By Norman Solomon

Time is running out for Kamala Harris to distance herself from U.S. policies that enable Israel to continue with mass murder and genocide in Gaza. Polling shows that a pivot toward moral decency would improve her chances of defeating Donald Trump. But during her CNN interview Thursday night, Harris remained in lockstep with President Biden’s unconditional arming of Israel.

Two weeks ago, YouGov pollsters released findings in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, three swing states now on a razor’s edge between Harris and Trump. “In Pennsylvania, 34 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to 7 percent who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference,” the new journalism site Zeteo reported.

Results in the two other states were similar. “In Arizona, 35 percent said they’d be more likely, while 5 percent would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39 percent said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5 percent who would be less likely.”

But on CNN, Harris stuck to echoing Biden’s rhetoric — calling for a ceasefire while dodging the reality that the U.S. government could force one by implementing an arms embargo on Israel.

Huge U.S. shipments of weapons and bombs to Israel keep allowing it to massacre and starve civilians of all ages while violating federal statutes as well as international law. Days ago, Biden approved sending arms to Israel worth upwards of $20 billion. The transfers were called “sales,” but as policy analyst Stephen Semler pointed out, “most if not all of this matériel is paid for by U.S. taxpayers — Israel uses much of the military aid Congress approves for it effectively as a gift card to buy U.S.-made weapons.”

Just listening to Harris during her CNN interview, you’d be clueless about the realities that the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, spelled out in a statement midway through August: “The people of Gaza are now grieving 40,000 Palestinian lives lost, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war. On average, about 130 people have been killed every day in Gaza over the past 10 months. The scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship is deeply shocking.”

Notably, Harris gave no indication of the number of Palestinian lives lost — while she did say that 1,200 Israelis, including “many young people,” lost their lives on October 7. That most of the Palestinians who died were children and women went unmentioned.

While the vice president said that Israelis were “massacred,” she relied on passive voice to say only that too many Palestinians “have been killed.”

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By Norman Solomon

An observation from George Orwell — “those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future” — is acutely relevant to how President Biden talked about Gaza during his speech at the Democratic convention Monday night. His words fit into a messaging template now in its eleventh month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.

“We’ll keep working, to bring hostages home, and end the war in Gaza, and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” Biden told the cheering delegates. “As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza. A few days ago I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to doing that than we’ve done since October 7th.”

It was a journey into an alternative universe of political guile from a president who just six days earlier had approved sending $20 billion worth of more weapons to Israel. Yet the Biden delegates in the convention hall responded with a crescendo of roaring admiration.

Applause swelled as Biden continued: “We’re working around-the-clock, my secretary of state, to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families, and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now, to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”

In Chicago’s United Center, the president basked in adulation while claiming to be a peacemaker despite a record of literally making possible the methodical massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Orwell would have understood. A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.

And so, working inside the paradigm that Orwell described, Biden exerts control over the present, strives to control narratives about the past, and seeks to make it all seem normal, prefiguring the future.

The eagerness of delegates to cheer for Biden’s mendaciously absurd narrative about his administration’s policies toward Gaza was in a broader context — the convention’s lovefest for the lame-duck president.

Hours before the convention opened, Peter Beinart released a short video essay anticipating the fervent adulation. “I just don't think when you’re analyzing a presidency or a person, you sequester what’s happened in Gaza,” he said. “I mean, if you’re a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it’s just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide.”

Beinart continued: “And it’s really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don’t see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it's not indeed there. . . . If you’re gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-a-vis Gaza. It’s central to his legacy. It's central to his character. And if you don’t, then you’re saying that Palestinian lives just don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter this particular day, and I think that’s inhumane. I don’t think we can ever say that some group of people’s lives simply don't matter because it’s inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular moment.”

Underscoring the grotesque moral obtuseness from the convention stage was the joyful display of generations as the president praised and embraced his offspring. Joe Biden walked off stage holding the hand of his cute little grandson, a precious child no more precious than any one of the many thousands of children the president has helped Israel to kill.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon

After the Democrat in the White House decided not to run for reelection, the vice president got the party’s presidential nod — and continued to back the administration’s policies for an unpopular war. As the election neared, the candidate had to decide whether to keep supporting the war or speak out for a change.

