Harris should stop the ethnic cleansing
It is easy to quarrel with B’tselem’s picture of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. Many will want to cite Hamas’ behavior as the cause. Some will want Israel to continue the fight until Hamas is routed. Others will doubt that the policy is coherent and concerted, as Ms Novak claims.
Results
But it is hard to quarrel with the results she anticipates. Re-occupation of Gaza may not be the intention. But it is hard to see how Israel can accomplish its announced goals, demilitarization and deradicalization, without imposing a draconian military regime there.
Absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel is the explicit goal of the settlers and their supporters. Netanyahu’s maps already show the West Bank as part of Israel. He is doing “from the river to the sea” while Palestinians and their supporters are only chanting about it.
The future of Israel and Palestine
These results condemn Israel to a one-state future of unequal rights. Call it apartheid if you like, though that South African regime had its own unique characteristics. It will certainly be a regime of Jewish supremacy.
A situation that was in the past regarded as temporary will be recognized as permanent. Gaza will become what some claimed it was in the past: a giant prison. Jewish settlements will riddle the West Bank. Israel will prevent the two Palestinian territories from uniting in a single state.
Inside Israel proper (that is the 1967 lines), Palestinians will continue to be better off than their compatriots in Gaza and the West Bank. But their communities will get less money than Jewish communities from the Israeli government, the police and army will treat them as second class citizens, and they will continue to suffer inhumane treatment, including dispossession and displacement. These are not incidents occurring in a fair and just system. They are consequences of a system that priorities Jews and Jewish property, a system in other words of Jewish supremacy.
Is Jewish supremacy necessary?
Jewish supremacy is not necessary to preserve the Jewish-dominated state within its 1967 borders. It is however necessary if you want the Jewish state to occupy all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean (Greater Israel), since the numbers of Jews and Arabs in that territory are more or less equal. And the Arabs have higher birth rates. That is one of many reasons why a two-state solution is desirable. It would preserve the Jewish state while creating a Palestinian one.
Many Israelis and Palestinians no longer support a two-state solution. But their one-state objectives are different. Israelis want Palestinians to either go away or accept second-class citizenship, or no citizenship at all. The Palestinians want a one person/one vote system of equal rights. With higher demographic growth among Arabs than Jews, this would ensure Arab dominance. I wouldn’t expect Israelis to like that.
So Jewish supremacy is necessary in a Greater Israel, not in the 1967 one. Netanyahu’s continued pursuit of the Gaza war as well as his government’s mistreatment of Palestinians on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem aim, among other things, at reducing the Palestinian population. In other words, ethnic cleansing.
The United States should not be tolerating it. I hope President Harris won’t.
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Trump is out of gas but keeps farting
Donald Trump’s performance last Tuesday night in the debate with Kamala Harris was pitiful. He has been griping ever since about the moderators, but most of the country knows the truth. Trump was unable to hold his own while Harris established her credentials as a worthy contestant for the presidency. Whether you agree with her policy proposals or not, she looked, acted, and spoke like a president. He did not.
It isn’t over yet
But there are still more than seven weeks to the election. Battered, Trump will now fight back harder and dirtier than ever. The Republican Party will do everything it can in the battleground states to limit voting by minorities, citizens born in other countries, and younger people. It will try to hinder vote counting in big cities and cast doubt on the outcome in any state that produces only a narrow margin for Harris.
The Democrats are prepared for this onslaught and will counter the Republicans in court, both before and after the election. Both parties seem to be hard at work registering new voters. But just the confusion of claims and counterclaims will create problems, including a media frenzy.
Some of this could work against Trump. Even the Republican governor has said the claims about illegal immigrants eating pet cats and dogs in an Ohio town are untrue:
But Trump and Vance are not saying things like this because they think them true. Vance has admitted he is prepared to “create” stories he thinks represent the interests of his constituents:
What Vance and Trump are trying to do is attract attention and subtract from Harris’ momentum, using racist tropes. That is having some success. Half of America is now thinking about immigration rather than Trump’s felony convictions or Harris’ economic proposals.
Harris is proving wise
Harris did challenge the pets story, but she does not challenge all of Trump’s falsehoods or defend the Biden Administration at every opportunity. According to CNN, he told 33 lies (“false claims”) during the less than 45 minutes he spoke during the debate. It would have been impossible to take them all on. If she had, it would have looked as if he set the agenda, not her.
I regretted that she did not counter his assertion that immigrants are committing a lot of crimes, though she no doubt knows they commit fewer per capita than people born in the US. I also regret that she failed to respond to the first question in the debate: are Americans better off than four years ago? She should have. Unemployment, growth, energy exports and many other parameters are dramatically improved since January 2021.
