Josh Shapiro Is A Shitty VP Pick, But He Would Give Kamala Political Cover to Change Policy in Gaza

Pennsylvania Governor and Obama impersonator Josh Shapiro should not be Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential nominee. There are a litany of reasons why he is not a good choice: he’s supported school vouchers and drawn the ire of teacher’s unions, he likened Gaza protesters to the KKK and he even tried to use dubious state power to force Ben & Jerry’s to sell their ice cream in illegal Israeli West Bank settlements. His selection would be a slap in the face to the left, but that’s not the biggest reason to pass him over.

The Democrats are running a woman against a criminal sex pest who has spent a lifetime demeaning women, and the last thing they need on the ticket is someone whose office settled a sexual harassment claim against a top aide. Shapiro’s mere presence would destroy all sorts of Democratic credibility to prosecute the most straightforward case in electoral history. So leaving that glaring disqualifying weakness aside, there is actually a logic to selecting Shapiro as a politically strategic choice if Kamala Harris is serious about stopping the genocide in Gaza.

Precisely because Shapiro is so shitty on this issue and has been so shameless in his support for Israel’s depravity is why he provides the most political cover for Harris out of any VP candidate. I love Tim Walz and in a just world the ex-championship football coach who gives free meals to kids and is backed by unions would be the pick, but how do you think the media and political establishment would treat a serious Harris pivot in Gaza with another nice old guy defending socialism next to her? Now imagine a policy change with a VP who potentially tried to break U.S. law to support Israel’s defiance of international law.

See? You can already hear Jake Tapper harumphing in the distance as his bothsides programming battles with itself and fries his system. I wish we lived in a world where we could just straightforwardly communicate our values to policy and that would be enough, but we don’t. We have to trick the idiots who own the discourse if we want to usher nice things through this sclerotic 18th century political system.

Like Trump correctly said in his interview with the National Association of Black Journalists yesterday that went even worse than you think, VP’s don’t matter, you’re voting for the name at the top of the ticket. Mark Kelly, perhaps the most anti-labor Democratic Senator, bending the knee to labor is another example in a quarter-century of how every VP understands the deal: you prostrate yourself for the president, and back and adopt everything they say and do no matter what (unless you’re Joe Biden rightfully shoving a stubborn Barack Obama to the right side of history on gay marriage) in the hopes that one day you will get to be president and regain your agency as a public figure.

Again, Shapiro sucks and his policy views on this subject should be nowhere near actual decision-making processes, but the VP is an inherently superficial position. If Shapiro were Kamala Harris’s Secretary of State, yeah, we’ve got a big problem, but the VP is a schlub! They do what they’re told and exist mainly as a shiny toy for the media and to say things on the campaign trail that are too mean or incendiary for the presidential candidate to say. Lefties freaking out over a potential Shapiro VP pick are putting too much stock in his level of influence on Gaza. You think Kamala Harris waited her turn behind Biden just so she can turn around and listen to a one-term governor giving her foreign policy advice?

We’re voting for Kamala, not her VP, how she views the situation in Gaza is infinitely more important.

And how she does is an open question. She wrote an absolute dogshit statement around the handful of protesters among thousands that played all the stenographers’ greatest hits last week when Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress, then later delivered some traditional Biden administration talking points on Gaza with real emotion after yet another stern conversation with Bibi. That performance implied that she is more invested in ending this crisis than the current administration, and now it is on her to prove that she can translate that implication to actually stopping the immiseration of Palestinians.

As Jen Kirby reported for Splinter, activists are making certain that she will not receive a pass on Gaza, and are applying effective political pressure on her to try to change the barbaric status quo. I’m not semi-making this case for Shapiro because I believe Harris can anchor the left flank on this issue while he distracts the right, just hoping that she can. This is a woman who has backed Medicare for All and the Green New Deal before back-tracking on both after all, and the one consistency she has on lefty policy is her malleability, so what she does on any policy matter should she become president is anyone’s guess.

That makes her untrustworthy, but that’s a dog bites man story, all politicians are not to be trusted. What the first two years of the Biden administration taught us is that untrustworthy ideologues are to be shunned, but untrustworthy transactional politicians like Biden who spent his entire career trying to average out his politics to the exact middle of the current Democratic Party can be useful. The more votes we bring them, the more we can trust them to pass our policies, and the left has votes. Understanding that political math is a big reason that Joe Biden is president now, and losing sight of it in his blind support for Israeli depravity was the final blow that knocked his approval rating down to late-stage W. and pandemic Trump levels where presidents don’t come back from losing their own party.

If Kamala Harris wants to follow Biden’s transactional success in working with the left, she must advance our wins from the domestic realm to foreign policy by ending the genocide in Gaza. If she is serious about doing so, Josh Shapiro actually buys her the most political cover to make aggressive policy changes. I get that sounds gross and counter-intuitive, but welcome to American politics.