Hubert Humphrey faced that choice in 1968. Kamala Harris faces it now.

Despite the differences in eras and circumstances, key dynamics are eerily similar. The history of how Vice President Humphrey navigated the political terrain of the war in Vietnam has ominous parallels with how Vice President Harris has been dealing with the war in Gaza.

*****     *****     *****

For millions of liberals, during the first half of the 1960s, Hubert Humphrey was the nation’s most heroic politician. As the Senate majority whip, he deftly championed landmark bills for civil rights and social programs. By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson put him on the Democratic ticket in 1964, progressive momentum was in high gear.

LBJ defeated ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater in a landslide. As vice president, Humphrey assisted Johnson to follow up on the 1964 Civil Rights Act with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a huge set of antipoverty measures while enacting broad social programs in realms of education, health care, nutrition, housing and the environment. Midway through the summer of 1965, Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law.

Meanwhile, escalation of the U.S. war on Vietnam was taking off. And, as Martin Luther King Jr. soon pointed out, “When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer. We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don’t even get good oleo [margarine]. These are facts of life.”

At first, Vice President Humphrey wrote slightly dovish memos to Johnson, who angrily rejected the advice and retaliated by excluding him from key meetings. Banished to the doghouse, Humphrey licked his wounds and changed his approach. By early 1966, he was deferring to Johnson’s war views in private and advocating for the Vietnam War in public.

As the war escalated, so did the vice president’s zeal to extol it as a fight for freedom and democracy. “By 1967 he had become a hawk on Vietnam,” biographer Arnold Offner noted. Beneath the lofty rhetoric was cold calculation.

“Humphrey’s passage from dove to hawk on Vietnam was not the result of one-sided White House briefings or of his ability, as one journalist had noted, to see silver linings in the stormiest clouds,” Offner wrote. “His change of position derived from a case of willful mind over matter, from his strong anti-Communism combined with political expediency driven by ambition, namely desire to remain in Johnson’s good graces and perhaps succeed him whenever his presidency ended.”

That desire to be in the president’s good graces did not dissipate after Johnson suddenly announced in a televised address on March 31, 1968 that he would not seek reelection. Four weeks later, Humphrey launched a presidential campaign that pitted him against two antiwar candidates, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.

From the outset, Humphrey was plagued by his fear of antagonizing Johnson if he were to depart from a pro-war script. The United States had “nothing to apologize for,” Humphrey said. He didn’t run in any primaries and was not willing to debate McCarthy or Kennedy.

Humphrey mouthed the same old rhetoric to rationalize the administration’s policies for the war in Vietnam. Several high-level supporters — including Iowa’s Governor Harold Hughes, Vermont’s Governor Philip Hoff, and the venerable former New York governor and ambassador Averell Harriman — advised him to resign the vice presidency and thus free himself from entanglement with Johnson. But to Humphrey, such a step was unthinkable.

And so, Hubert Humphrey rode in the caboose of the war train all summer. In late August, the day before the Democratic National Convention got underway in Chicago, he told viewers of the CBS program Face the Nation that the administration’s policies in Vietnam were “basically sound.”

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WAR MADE INVISIBLE

"A powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy."

– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

DETAILS AND ORDERING OPTIONS

By Norman Solomon

Soon after the Gaza war began 10 months ago, a prominent newspaper columnist denounced Congresswoman Cori Bush under a headline declaring that “anti-Israel comments make her unfit for reelection.” The piece appeared in the newspaper with the second-largest readership in Missouri, the Kansas City Star. Multimillion-dollar attacks on Bush followed.

Bush’s opponent, county prosecutor Wesley Bell, “is now the number-one recipient of AIPAC cash this election cycle,” according to Justice Democrats. “Almost two-thirds of all his donations came from the anti-Palestinian, far-right megadonor-funded lobby group.” The Intercept reports that “AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has gone on to spend a total of $7 million so far to oust Bush” in the Aug. 6 Democratic primary in her St. Louis area district.

