Vice presidents usually don’t contribute much to political campaigns. A campaign is generally lucky if a Veep isn’t a net loss (and they most often are). And Gov. Tim Walz was a hell of a net loss. He had one job: bringing in working class whites. Instead he drove them and everyone else away and is currently busy making national headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Kamala wouldn’t have won the election even if the ghost of George Washington had returned to be her VP. But Walz didn’t help.
There was speculation that Gov. Josh Shapiro was going to be a likely pick. Shapiro wouldn’t have saved the day, but at least he could have gotten through a debate without looking like he had just discovered Hooked on Phonics. The selection process turned oddly ugly with Kamala, in her memoir trashing everyone, claimed that Shapiro had been measuring the Oval Office drapes.
And in his own memoir, Shapiro shares some of his own experiences with Kamala.
In Mr. Shapiro’s book, “Where We Keep the Light,” the governor is measured in describing his interactions with Ms. Harris herself. But Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, details a contentious vetting process in which Ms. Harris’s team focused intensely on his views on Israel — so much so that at one point, he wrote, he was asked if he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government, a question he found deeply offensive.
“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” wrote Mr. Shapiro, describing a last-minute question from the vetting team. He responded that the question was offensive, he wrote, and was told, “Well, we have to ask.”
Mr. Shapiro wrote that he understood that questioner was “just doing her job.” But the fact that he was asked such questions, he wrote, “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”
Much like after the arson, Shapiro is dancing around the obvious. This wasn’t just people around the VP. Kamala felt a need to slam him in her memoir. Which is just strange. But she had to go through the motions of considering him while humiliating him.
Shapiro knows what the next step here is, but the same politician who ran around in circles to deny why he was targeted by an arsonist, is not about to say it. But it does speak volumes about where the Democratic Party is now. Much like Scott Weiner, Shapiro can humiliate himself, but he won’t get picked, and life in the party will only get harder for him.
