacks—as the new academic year approaches

---

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.

---

“You Like Me, You Really Like Me”

Dispatches from the DNC

by Armin Rosen

The actress Sally Field never actually delivered her most famous line. What Field actually said, when accepting her Best Actress Oscar in 1985 for director Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart, which is a type of film that Hollywood hasn’t made for ages and might usefully resurrect, was miles less pathetic and more self-aware: “Right now, you like me!”

Jewish Democrats may have left the United Center last night feeling much the same way. It’s no big secret that somewhere around 70% or more of American Jews identify as Democrats, with many experiencing the party as their quasi-spiritual home. Yet at this year’s DNC, any event with an explicitly Jewish angle to it is being held in a location that the organizers won’t share until you’ve gone through a multistep RSVP process. At the first post-Oct. 7 Democratic convention, no podium address has mentioned Israel’s security or its right to defend itself against past and future jihadist pogroms—the acceptable, campaign-vetted pro-Israel formula for convention speakers is a light variation on “free the hostages and secure a cease-fire,” which treats hostage-freeing as the sum total of Israel’s current strategic challenges and a near-term cease-fire as an obvious inherent good for the U.S. and its closest Middle Eastern ally, rather than as coerced surrender to terrorists.

On Tuesday night, Doug Emhoff, who the Harris-Walz ticket has charged with rekindling the party’s old magic among Jewish voters and donors, recalled the plastic on his grandparents’ furniture, a schmaltzy callback to the stereotypes of a much earlier time. In contrast, he did not mention the Oct. 7 attack, a communitywide trauma that happened only 10 1/2 months ago. The whole topic of Israel, a country Emhoff apparently didn’t visit until his mid-50s, is one he has sought to avoid during his time as second gentlemen, which is odd because Emhoff ostensibly led the Biden administration’s effort to develop a national strategy on antisemitism, a hatred with a pained relationship to broader questions of the Jewish state’s continuing existence. On Tuesday, Emhoff spoke about going to church with his wife on Easter, but not about the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. His daughter Ella, who does not identify as Jewish, has used her celebrity-by-association to raise money for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is terror-linked enough for her stepmother’s administration to briefly cut off U.S. funding to the agency.

“There was a proud and explicit celebration of Jewish identity during the DNC last night, and that matters,” Amy Spitalnick, director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said of Emhoff’s speech, and she is of course correct. It is important that the party is telling Jews that it likes us, though there is always a danger of relying on symbols too much, or misreading what the symbols mean. I met Spitalnick at a jam-packed lunch reception organized by the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), and the event was a remarkable show of force, a symbol even more powerful than the brisket Kamala Harris supposedly cooks on Rosh Hashanah.

A couple dozen members of Congress dropped by a fancy events space near the United Center, as did New York Mayor Eric Adams, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and a passel of other national figures. Scores of elected officials addressed the gathering. “This problem we’ve had with some elements of the Democratic Party is horrendous, but it’s not new,” California Congressman Brad Sherman reassured everyone. “The other side can’t win elections. That’s why they’re blocking traffic.”

Don’t worry, we’re winning! Across over an hour of speeches, Eric Adams, the eccentric who runs the nation’s largest city, was one of the few who strayed beyond the bounds of in-group reassurance. “It’s become popular to hate,” fretted Adams in the event’s most candid moment of intracoalition criticism. “The days of just having dinners or idle conversations are over” for Jews who want to form connections to the Black community, he said. “We need to go outside our comfort zone and bring the young people along.”

The same unspoken anxieties hovered over every speech and over the event in general. Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden. Are there differences between the two of them on Israel that we will only learn of once she becomes president? “She was intimately involved in core decision-making throughout the conflict,” said Mark Mellman, veteran Democratic consultant and president of DMFI. “I think that’s important evidence.”

For skeptics, direct participation in post-Oct. 7 policies, which include sanctions relief for Iran and a U.S.-brokered effort to redraw Israel’s border with Lebanon to bring it closer to Hezbollah’s demands, will be mixed proof of Harris’ pro-Israel bona fides. Luckily DMFI has printed up a 14-page booklet of “Kamala Harris’ Twenty-Year Record of Pro-Israel Statements and Actions,” which includes sections outlining her opposition to BDS and her support for the Abraham Accords.

