Waiting for Biden to speak |
| | Protests erupt in violence on Wednesday at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. (KCAL/KCBS) |
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What, if anything, should Joe Biden say about America's student protests?
Unrest cascading across US university campuses presents the president with dilemmas encompassing his own political interests, his role as the figurehead of the legal system and his management of US national security policy.
Demonstrations have erupted over the terrible civilian toll of Israel's war on Hamas in Gaza. They have been mostly peaceful, but in some cases — for instance at Columbia University in New York — protestors seized buildings and college authorities called in police to evict them. Police have clashed with demonstrators on campuses in Texas and California who are calling on college presidents to divest from funds or businesses that are linked to Israel. The demonstrations have now become a stage for national politicians to push their own agendas and are exposing America's deep ideological rifts and new political currents. - Biden doesn't actually have to say anything. Power is diffused in the US and dealing with protests and public order is down to city, local and state authorities in the jurisdictions concerned — at least until they get out of control. And it's hardly news that students are in revolt; campuses have long been homes for dissent. In some ways, it's part of the function of higher education.
- This may not be as big as it looks on TV. The protesters hardly represent all students; a recent Harvard University poll asking young people to rank issues by importance found "Israel/Palestine" near the bottom of a list of 16 topics (only student debt was lower ranked.) The same poll found that only 38% of young Americans are following news about the war between Israel and Hamas closely, though the proportion rises to 45% among registered voters.
- But no president can afford to look outpaced by events -- and especially not one who will ask Americans to give him a second term in a few months. Biden's rival, ex-President Donald Trump is demagoguing the protests and claiming they're a symptom of a nation descending into anarchy. (It's not).
- If Biden condemns unrest in college campuses, he could further alienate young and progressive supporters who are furious about his handling of Israel's assault in the Palestinian enclave. He badly needs these voters in the key swing states that will decide the election. At the same time however, he risks looking weak if he fails to condemn trespassing and intimidation by some extremist demonstrators who have made other students feel scared.
- There is a constitutional right to protest -- and a moral imperative for the president to speak out against antisemitism. Biden would have to walk a fine line; disturbing incidents of hate speech have been reported, however, it is not antisemitic to criticize how Israel is pursuing its nearly seven-month war in Gaza. There are many young Jewish students involved in these campus protests.
- Domestic fallout from the Gaza crisis is a classic example of how a president's political needs and his conduct of foreign policy can conflict. Biden has judged that American interests lie in defending Israel and trying to forge a ceasefire between the Israelis and Hamas. But US efforts to slow the bloodshed have so far failed, and Biden has been exposed at home as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rebuffed his attempts to temper the ferocity of Israeli operations, which have killed 34,000 people, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. If Biden can't convince the Israelis to call off a planned assault in the densely populated city of Rafah, he'll be in an even dicier spot.
The president will try to reconcile all of these political tensions in a speech he's planning about antisemitism at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, next week. He'll be hoping that when final exams end and students go home for the summer, the protests will disperse and that by the time term starts in the fall — the final weeks of America's bitter general election campaign — the worst of the war in Gaza will be over. |
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'I condemn ... I also condemn' |
Asked by reporters last week about the demonstrations, Biden said, "I condemn the antisemitic protests; that's why I've set up a program to deal with that," then added: "I also condemn those who don't understand what's going on with the Palestinians." On Sunday, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who's been critical of the civilian deaths and destruction in Gaza and has expressed openness to putting conditions on aid to the Israeli government, sought to disentangle the two issues, writes CNN's Gregory Krieg. "We should all speak out when protest crosses the line, when it becomes violent or when there's hate speech. But 95% of the young people who are on these campuses are there because they believe there is a fundamental injustice being perpetrated in Israel," Murphy said on Fox News. "We also have a history of overnight, multiday protests in this country. I don't think there's anything wrong with protecting the ability of peaceful protests to last beyond a handful of hours." Republicans have been less inclined to sort through the details. Days earlier, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the fourth-ranking House Republican and a top GOP fundraiser, called on the Biden administration to crack down on protesters, asserting that "anarchy has engulfed the (Columbia University) campus" -- conveniently tying it to another favorite GOP issue: migration. "By allowing this support for terror to continue, this wicked ideology is able to spread," Stefanik wrote. "I demand that you enforce existing law to revoke the visas and deport students here on visas who are suspended for their antisemitic actions." |
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| What Biden really wants the election to be about |
Vice President Kamala Harris assails ex-president Donald Trump on abortion policy in Florida on Wednesday |
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If the war in Gaza is still a big political issue in November, Biden will be vulnerable — especially in the battleground state of Michigan where Arab Americans are an important part of the Democratic coalition.
But as the White House parries questions about Biden's attitude toward the campus protests, his campaign is highlighting another issue that it hopes will play a much more prominent role in the election — abortion rights.
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Florida on Wednesday, hours after a new state law went into force banning abortion after six weeks — at a point when some women don't know they are pregnant.
She argued that what Democrats see as an infringement of women's rights and freedoms was all down to Trump — who built the Supreme Court majority that overturned the constitutional nationwide right to an abortion. She name-checked the former president 21 times and said that if he wins a second term, he'd bring "more bans, more suffering, less freedom."
Trump has been dancing on the head of a pin on abortion for months. He appears to both want credit for assembling a generational conservative Supreme Court majority and to be insulated from political damage over his achievement. His latest position is that it would be down to individual states to decide abortion policy. But as Harris's trip to Florida showed, that still leaves him open for being hammered over draconian measures by ultra-conservative state legislatures.
President Joe Biden got in on the act on Wednesday as well, releasing a video in which he pounced on Trump's comments on abortion in a Time magazine interview that was bristling with authoritarian rhetoric. The ex-president implied it would be up to states to decide whether to prosecute women if they had illegal abortions. "This should be a decision between a woman and her doctor, and the government should get out of peoples' lives," Biden said in a video. |
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