Vice President Harris is to hold a rally with her running mate in Philadelphia this evening. She has not yet revealed her selection. Today is the day. It has come down to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
My idea of hell is to be chained in Plato’s Cave — the one Socrates conjures in Book VII of The Republic — next to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Chained next to Walz, I have no choice but to listen to him comment endlessly on the shadows cast on the wall of the cave by the fire behind us.
We mistake the shadows for reality, but I doubt everything Walz has to say. There must be a better world somewhere. I want out of the cave without even knowing that the real world lies behind us and beyond the cave. He is a blowhard and a buffoon. Somebody get me out of here.
Along with Shapiro, Walz has somehow landed on the short shortlist of Harris’s possible running mates. What does Walz have going for him? He has a terrible record as governor in the shadow world of Minnesota. He pretends to be an ordinary guy, but he has gone down the line promoting every article of the new progressive orthodoxy. In the cave of Walz’s Minnesota, madness rules.
The madness is of course deeply embedded at the Star Tribune, where publisher Steve Grove has taken up since leaving the Walz administration. It has reached such a pitch that the Star Tribune has gifted us Walz’s hot dish recipe. As the Valley Girls used to say, gag me with a spoon. Or gag me with the Star Tribune.
Shapiro is a popular governor of a key state — the Keystone State. He might even help Harris win it. He might give Jewish Democrats beyond Pennsylvania — say, in Michigan — an excuse to vote for Harris without a guilty conscience.
Shapiro’s past reveals an attachment to Israel, he has supported Israel in the current war, and so on, but he appears to be willing to suppress his record in deference to Harris and the new progressive orthodoxy. If he is the kind of man who gives politics a bad name, that does not distinguish him from Walz. No, what distinguishes him from Walz is his religion and ethnicity. His father is a Jew. His mother is a Jew. He is a Jew.
I find it difficult to believe that Harris will go with Walz when she announces her selection later today. Whether or not she selects Shapiro, the anti-Semitism that has driven the internal Democratic campaign against him is something to behold. It’s not just Columbia University. It’s not just the University of Pennsylvania, for that matter. It has burrowed deep within the heart of the Democratic Party, where it is now hiding in plain sight.