“The $2.1 million in ads spent for her campaign is up against $12.2 million spent to attack her or support Bell,” The American Prospect points out. AIPAC “is trying to pull voters away from her without ever saying the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine.’ Instead, their advertising against Bush centers around her record on infrastructure legislation, in a manner that lacks context.”

It's easy to see why AIPAC and allied forces are so eager to defeat Bush. She courageously introduced a ceasefire resolution in the House nine days after the bloodshed began on Oct. 7, calling for “an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine.”

The Kansas City Star article, published shortly after Bush introduced the resolution, was written by former New York Times reporter Melinda Henneberger, now a member of the Star’s editorial board. “A military attack in response to the massacre of civilians by a group committed in writing to ‘carnage, displacement and terror’ for Jews is not my idea of ‘ethnic cleansing,’” she wrote in early November. “But it is Missouri Rep. Cori Bush’s, which is why she deserves to lose her congressional race next year.”

Bush supposedly became unfit to keep her seat in Congress because, after three weeks of methodical killing in Gaza, she tweeted: “We can’t be silent about Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. Babies, dead. Pregnant women, dead. Elderly, dead. Generations of families, dead. Millions of people in Gaza with nowhere to go being slaughtered. The U.S. must stop funding these atrocities against Palestinians.”

Henneberger’s response was hit-and-run. She wrote a hit piece. And then she ran.

Ever since late April, I’ve been asking Henneberger just one question, over and over. Every few weeks, I have sent another email directly to her. I also wrote to her care of an editor at the newspaper. And I even mailed a certified letter, which the post office delivered to her office in June.

No reply.

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By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Kamala Harris has gained strong support as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate. Putting Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on the ticket would likely fracture that support.

The most divisive issue among Democrats is the U.S.-enabled Israeli war against the civilian population of Gaza. To unify the party and defeat Trump’s MAGA forces, Harris needs to distance herself in a meaningful way from Joe Biden’s Gaza policy. If she does so, she can win back the votes and energy of young activists, progressives, racial justice organizers, Arab Americans and Muslims – many of whom devoted weeks or months of their lives in 2020 to defeating Trump on behalf of the Biden-Harris ticket.

But a Harris-Shapiro ticket would jeopardize all that.

Today, parallels are apparent with pivotal events of 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson – increasingly unpopular among Democrats and others because of his Vietnam War – stunned the political world by announcing he would not seek reelection. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the party nominated LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as its standard-bearer. Humphrey’s halting efforts to distance himself from Johnson’s war policy were too little, too late, and he was unable to connect with many of the dedicated Democratic activists and voters who were antiwar. Failing to detach himself sufficiently from the president’s war policy, Humphrey lost a winnable election to Republican Richard Nixon.

If Harris now chooses a running mate who intensely connects her to Biden’s policies on the Gaza war that are so unpopular with much of the Democratic base, party unity – and the chances of defeating Trump – would be undermined.

Overall, Josh Shapiro is liberal and sometimes progressive on domestic issues (though notably not on fracking or tax subsidies for private schools). But on the contentious issue of Israel’s relentless war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Shapiro sounds much less bothered by the lethal violence than by U.S. ceasefire activists, many of whom he has demonized. Here’s a bit of the history:

In 2021, after Ben & Jerry’s (a company founded and led by Jewish Americans) refused to sell its products in Israel’s illegal settlements, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro threatened the company by urging Pennsylvania state agencies to enforce a constitutionally suspect law targeting advocates of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel over its discriminatory policies. Shapiro smeared such advocates by claiming that “BDS is rooted in antisemitism” – although the effort has wide support globally, including from many Jews, as a thoroughly nonviolent tactic in advancing Palestinian rights.

After the horrific Hamas attack of October 7, several dozen Pennsylvania-based Muslim groups wrote a letter protesting Governor Shapiro’s one-sided comments: “Not only did you fail to recognize the structural root causes of the conflict, you chose to intentionally ignore the civilian loss of life in Gaza.” Responding to the letter after Israeli bombs and missiles had killed more civilians in Gaza than had been killed by Hamas in Israel on October 7, the governor’s spokesman said: “We all must speak with moral clarity and support Israel’s right to defend itself.”