Harris’ virtues
But Harris is persistent and tireless in claiming to serve the American people. That is what some of us want to hear. We don’t hear it from Trump. He disowns responsibility for any failures, even claiming he did nothing to encourage the January 6 attack on The Capitol that he spent weeks inciting. Trump claims to be the best president ever and that Biden is the worst. He claims he can fix everything and Biden could fix nothing. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Biden legislative accomplishments compared to Trump’s knows that isn’t true. Harris certainly does.
I attended a Harris fundraiser Saturday here in DC. She seemed to me, at a distance of 150 feet or so, to be genuine and sincere.
She is animated, vigorous, and coherent. I can’t say that about her opponent. Trump played golf a lot while president. He is still doing it during the campaign. He offers little more than tariffs on everything, replacing the Federal civil service with his cronies, and concessions to Putin and other dictators. Trump is out of gas but still farting.
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Hopeful v hopeless: guess who won
Last night’s presidential debate between former President Trump and Vice President Harris conformed to expectations. An ill-tempered Trump lied, rambled, and indulged in conspiracy theories. A smiling and bemused Harris projected herself as an agent of change and optimism. She was amiable and hopeful. He was threatening and hopeless. That’s what really counts.
Policy doesn’t count, but it is still worth considering
The economy: advantage Harris
On the economy, Trump promises little more than steep tariffs on everything, which a president can impose without Congressional approval, and extension of the tax cuts passed in 2017 for the (very) rich. Neither proposition should be attractive to 90% of Americans. He continues to insist that other countries will pay the tariffs, but they will also raise prices whenever they can to recoup whatever they pay. In addition, they will retaliate against US exports. So MAGA means higher prices and loss of market share abroad. Little to celebrate there.
Harris is flogging tax breaks for small business, families, and home construction. Not all of what she proposes makes good sense, and she has not said how she will pay for them. But her proposals respond to what most Americans are concerned about. All of what she wants would have to pass in Congress, which means there is at least a chance to get it right. Even if the Democrats were to gain control of both Houses, it would be difficult to hold together their majorities for proposals that don’t make sense.
Immigration: advantage Harris
This is Trump’s strong suit, but he played his hand poorly. He repeatedly claimed that immigrants are increasing the crime rate in the US. He even claimed that crime is down in Venezuela and other countries because all the criminals are being sent to the US. Harris didn’t respond forcefully on these points. I suppose she was wary of championing immigration. But crime is down in the US and it is not down in Venezuela and other migrant-exporting countries.
Harris hit a solid note with her response. She rightfully claimed Trump had blocked a bipartisan immigration bill that would have sharply increased the number of agents on the border. She did not say what a lot of us know: America needs immigrants. The labor market is tight and immigrants are prolific entrepreneurs who found a large number of new, small companies.
Foreign policy: advantage Harris
Trump was at pains to claim that he got NATO countries to ante up and that the world loves him. But America’s allies have been increasing military expenditures at least as fast under Biden. Trump repeated his claim that he would end the Ukraine war by negotiation before he even took office. The only way he could do that is by signaling lack of support for Ukraine. Trump was only able to cite Hungary’s would-be dictator, Viktor Orban, as a leader who appreciates him. Of course Putin, Xi, and Kim are also in that camp, but they are even less to Trump’s credit.
Harris cited Trump’s love affairs with those miscreants, as well as with the Taliban, as evidence of his failure to align the US with its democratic friends and allies. Even more important is that he failed to get anything worthwhile from his dreadful friends. Harris was effective in parrying Trump’s criticism of the Afghanistan withdrawal, which he had negotiated before Biden won the 2020 election.
Next
I expect the polls to show a visible jump for Harris in the next couple of weeks. She demonstrated at the debate a demeanor, temperament, and acuity that contrasted sharply with Trump’s. He looked and played the part of a tired incumbent. His ideas, insofar as he had any, were stale. Taylor Swift got it right. Kamala Harris will be the next President. That will give the Republicans time to end their romance with a crooked flim-flam man.
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Don’t miss it!
This will be a non-technical presentation 12-1:15 September 19 on a subject I have been thinking about for more than 45 years: why does the world have universally respected norms for ionizing radiation (from nuclear power plants and X-rays) that have no legal force? The answer is not only interesting but also applicable to other subjects that entail both benefits and risks, like toxic and climate-change chemicals, pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering, arms control, and artificial intelligence.
Lunch will be available. Also a good look at the new SAIS home at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue. Sign up here. I hope to see you there,
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Look who is rigging the elections now
American presidential elections are complicated. Most of the world that wants to follow them by now understands that they are decided in an Electoral College. That however is not necessarily the case.
The Electoral College is a process
The Electoral College is not an institution with a well-tended campus, but rather a process. Each state gets a number of votes in this process equivalent to its number of members of Congress (two Senators for each state plus a number of representatives proportional to its population). The electors will cast their votes in state capitals on December 17 this year. In all but two states (Maine and Nebraska), the electoral votes go to the winner of the popular vote (those two states have processes for splitting their electoral votes).