But hadn’t Harris surrounded herself with key figures from the pro-Iran deal wing of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, and wasn’t Ilan Goldenberg, her campaign’s Jewish liaison, a former adviser to Elizabeth Warren, who is far to the left of much of the Jewish community on Israel? “This is history,” replied Mellman, “in some cases almost ancient history. You don’t have a lot of people talking about resuscitating the Iran deal.” Besides which, “the president and the vice president make the policy,” not their staff. As for getting something, anything from the convention stage beyond the hostages-and-ceasefire formula: “I’m hopeful that tomorrow night we’ll hear some strong statements from Vice President Harris.”

Hours later, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of Hamas hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, pressed her forehead to the United Center podium and wept as the convention hall rose to its feet to welcome her. The delegates on the floor remained standing as Rachel and John Goldberg-Polin pleaded for their son’s release and an end to civilian suffering in Gaza. Jewish Democrats now had the validation they needed in order not to worry anymore. The inner reckoning would be much less painful than some Jews had feared—the party really does like us, and how silly and paranoid we were for ever thinking otherwise.

On Israel, just like on a host of other issues, there is a legitimately unknowable gulf between messaging and policy—which is a problem the Democratic Party doesn’t think it needs to solve right now. It’s a problem much of the party might not even see. And for the sake of defeating Donald Trump, keeping on Harris’ good side, and preserving a sliver of bipartisanship on Israel, the ones who do see it must pretend there isn’t a problem at all.

***

Democrats generally view Trump as a racist threat to democracy, but to defeat him in November they will need to make an intellectually honest attempt to understand his appeal—and not just to Jews. A side gathering of religious Christians on Wednesday morning got admirably close to a true understanding of what Harris is up against. “There’s no candidate less like a faith voter than Donald Trump—Amen to that?,” Doug Pagitt, executive director of Vote Common Good, said during a panel discussion hosted by Catholics for Kamala, “but he tells them he likes them.”

Trump has made himself the champion of people the Democrats now scorn. It would be a good start for Democrats not to scorn them anymore. But will nonscorn really be enough to swing them?

Marginal reversals in the Catholic vote in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania could determine the outcome of the election. Abortion rights have been a huge theme of this DNC—though the overwhelming majority of noneuphemistic mentions of abortion from the podium have focused on medically necessary procedures rather than purely elective ones. The week’s emphasis on morally less ambiguous cases for terminating a pregnancy is a decision of messaging, not of policy, and if Harris loses, it is liable to be because Democrats have lost sight of any difference between these two things.

Evangelicals and traditional Catholics don’t just want to be told they’re liked, though it takes a surprisingly unusual degree of discernment and foresight to understand how necessary this is as a starting point. Of course politically liberal but religiously conservative abortion opponents don’t want the people they vote for to belittle or disrespect them, but they also want their elected leaders to reflect their preferences on the issues they most care about. Might it be possible for the Democratic Party to throw soft pro-lifers the smallest of bones for the sake of beating Donald Trump? “That’s a question we ask ourselves all the time,” replied Denise Murphy McGraw, national co-chair of Catholics Vote Common Good. “What does the campaign plan to do about these faith voters? There are a lot out there.”

These “faith voters” include people who are horrified at both late-term abortions and at forcing women to give birth to nonviable infants at the risk of their own health. They include people who are practically socialist but also believe that life begins at conception. “If you’re a Catholic you have neither political party that’s with you on everything your Catholic teaching teaches,” says Pagitt. “You’re always making a bargain.”

Jews are drifting into the category of religious-minded voters who must strike bargains with themselves in order to remain inside the Democratic tent. There’s bad conscience on offer on the Republican side as well. The GOP is effusively pro-Israel and friendly toward school choice, public accommodation of religious practice, and religion in general. But then Donald Trump will also meet with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, and the Republicans support a raft of policies that are deal-breakers for most of the country’s Jews—including on abortion.