Last December, after he amplified the Capitol Hill demagoguery of MAGA Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Gov. Shapiro contributed to the firing of the University of Pennsylvania president. Referring to UPenn’s president, Shapiro said: “I thought her comments were absolutely shameful. It should not be hard to condemn genocide.” By then, after two months of Israeli bombing, more than 17,000 Gazans had been killed, mostly women and children – and later that month, Israel was charged with violations of the Genocide Convention in South Africa’s filing at the International Court of Justice.

In early April, after Democratic governors in other states had called for a ceasefire in Gaza, Muslim leaders in Philadelphia criticized Shapiro for his refusal to do so.

Beginning in late April, Gov. Shapiro and his office repeatedly prodded campuses to “restore order” and take action against student encampments, including the University of Pennsylvania Gaza Solidarity Encampment which called on the college administration to provide greater transparency on university investments, divest from Israel, and reinstate the banned student group Penn Students Against the Occupation.

On May 9, Shapiro invoked student “safety” in demanding the encampment be shut down. Police shut it down the next day, arresting 33. In two different interviews, Shapiro seemed to compare campus ceasefire activists, many of whom are Jewish or students of color, to “white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs” and “people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia making comments about people who’re African American.”

In May, as activism continued to grow over Israel’s lethal violence against civilians in Gaza, Gov. Shapiro issued an order aimed at Israel’s critics that revised his administration’s code of conduct to bar state employees from “scandalous or disgraceful” conduct – a vague and subjective directive criticized by the legal director of Pennsylvania’s ACLU as a possible violation of free speech protections.

In a July 23 tweet on X, progressive leader and former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner wrote: “Choosing Governor Josh Shapiro for Vice President would be a mistake. Governor Shapiro compared pro-peace protesters to the KKK. That’s simply unacceptable & would stifle the momentum VP Harris has. Hopefully she is looking to build a broad coalition to beat Trump.”

A broad coalition to defeat Donald Trump and the fascistic MAGA movement is exactly what we need. Making Josh Shapiro the nominee for vice president is exactly what we don’t need.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.

By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch

The Biden campaign drove the Democratic Party into a ditch and speculation is rampant about grim prospects for the election. But little scrutiny has gone into examining how such a dire situation developed in the first place.

Joe Biden was on a collision course with reality long before his abysmal debate performance led to his withdrawal from the race. “Several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations,” the New York Times reported five days after the debate. Some had noticed the glaring problem months earlier but kept quiet.

A culture of dubious loyalty festered far beyond the Biden White House. It encompassed Democratic leaders at the Capitol and across the country, as well as countless allied organizations and individuals. The routine was to pretend that Biden’s obvious cognitive deficits didn’t exist or didn’t really matter.

Because his mental impairment was so apparent to debate viewers, some notable Democratic dissenters in Congress stepped up to oppose his renomination. But for weeks, relatively few colleagues followed the lead of Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett, who broke the congressional ice by calling for Biden to “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”

Heads in the Sand

Acuity came from Julián Castro, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration, who kept up a barrage of cogent tweets. One message referred to Biden’s “unique political liability” and warned: “It’s not going to get any better — and has a high risk of scrambling the race again, sealing Dems fate. Burying our heads in the sand won’t assuage voters concerns, which have been painfully obvious for years.”

A literal heads-in-the-sand photo was at the top of a full-page print ad that the Don’t Run Joe team at RootsAction.org (where I’m national director) placed in The Hill a year and a half ago. Headlined “An Open Letter to Democrats in the House and Senate,” it said: “Many of your colleagues, and maybe you, are expressing public enthusiasm for another Biden presidential campaign in on-the-record quotes to journalists — while privately voicing trepidation. This widespread gap ill serves the party or the nation… There are ample indications that having Joe Biden at the top of ballots across the country in autumn 2024 would bring enormous political vulnerabilities for the ticket and for down-ballot races. No amount of spin can change key realities.”

But the spin never stopped and, in fact, went into high gear this summer with Biden trying to make his candidacy a fait accompli. Meanwhile, the culture of loyalty kept a grip on the delegates who’ll be heading to Chicago in mid-August for the Democratic National Convention. As the second week of July began, CNN reported that “a host of party leaders and rank-and-file members selected to formally nominate Biden said they were loath to consider any other option.” A delegate from Florida put it this way: “There is no plan B. The president is the nominee. And that’s where I and everyone that I’ve been talking to stands — until and unless he says otherwise.”