The District of Columbia, which is not a state, also gets three electoral votes. That makes a total of 538 votes (50 states x 2 Senators each, no matter their population, plus + 435 members of the House + 3 for DC). In order to be elected president, a candidate needs a majority, that is at least 270 electoral votes.
The Electoral College process favors the Republicans, who control more smaller population states with disproportionately larger numbers of electoral votes, due to the two senators. Both George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College. Trump is likely to lose the popular vote again but could still win in the Electoral College due to his strength in low-population states.
Here’s the rub
If no one gets a majority in the Electoral College, the presidency would be decided in the House of Representatives. There each state would cast a single vote. The Republicans hold the advantage. They control more state delegations. That is why Republicans are working hard to try to prevent certification in enough states to prevent Harris from winning the majority of the Electoral College.
This is election rigging. It is attractive to hope that it won’t pass muster in the courts, as the video above suggests. But the reality is that courts are slow. The Georgia Election Board has already adopted rules intended to make it easier to delay certification. Election officials in other states may do likewise. And violent demonstrations could prevent certification at the state level, as the January 6, 2021 crowd tried to do at the national level. Even the credible threat of jail terms after the fact is unlikely to prevent some miscreants from trying to rig the election.
There is a solution
The solution is an unequivocal election outcome, especially in battleground states. That will not be easy to achieve. We call them battlegrounds precisely because we expect the vote there to be close. In many, Trump and Harris are running neck and neck, even if she is pulling out ahead in the national polls. In Georgia, Harris is still 4 percentage points behind. You shouldn’t expect the Trumpkins to delay certification there if he scores a definitive win.
Enthusiasm for Harris is still growing. Trump is stumbling. He has tried many lines of attack, to no avail. He has claimed she is dumb and that he is better looking. It was no surprise that he gained little traction with those obviously false claims. Trump may have looked viable against an aging Joe Biden. But he is now the aging candidate all too obviously less energetic, articulate, smart, well-informed, and well-prepared than Harris. May the best woman win, big.
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What Harris needs to do now
Wow! Even for someone who in early July thought she would be a good candidate, Kamala Harris has overperformed. The Democratic Party unified quickly, she took the reins without hesitation, and she has now claimed high ground.
Donald Trump is flummoxed. Instead of running against a wizened pol hesitant to go on the offensive, he now faces a vibrant, high-energy woman determined to take the fight to him. The polling has already turned in her direction, putting her up a couple of points nationally and at least even in most of the battleground states. What could go wrong?
Lots of hurdles ahead in September
Trump’s effort to label her a communist extremist isn’t gaining much traction. A lot of Americans don’t remember communism. A woman who spent decades as a prosecutor doesn’t fit easily into the extremism box.
But lots of other potential hurdles loom. The presidential debate, if Trump doesn’t back out, will take place on September 10. Harris should be able to slice and dice him when it comes to policy, but a debate is also about image and presence. She wins on those scores with me, but a woman as commander-in-chief is a novelty for Americans. We’ll have to see how it goes.
The vice presidential candidates will also debate, on October 1. There Tim Walz’s normality and J.D. Vance’s weirdness will no doubt be on display. Debates, however, are always high-risk, high-gain events. A single flub or cutting remark can determine the impression a debate leaves.
Between the debates, on September 17 and 18, a Federal Reserve meeting will have an opportunity to begin lowering interest rates. It will act if it thinks the economy is slowing enough to end the post-pandemic inflationary spiral. It will postpone the decision if inflation still looks resilient. Harris will be a lot better off if inflation continues edging downwards toward the 2% annual goal from the 2.9% August figure. The new figure will be out September 11.
October will be about the battlegrounds
Campaigning is already focused mainly on the few states where the outcome is not already clear. The American “Electoral College,” an 18th century anomaly embedded in the constitution, makes that a necessary feature of American presidential elections. Each state has a number of electoral votes equivalent to its members of the Congress (two Senators per state plus a number of Representatives proportional to population). This system favors less populous states, in many of which the Republicans are strong.
270towin.com figures the state-by-state breakdown this way:
The battlegrounds are Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Some might add North Carolina or Ohio. But basically you’ve got a contest in two states in the west, three in the middle west, and one other in the south.
In all these, the main issue will be turnout and ballot access, which is determined by state laws and regulations. Georgia, which is Republican-controlled, has been aggressively trying to limit voting. Such efforts will be undertaken elsewhere as well, including refusal to certify results after the election. The courts will be jammed with efforts to get Republican complaints to the Supreme Court, where Trump can hope his three appointees will once again join in majorities deciding in his favor.
What it will take
The Economist is right. Harris will need more than the good vibes she has already generated to win. But I doubt they are correct about the need for more policy detail. They want principled consistency. Most American voters wouldn’t know if she offered it. The main thing for Harris is to convince Americans that she understands their problems and has the ability and interest to try to solve them. That is where Trump is weakest. It should be where she is strongest.
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