Want to annoy a corporatist, AIPAC-purchased Democrat? If you live in Michigan, this is your lucky week. The Democratic Party’s so-called “centrists” (a misnomer, given that their views are to the right of public opinion) seem perturbed by the prospect of an Abdul El-Sayed victory in this week’s election.
Haley Stevens, who lost her primary to El-Sayed despite being flooded with cash, won headlines by endorsing El-Sayed’s Republican opponent this week. But she’s a sideshow, the kind of toxic personality who will do anything for attention. The real story lies in the other mainstream Democrats who are undermining El-Sayed. Unlike Stevens, these Democrats can’t afford to directly undermine their party’s candidate when control of the Senate is at stake. Their preferred tactic is, therefore, the racially-tinged slow bleed. With the collusion of the mainstream media, they twist El-Sayed’s words and hold him responsible for the words of others—most of which are also twisted.
Former Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz followed the playbook to a “T” on CNN. “I don’t think that El-Sayed has done enough to address the concerns that the Jewish community has about his incendiary comments,” she said. She did not specify which comments were “incendiary.”
Wasserman Schulz then addressed an anti-Israel ad produced by an outside group, saying it blamed inflation on “Jews and Israelis” and condemning El-Sayed by saying “it’s incomprehensible to me that he hasn’t forcefully condemned it and insisted that the ad come down.”
That was a double lie. El-Sayed had already condemned the ad, which didn’t mention Jews and doesn’t blame Israel for inflation; rather, it says that taxpayers are funding Israeli genocide (which is objectively true.) The far-right website Breitbart News promptly (and presumably, gleefully) reprinted Wasserman Schulz’s remarks.
(For the record, this member of the Jewish community has no concerns about El-Sayed’s rhetoric—and I certainly didn’t deputize Debbie Wasserman Schulz to speak for me.)
Then there was Nancy Pelosi’s conversation with talk show host Donny Deutsch, where he said that comments about Israel from El-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani were “concerning.”
“No, it’s more than concerning,” Pelosi answered. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong ... This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress.”
“This new person”? Either she a) can’t remember his name, b) can’t pronounce his name, or c) wanted to emphasize its supposed alienness. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t reflect well on Rep. Pelosi.
Rahm Emanuel, the longtime power broker mulling a presidential campaign, declined to openly support El-Sayed in this uncharacteristically coy exchange with Fox News:
“Look, I mean, it doesn’t matter what I do ... it matters what the Michigan voters think,” he told Fox News Digital. “And that’s what’s gonna determine this in this effort. And I support the Democrats winning the Senate.”
“So, in effect, you do hope that he wins that race for Democrats,” Fox News Digital followed.
“Yeah,” Emanuel answered.
The list of Democrats playing this game is long. The pattern’s always basically the same: First, undermine El-Sayed with false accusations and intimations of antisemitism. Then, endorse his candidacy so that you won’t be blamed if Democrats fail to win back the Senate.
Pro-Democratic consultants and media commentators are doing the same thing. Some, like Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, have taken it too far—even for their own in-groups. Tanden’s online presence has progressed from annoying, to destructive, to openly bigoted—as when she retweeted a post from right-wing lunatic Laura Loomer which claimed a social media star with a Muslim background was practicing “Ninja Taqiyya.” As The Intercept correctly noted, that reference was “a white nationalist meme referring to a secret Muslim plot to infiltrate Western society with their Islamic faith.”
On the other hand, Tanden is known as a prodigious fundraiser. She’s unscrupulous, but she may be shrewder than she seems.
The Intercept article has more details on these Democratic attacks, as does Perry Bacon. Writing in The New Republic, Bacon notes that this follows an Islamophobic pattern that was first established during Zohran Mamdani’s primary race against Andrew Cuomo.
Like many other people on the left, I have massive criticisms of the Democratic Party’s leadership. My favorite thing about the Democratic establishment, in fact, is that it’s dying. The election of Abdul El-Sayed would accelerate that process, which is why they’re fighting it.
But the opportunity to resist them isn’t limited to Michigan. James Talarico’s approach differs substantially from El-Sayed’s, but he also presents an opportunity to undermine the old guard. In fact, Democratic majorities in the House and Senate would be more beholden to left-populist pressure than ever before.
A note of caution is in order, however: If the Democrats do win Congress, the work will only have begun. It will take massive organizing and resistance to prevent these newly-elected Dems from following the same storyline Captain Picard followed when he was kidnapped by the Borg and became their spokesman. We’ve seen that story before, and we know how it ends.
I’ll be phone-banking for Abdul El-Sayed tonight and will drive some people to the polls tomorrow. I wish us all the best of luck.
Stevens is aptly demonstrating what establishment corporate Democrats do when the fight truly matters to everyday Americans, they throw it. Their allegiance is to their corporate PAC donors that expect them to maintain the status quo for them.