The lure of going along to get along with high-ranking officials is part of the Democratic Party’s dominant political culture. I saw such dynamics up close, countless times, during my 10 years as a member of the California Democratic Party’s state central committee, and as a delegate to three Democratic National Conventions. I viewed such conformist attitudes with alarm at meetings of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

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By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen

Let’s face it: Donald Trump is in a stronger position than ever to win a second term in November, with his active supporters even more motivated in the wake of the shooting Saturday. Preventing a Trump victory is now unlikely. But we must try.

Top Trump strategists are very eager for their candidate to run against Joe Biden. They’re now worried that the Democratic Party might end up with a different standard bearer.

Days ago, The Atlantic published journalist Tim Alberta’s in-depth examination of the Trump campaign’s strategic approach. “Everything they have been doing, the targeting that they have been doing of voters, the advertisements that they’re cutting, the fund-raising ploys that they’re making, the viral Internet videos that they have been churning out, they’re all designed around Joe Biden,” Alberta told the PBS NewsHour.

“So if suddenly he were replaced at the top of the ticket,” he added, “I think in many ways it’s back to square one for the Trump campaign. They recognize this. And I think they’re deeply unnerved by the possibility of a switcheroo at the top of the Democratic ticket.”

Last weekend, the Washington Post put it this way: “As Democrats debate the future of Biden’s reelection bid, Republicans would prefer he stay in a race they believe they are already winning.”

On Sunday, Face the Nation reported “top Democratic sources believe that Democrats who had thoughts about challenging President Biden are now standing down ‘because of this fragile political moment.’” Yet a guest on the same CBS program, Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, warned of a “high risk” that his party will lose the election “unless there is a major change.” He said that messaging from Biden’s campaign “is not effectively breaking through.”

While Biden boosters like to talk about national polling that sometimes puts Biden within a couple of points of Trump, such surveys mean little. Due to the Electoral College, the swing states will determine the winner. Biden is behind — and falling further behind in most of them. Arizona, Georgia and Nevada have moved from “toss up” states to “lean Republican” according to the Cook Political Report.

And with an approval rating that now hovers around an abysmal 37 percent, Biden is increasingly playing defense in states he won easily four years ago.

“Democrats’ concerns about Biden’s ability to win are expanding beyond this cycle’s predetermined battlegrounds into states that long ago turned blue in presidential elections,” Politico reported last week, in an article raising doubts about Biden’s prospects in New Hampshire, Maine, New Mexico and Minnesota. The headline: “Dems Are Freaking Out About Biden Even in Once Safely Blue States.”

Around the country, Democratic candidates are running well ahead of Biden. Last week, the Economist/YouGov poll found that “96 percent of registered Democrats say they will vote for a Democratic House candidate in the fall, compared with 85 percent who plan to vote for Biden.”

Biden’s presence at the top of the ticket promises to not only deliver the White House to Trump but also the House and Senate to Republicans.

In the light of such realities less than four months before Election Day, it’s alarming to hear many elected Democrats — including some progressives in Congress — publicly claim that Biden is just fine as the party’s nominee.

The happy-talk denialism from those congressional progressives shows a disconnect from the progressive grassroots. Many activists who devoted months of their lives on behalf of Biden in 2020 to vote Trump out are disaffected from Biden in 2024. Many are furious over Biden’s nonstop support of Israel during its continuous slaughter of civilians in Gaza. That includes Arab-American and Muslim activists and groups who mobilized for Biden four years ago against his Islamophobic opponent. Many climate activists who fought for Biden in 2020 against the “drill, baby, drill” Trump are disgusted with his reversals on climate policy.

So, the depressing poll numbers may understate the problem for Biden as the Democratic nominee, because they don’t count the gap in campaign volunteer energy — especially in contrast with the highly energized MAGA base. Early this year, an anonymous letter from 17 Biden 2024 campaign staffers urged Biden to reverse himself on Gaza and seek an immediate ceasefire: “Biden for President staff have seen volunteers quit in droves, and people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for the first time ever.”

