Joe Biden’s Legacy Will Be the Genocide in Gaza
Kamala Harris need not suffer the same fate.
It is official: Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee for President in 2024. He pulled out of the race at the eleventh hour less than four months ahead of the general election.
Although the June presidential debate was the turning point for most liberals and Democrat party elites, the reality is that Biden was already a greatly weakened candidate by the time we got to the debate: his coalition was already extremely fractured due to Gaza. The debate was the final nail in his reelection campaign’s proverbial coffin.
As an activist and someone heavily involved in politics, I was not surprised at all and had predicted that he would be out of the race by the end of July. He was no longer a viable candidate. I began telling friends and family that he would not be the nominee on the ballot back in November 2023, once Gaza had been effectively destroyed due to his disastrous imperialist foreign policy. There was no coming back from genocide — morally or at the polls.
It was clear: the Democratic voter base was not willing to support a President who enables and arms genocide.
At the beginning of this year, both the Uncommitted Movement and Abandon Biden campaign did the important work of demonstrating how much support Biden had lost during the primary season. While the June debate was the last straw, Biden not being on the ballot this November was a massive effort of many people, namely Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, young, Brown, Black, and non- and anti-Zionist Jewish Americans who were horrified by the genocide in Gaza and who organized within our communities to demonstrate how much support Biden lost as a result of the genocide in Gaza.
Within the last 36 hours, there has been an outpouring of gratitude and thanks to Biden for his service to the country over the last five decades, with many claiming he is a “good man,” “great leader,” and “patriot” — among other accolades.
Joe Biden is not a good man. Good men do not fund and enable genocides.
Biden’s internalized racism and bias towards Palestinians led to a genocide that the United States armed, funded, and gave diplomatic cover to for more than ten months now. The Lancet recently estimated that more than 186,000 Palestinians in Gaza are dead as a result of the bombings, snipers, starvation, and the destruction of Gaza and all critical infrastructure.
Please realize that telling your Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim friends and colleagues that Joe Biden was “a great President” or is “a good man” is offensive to us. It lets us know exactly how little you value our lives, our people, and what happens to our communities.
The genocide in Gaza will be Joe Biden’s legacy. And that is how history will remember him.
Looking ahead, Vice President Kamala Harris is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for President. She can win against Trump, but she must chart a markedly different path than Biden.
Harris’s platform must be centered on policies for both people of color (Black and Brown people and other minority communities), young people, and the working class. These are the people she needs and they need to have a reason to turn out to the polls. And the only way to do that is to motivate and inspire them — not try to scare them.
We already know who will be voting for Trump — mostly White voters who voted for him in the previous two election cycles. Harris needs people of color.
And the votes of those communities of color must be earned through policies that promise them a better life and acknowledge their struggle in the current economy. And those communities of color care about Gaza.
Additionally, much of the core Harris base of voters has been heavily organizing and advocating for Gaza and Palestinian human rights. Not only are there new grassroots organizations like Uncommitted and Abandon Biden in place for this upcoming election, people are activated and public opinion has shifted so much on Palestine and Israel in the last 10 months, that it would be certain failure for the Harris campaign if they use Biden’s playbook. Harris has to pivot her policy on Gaza, specifically, in order to win key segments of the coalition required to win in critical swing states.
As it was with Biden, the fate of Kamala Harris is in her own hands. She can’t make the same disastrous policy decisions as Biden that weakened him so much as a candidate, and she must chart a different path to win the votes she must get to become the first woman President of the United States.
