How Kamala Harris and the DNC Vanquished Their ‘Uncommitted’ Foes | Opinion

Democrats have been giddily proclaiming their unvarnished “joy” at the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago. Less joyful might be the handful of pro-Palestine activists and “Uncommitted” delegates who unwisely thought they would have any serious chance of obtaining actual policy concessions related to the ongoing disaster in the Middle East—or really anyone who might have reservations about current U.S. policy toward Israel, the unceasing pulverization of Gaza, and the potential outbreak of yet more cataclysm involving Iran and Hezbollah.
What are their choices exactly? In one corner, there’s Donald Trump, who may well be running on the most hardline “pro-Israel” platform of any major party nominee ever. As for the Democrats’ nominee, Kamala Harris, she took pains to portray her stance as indistinguishable from that of Biden-Harris administration, which has earned the distinction of supplying more military resources to Israel than any Administration in U.S. history. And then she took it one step further, shunning Left-wing activists who funneled into Chicago only to be treated with little more than painfully transparent lip service and half-hearted mollification.
Desperate to maintain their appearance of unanimous jubilation, Democratic bigwigs spent the DNC making superficial appeals to the dissenting elements of their coalition, including Arab-Americans and kindred Leftists, about how the party leadership is supposedly “listening” to their concerns regarding Israel/Palestine with a great deal of “compassion,” all while continuing to send massive amounts of armaments to Israel for prosecuting the war in Gaza, and, potentially, elsewhere in the region.
Of course, some dispensed with the lip service. “To me, the Biden-Harris administration has been extraordinary in their support of Israel, without any question,” Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL), who boasts that she represents more Jewish constituents in her South Florida district than anywhere else in the country, happily assured a gathering of the Jewish Democratic Council in Chicago. “And I just want you to know, the Democratic leadership in the House has been extraordinary in their support of Israel.” Frankel noted that while there are a handful of exceptions in the Democratic Party, she dismissed them “small asterisks.”
“Congratulations George Latimer—he just eliminated an asterisk,” she said, turning to George Latimer, one of the Democratic candidates who recently ousted a Democratic incumbent seen as insufficiently loyal to Israel, Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York, with the help of an unprecedented influx of money from “pro-Israel” donors.
Latimer, too, was not overly concerned about some massive shift in the Democratic Party. “There is a point of view expressed by some people inside the Democratic Party that you would argue is pro-Palestine,” said Latimer, the beneficiary of the largest-ever expenditure on a primary race in U.S. history. “In terms of what happens at a convention, where voices want to be heard, you create a forum for those voices to be heard. Perhaps that’s what the DNC did.”
Indeed, Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Attorney General, was tasked with the unenviable job of leading one of those forums and placating the “Uncommitted” delegates, which included his own son, Jeremiah, also a Minneapolis city councilman. One of the crumbs thrown to the grumbling Uncommitted delegates this week was a panel in a secondary convention site on “Palestinian Human Rights.” Keith Ellison gamely moderated the panel, making sure to keep any disruption to a minimum. Jeremiah Ellison, the “Uncommitted” delegate, told me he hoped the existence of the panel demonstrated that he and his cohort can “create some policy change and walk out here excited by our nominee. I can tell that there is an effort within the Party to take the Uncommitted movement seriously.”
But the “seriousness” with which the party has treated the Uncommitted movement has been to vigorously sideline them, with the exception of the one throwaway offsite panel. They allowed no Palestinian-American to deliver even vetted remarks on the main convention stage and made zero changes to the Party’s stalwart pro-Israel positions.
The relatively uninspired and meager protests at the Democratic Convention in Chicago also suggest that the over-hyped dissension, to whatever existent it might have actually existed, has been effectively neutered into virtual irrelevancy. Organizers have admitted that protest turnout vastly underperformed expectations, with desperate journalists eager for chaos nearly outnumbering protesters in some instances. This owes at least in part to Kamala Harris being a vaunted “woman of color”—in inspiring contrast with an “old white guy” like Joe Biden, which apparently has led many easily-duped activists and organizers to fallaciously assume that she must represent some exciting policy break with her “white guy” predecessor, when in fact there’s essentially nothing in the record to indicate this.
And even those Democrats who purport to have criticisms of the status quo on Israel seem to have been lulled into a kind of mandatory complacency when it comes to the actual policy positions of Kamala Harris, which have been steadfastly concealed from voters despite her warp-speed coronation. “The default is that she’s the Biden-Harris policies on a lot of these things,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who characterizes himself as a critic of certain aspects of Biden’s Israel stance, told me in an interview. “I do think she has a chance to pivot,” Khanna added, noting that “she’s going to have to give a major speech on the Middle East at some point.”
“I look forward to hearing what the Vice President’s policy is going to be,” Khanna said.
Shouldn’t something as basic as “hearing what her policy is going to be” ought to have perhaps been accomplished before she was granted the Party’s nomination, rather than afterwards?
Instead, Kamala has been ushered to power with an unprecedented absence of scrutiny on virtually anything, with Israel-Palestine just being one glaring example.
Khanna’s outlook is a useful insight into how the “Uncommitted” delegates have largely forfeited whatever minor leverage they might have once possessed, with many of them pledging to vote for the Democratic nominee come hell or high water, thus giving the party brass no reason to substantively address their grievances.
All the more reason for Kamala Harris to “joyfully” exit Chicago with her main mission accomplished: maintain the status quo, while giving a vague impression that the “tone” somewhere has meaninglessly, pointlessly shifted.
Michael Tracey is an independent reporter with Substack. Find him at www.mtracey.net. Follow him on Twitter @mtracey.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.