Uncommitted Movement Welcomes Biden’s Decision to Step Aside Hoping Harris Will Change Course on Gaza

AMY GOODMAN: On her first full day of campaigning, Vice President Kamala Harris secured the backing of enough Democratic delegates to win the party’s presidential nomination. The Democratic Party has quickly coalesced around Harris following President Biden’s stunning announcement Sunday that he’s dropping out of his reelection bid. The Democratic National Convention begins in Chicago in four weeks, but the Democratic National Committee is moving ahead with a virtual roll call vote to lock in Harris as the party’s nominee by August 7th.

On Monday, Kamala Harris picked up some major endorsements, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and every Democratic governor, including some who were seen as potential rivals to Harris, including Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Harris has tapped former Attorney General Eric Holder to vet potential running mates.

Since Sunday afternoon, Harris has raised over $100 million, including a record $81 million in the first 24 hours of her campaign. On Monday, Harris addressed campaign staffers in Wilmington.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as United States senator, I was the elected attorney general, as I’ve mentioned, of California. Before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.

AMY GOODMAN: While the Democrats are quickly moving forward on nominating Kamala Harris, there are still voices in the party calling for an open convention in Chicago to pick the party’s nominee. Democratic Congressmember Rashida Tlaib of Michigan said in a statement, quote, “I support a transparent democratic process at an open convention next month, and hope there is a fair vote on the resolutions at the DNC that calls for an arms embargo to stop the Israeli government’s war crimes,” unquote.

Harris is heading to campaign in Milwaukee today. She’s declined to preside over the Senate Wednesday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint session of Congress. She’ll be in Indianapolis.

We’re joined now by Waleed Shahid, Democratic strategist, adviser to the “uncommitted” campaign, previously spokesperson for Justice Democrats and former senior adviser for the campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. If you could start off, Waleed, by just responding to these historic events that took place this weekend, with President Biden suffering from COVID, not to mention the low poll ratings, an enormous pressure from within his party, announcing he’s stepping aside and endorsing Kamala Harris to be president?

WALEED SHAHID: So, since February, the uncommitted movement has been saying that President Biden’s disastrous policy on Gaza was disqualifying enough for him to be the Democratic nominee because the policy had fractured the Democratic Party. This was on top of growing concerns amongst the party’s electorate, the party’s base, about Biden’s positions on the economy, inflation, cost of living, and his age. And so, that coalition had been fracturing for months preceding the debate performance, and that coalition wasn’t really there to back the president once he had a disastrous debate performance.

And so, for a long time now, the uncommitted movement, particularly in states like Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, our allies in places like Georgia, have been saying that they’ve been waiting to see President Biden change course on Gaza. That hasn’t really come. And so, many of our communities in swing states have been saying that, you know, yesterday — or, this past week, they breathed a sigh of relief that President Biden was no longer the nominee, and they’re hoping that Kamala Harris says “not another bomb,” turns the page on Biden’s disastrous policy on Gaza and shapes a new course on Middle East policy.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The rapid backing of Kamala Harris by the Democratic establishment, it reminds me to some degree of what happened in 2020, when over a weekend, in the midst of the primary, with Bernie Sanders gaining momentum, that suddenly the Democratic establishment united behind Biden.

WALEED SHAHID: Yeah, I mean, the role of the vice president is to take the role of the president when the president is incapacitated. We’re in uncharted waters here, I guess. Maybe 1968 is the last time that this happened.

But Vice President Harris is set up to win the nomination. My understanding is, one of the reasons why President Obama has not endorsed Kamala Harris is to allow an open democratic process. But there hasn’t been candidates who have thrown their hats in the ring to challenge Harris, in part because it’s an insurmountable task to overcome the endorsements that she’s received from President Biden and numerous Democratic officials, numerous labor unions, so it seems 99% the chance that she will be the nominee.

