WOW: Josh Shapiro Backed Out of the Kamala Veepstakes at the Last Minute.
Shapiro’s chances remained high even after he faced serious allegations by a fellow Democrat of covering up harassment in his office. The sexual harassment cover-up didn’t take Shapiro out of contention, and neither did another cover-up — this one involving murder.
In 2011, 27-year-old Ellen Greenberg, a first-grade teacher, was found dead in the apartment she shared with her fiancé, Sam Goldberg. Her body was discovered on the kitchen floor with a knife in her chest and 20 stabs and slash wounds, half of which were in the back of her neck and head. Initially, Philadelphia Assistant Medical Examiner Marlon Osbourne ruled her death a homicide. However, after police publicly challenged this finding, Osbourne changed the ruling to suicide without explanation.
Related: Why Did Kamala Harris Pick Tim Walz?
In 2019, then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Shapiro supported the suicide determination when the case reached his desk—and many speculate his connection to the fiancé’s family was the reason. Shapiro, for his part, seemed to be actively campaigning for the job, going so far as to abandon his faith and principles to help make himself palatable to the progressive, antisemitic wing of the Democratic Party.
Take a look at this report from Politico (emphasis in the original):
Why not Shapiro? By contrast, Pennsylvania Gov. JOSH SHAPIRO’s team felt that his own interview with Harris did not go as well as it could have. There was “not a great feeling” coming out of it, according to a person in touch with Shapiro’s advisers. A person familiar with the selection process told our colleagues that, after their meeting on Sunday, Shapiro called Harris’ team and made clear that he was “struggling with the decision to leave his current job as governor, in order to seek the vice presidency.”
Does anyone believe that Shapiro was “struggling with the decision to leave his current job as governor”? Of course, he wasn’t. This sounds like Shapiro realized that the risk of joining the Harris ticket was too high after the terrible jobs report on Friday and the subsequent stock market crash on Monday.
In other words, he dropped out.
Question: Did Philly Mayor Ruin Shapiro’s Chances?
The video in question hit social media on Friday and was interpreted initially by some as an inadvertently posted announcement of Shapiro’s selection as running mate until the mayor’s office pushed back, claiming it was merely an expression of support. The reason reporters thought that is because the video looks like an announcement. It featured Philadelphia mayor Cherelle Parker and other locals explicitly promoting “Kamala Harris for president” and “Josh Shapiro for vice president.”
Considering that we now know Harris’s mind was not made up at the time, and that reporting indicates there was a concern with Shapiro’s ambition which a slickly produced hype video would seem to validate, the decision to make that video in the first place is mind-boggling.
Politico reported a few hours ago that, apart from the video, the Pennsylvania governor’s style already rubbed some in Harris’s orbit the wrong way:
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, another finalist, avoided the green-room circuit and instead touted Harris and his own record at a series of events throughout the state. A pro-Harris event in Philadelphia turned into a Shapiro-for-VP party.
His style was seen by at least some in Harris’ world as showboating. One senior Democrat in touch with Harris’ team called it “counterproductive.”
Heinrich reports that Shapiro had nothing to do with the Philadelphia video. If that’s the case, it’s fair to wonder whether the mayor helped tank the governor’s bid in the course of trying to do the opposite.
Noah Rothman writes that “The Walz Pick Is a Statement of Weakness:”
Beyond Walz’s presumed capacity to shore up the party’s faltering lines in the Midwest, it is also believed that the governor’s popularity among progressives in positions of authority mollifies the more rabid far-left elements in the streets. As Nate Silver wrote, the value proposition here was to “avoid news cycles about a disappointed left and Democrats’ internal squabbling over the War in Gaza.”*
This tacitly concedes the GOP’s claim that Democrats are unduly beholden to a radical faction within the party that is overrepresented in the press, on college campuses, and in online forums. This is terrain Republicans are eager to attack. Walz’s selection may foreclose on taking the campaign to the GOP’s turf, forcing them to commit finite resources to what should be safe states and triangulating their issues in the effort to pick off erstwhile Republican voters at the margins.
In much the same way Donald Trump’s running mate doubled down on the qualities already represented in Trump, Harris’s veep pick suggests that her campaign will not seek to remake the electoral map. As such, it is still playing the same defense Joe Biden spent much of the year playing until it became obvious to all that he had already lost.
Don’t get cocky.
* Well, that’s one way to phrase it. America’s Newspaper of Record not surprisingly, is much bolder in their phrasing:
Found via Ace of Spades, who in a post headlined “Tim Walz Quit the National Guard and Abandoned His Unit When They Got the Call-Up to Deploy to Iraq in 2005,” quips, “Make America Somalia Again!”