We were a Super Tuesday away from the ‘Squad’ standing with Hamas
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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By most available metrics, President Joe Biden has been an objectively poor president. The octogenarian triggered the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years, with trillions of extra spending on top of the tinderbox of the post-COVID economy. And after the Biden administration ripped up the Trump-era diplomatic deals that brought arrests for illegal border crossings to a 40-year low, they have hit the highest point on record.
From Sudan to Ukraine, foreign policy conflagrations across the globe, and Americans have rewarded Biden with consistently sub-40% approval ratings since his first foreign fracas in the abysmal withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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And yet, it could be worse.
Very, very few things would have had to go differently for the world to enjoy a functionally pro-Hamas administration in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Had Democratic kingmaker Rep. James Clyburn (R-SC) not crucially endorsed Biden after his brutal losses in the early 2020 primary states, Secretary of State Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be calling for a ceasefire, tantamount to national suicide by Israel, instead of Antony Blinken boldly blasting Hamas for its human rights atrocities. Had the party’s moderates not bowed out before 2020’s Super Tuesday at the beckoning of former President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Rashida Tlaib would be pushing our sole democratic ally in the Middle East to voicemail instead of sending over American weapons carriers to support Israel.
Even as a perennial and vociferous critic, I can, and must, admit that this is the single most existential dilemma in the realm of foreign policy, the arena in which the president has the most unilateral power, of Biden’s tenure, and Biden has met the moment and then some.
Sure, Biden has not been perfect. The administration’s relentless reminder that Islamophobia is also bad is a bit like going to one person’s funeral and loudly complaining that people aren’t mourning all the other people who have ever died, and as with most of the chaos cropping up on the world stage, the White House’s refusal to combat Iran directly signifies an inability to deal with (to use a favored phrase of the vice president) the root causes of this crisis.
But even the most partisan of Republicans can and should acknowledge that Biden and his Cabinet’s repeated calls and visits to Israel, public pledges of support, excoriation of Hamas and its domestic sympathizers, and robust military assistance to our ally are eons different and better than what we see under a President Bernie Sanders and his secretaries from the Squad. (Recall that Sanders, under pressure from his antisemitic supporters, has publicly called for a “ceasefire” and that Tlaib entered Congress wanting Israel wiped off the map.)
The thought experiment of what could have been is also a lesson to Democrats that they must be careful what they wish for.
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In 2020, despite the chorus of conservatives cheering on the prospect of Sanders winning the primary because he would possibly be easier to beat in a general election, I urged Republicans to hope for Biden’s victory. In first-past-the-post, effective two-party election, even the worst Democratic or Republican nominee has, at minimum, a 1-in-4 or 1-in-3 chance of winning a general election. With odds that high, patriots should pray that both parties elect not the easiest candidates to beat but the best ones, especially as it pertains to foreign policy, which, as mentioned above, is the avenue through which the president has the most power to execute policy without the constraints of Congress.
As a conservative who has questioned whether Biden’s senility is grounds to invoke the 25th Amendment and if his involvement in his son’s overseas business dealings constitutes an impeachable offense, I can genuinely say I am thankful that a Democrat with Biden’s moral clarity and friendship for our Jewish allies won that 2020 primary. To those Democrats cheering on chaos in the GOP primary in the hopes that they get to run against the weakest candidate come 2024, I urge you to be careful what you wish for, because he just might become president.