I think delegates still want their voices heard and still want some assurances about her policy positions, particularly on issues related to the war on Gaza and whether she will change, whether she will turn the page. Her declining to sit behind Netanyahu at the congressional address in Washington on Wednesday is a step in the right direction. But I think people do want to see a policy change, or some signals of a policy change, that a Harris administration would be different than President Biden’s financial backing and arms shipments to what has been a genocide in Gaza.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mentioned the Democratic convention in ’68. I happen to have been outside that convention as one of the protesters back then in 1968. But what are the limits of being able to use that analogy for the current situation?

WALEED SHAHID: Obviously, there were American troops in Vietnam, and that played a huge role in the war being unpopular in the United States. One of the analogies is that when Vietnam began to be televised in the United States, that drove the war to be incredibly unpopular. And today, young people, especially on social media, have access to journalists in Gaza who are reporting from the ground, civilians in Gaza who are posting on Instagram and TikTok and social media about the horrific conditions of the war and showing the world that these are American weapons that are dropping on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

And so, I do think that there will be actions at the convention, inside and outside, that pressure the Democratic Party, pressure the Biden-Harris administration and the presumptive nominee, Kamala Harris, to adopt new policy and enforce both American law and international law to ensure that no weapons are being dropped indiscriminately on civilians in any war, but particularly this one, because voicing opposition to this war should be a Democratic principle, should be a principle of the Democratic Party, but has been really crushed over the the last few months, and that dissent has been increasingly criminalized both inside the party and outside the party.

And so, we are hoping to make our voices heard as an uncommitted movement and as an uncommitted delegation inside the convention, outside the convention. People can go to our website, UncommittedMovement.com, to learn about those mobilizations happening around the Democratic National Convention. But we are in this fight, not just for the next few months, but the next few years, to shape a Democratic Party that treats Israelis and Palestinians as equal human beings who are deserving of the same human rights and civil rights.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Waleed, what about the Republicans? When I was covering a protest against the police killing in two separate instances of Black men in Milwaukee during and right before the convention, a Milwaukee artist came up to me and said, “Where is the protest?” He said, “It’s only us local Milwaukee residents who are engaging in small protests. I hear about big protests planned for Chicago. What about here? What about against Trump?” Your thoughts?

WALEED SHAHID: I think lots of people in this movement feel that because it’s the current administration and the current Democratic Party that’s in power, that they feel like it’s their duty to pressure the people who are currently in power. There are almost no voices in the uncommitted movement that believe Donald Trump would be or J.D. Vance would be better on Palestinian human rights or on policy toward — on the Israel-Palestine question. I think most people see the Democratic Party as their vehicle to enact change on this issue and want to bring pressure to have that party to align with the majority of its voters, who believe that there should be a permanent ceasefire and not a blank check to the IDF or to Netanyahu. And so, I think that people are using their voices in the party they belong to. The uncommitted movement is a movement of Democrats.

And so, we are making clear that we think that Biden and the White House’s disastrous policy on Gaza makes it harder for them to defeat Trump. In fact, having a campaign based on democracy, having a campaign fighting far-right authoritarianism, while sending bombs to one of the world’s biggest far-right authoritarians in Netanyahu, who is now visiting Washington, D.C., makes a mockery of our party’s claim to be fighting on the right side of history, fighting on the behalf of democracy. And we want to see that party change course.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you for being with us, Waleed Shahid, Democratic strategist, adviser to the uncommitted campaign, previously spokesperson for Justice Democrats and former senior adviser for the campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman. Final question, as we talk about current congressmembers and senators. Bernie Sanders has yet to endorse Kamala Harris, but he said, actually, that he will. Your thoughts on him holding back? And do you believe it has to do with Gaza?

WALEED SHAHID: My understanding is, one of the reasons why Bernie stuck with Biden for so long was because Bernie and Biden were negotiating what Biden’s economic agenda would be for the 2024 election, and I think he wants — Bernie Sanders wants those same assurances on what Kamala Harris’s economic agenda would be for the 2024 election. And Bernie has said very publicly that he believes if the referendum — if the November election is a referendum on progressive economics versus billionaire economics, that the Democrats would win. And I think he’s waiting for that phone call.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Waleed Shahid, thanks so much for being here.

Next up, we’re going to speak with a former Harris campaign worker who resigned from the Biden administration over U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Stay with us.