On the issue of Gaza, Biden is dramatically out of touch with the voters he needs to win re-election. If he will not be moved by morality to stop his support of this war, he should be moved by vulgar self-interest. Gaza is not a distant foreign conflict: it is an urgent moral emergency for large swaths of voters. Biden will lose those voters – and may indeed lose the election – if he does not cease his support of these atrocities.
Biden has that rare opportunity in politics: to help the country, and himself, by doing the right thing. But he must do so now. Both the Palestinian people and his own election prospects are running out of time.
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The Biden campaign has long been shrugging at the president’s fading polls, turning down opportunities to put him in front of voters, and generally doing their best to portray an air of confident nonchalance.
A new dataset released by the New York Times on 13 May found that Biden was trailing in five key swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania – and suffering from disillusionment among young voters as well as Black and Latino ones.
“Drawing broad conclusions about the race based on results from one poll is a mistake,” Geoff Garin, a pollster for the Biden campaign, told the New York Times.
If that figure cannot shake you into moral recognition, consider that many of those children have endured their amputations without anesthesia, since medicine – like food – has largely been prohibited from being delivered to Gaza by Israeli authorities.
And though his White House repeatedly leaks that he is “privately” dismayed by Israel’s conduct of the war, he has done little to stop the flow of US money and guns that support it.
But these lesser-of-two-evils argument do not lessen the tax on the conscience that many anti-war Americans will feel when they consider whether to vote for Biden in spite of his support for the genocide in Gaza.
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