In 2017, the Trump presidency was properly mocked for its brazen assertions of “alternative facts.” It’s now disconcerting that Biden and his advocates so often lapse into puffery as to his true political situation.

That situation was laid out with chilling candor in a detailed New York Times piece by longtime Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and has advised dozens of governors and senators. The article makes for grim reading: “President Biden has spent much of 2024 with a more challenging path to winning a second presidential term in November than Donald Trump. But for reasons that have become glaringly obvious, that path has all but vanished.”

Biden “not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020,” Sosnik wrote, “he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008.”

But so many Democrats in Congress are refusing to call for Biden to step aside. And a lot of them are even cheering him on, encouraging his intransigence, as though nothing is amiss.

Until the Democratic Party officially nominates its presidential candidate, the push for Biden to withdraw from the ticket should continue.

     Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

By Norman Solomon

I love Bernie Sanders. By most measures, he’s the greatest senator in the last 50 years. I was very glad to be a Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. But when Bernie screws up, his progressive base should say so.

That happened during the first months of Israel’s war on Gaza that began last October. Initially, Bernie sounded equivocal as Israeli forces engaged in mass murder. After several weeks of carnage, antiwar activists occupied his D.C. office to demand support for a ceasefire. Some were arrested for their civil disobedience.

Bernie gradually changed his position and became a fierce critic of Israel, denouncing it for horrific large-scale crimes against Palestinian civilians and challenging the shipment of weapons to the Israeli military. There’s no telling if the public pressure from progressives hastened his shift to strongly oppose Israel’s genocidal war. But that pressure was necessary.

Unfortunately, after President Biden’s debate debacle on June 27, Bernie did not weigh in against the gaslighting maneuvers by the White House and the Biden campaign. In fact, Bernie aided them by downplaying the importance of what had happened on the debate stage.

Since then, Bernie has encouraged the illusion that Biden now has the capacity to be an effective candidate against Donald Trump. Equally problematic has been the implicit pretense that Biden could be up to the job as president until January 2029.

Such evasion not only dodges the reality that Biden was inept and sometimes incoherent during the debate. Since then, much stunning information has come to light, illuminating how badly Biden’s mental capacities have diminished.

“In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations,” the New York Times reported on July 2.

But on July 3 and again on July 5, email from Bernie to supporters told them: “President Biden said today that he is staying in the race, and I take him at his word.”

However, taking Biden “at his word” is beside the point. As the party’s nominee, Biden would drag down many Democratic candidates with him while making it easy for Donald Trump to win the presidency again.

The problem isn’t only what Bernie has been telling people on his email list. He has also been putting out important messages to the broader public via mass media — in the process sending positive signals to Biden and his top aides while they gauge whether to continue the Biden 2024 campaign.

And Bernie is talking directly with the president. Biden “has spoken to me in recent days,” Bernie said on Sunday during an interview on the CBS program Face the Nation. It’s very likely that what Bernie told Biden was consistent with what he told the Associated Press, which reported on July 2 that Sanders “does not want Biden to step aside.”

The AP quoted Bernie as saying: “A presidential election is not a Grammy Award contest for the best singer or entertainer. It’s about who has the best policies that impact our lives.”

But Biden’s inability to clearly advocate for popular policies — or to effectively refute lies and demagogic statements from Donald Trump — is not like a failure to be “the best singer or entertainer.” The president’s glaring inabilities amount to huge failures as a candidate and as a leader.

It’s well known that Bernie Sanders has personal warmth toward Joe Biden. But, given the enormity of what is at stake, personal ties should not get in the way of realizing what ought to be crystal clear: Every day that goes by with Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee will work to the further advantage of Trump and his extremist right-wing forces.

“I’m going to do everything I can to see that Biden gets reelected,” Bernie told the Associated Press. But at this juncture, that’s the wrong vow. What we really need to hear from Bernie Sanders is a pledge to do everything he can to see that Trump is defeated — and that means replacing Biden with someone who has a better chance of getting the job done.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including "War Made Easy." His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in 2023 by The New Press.