Another day brings more dissent within the Democratic Party ranks over its leaders' stances on the Israel-Hamas war.
More than 130 former Obama campaign staffers and political appointees sent the ex-president a letter demanding he “leverage” his influence with President Joe Biden and other elected officials to call for a ceasefire and broker the return of hostages, the Intercept reported Tuesday.
“You always called on us to be courageous in reaching our hands high to help bend the arc toward justice,” the letter says. “Today, we call on you to stand with us, to do the same.”
The anonymous signatories are part of a growing trend of hundreds of onetime campaign staffers, and current staffers, imploring elected officials—including Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders—to call for a ceasefire.
Not all the letters are critical, however: As a White House spokesperson pointed out to me today when I reached out for comment, more than 115 former officials signed a letter in support of Biden’s policy toward Israel, as first reported by CNN yesterday. And not everyone supports the public shaming of elected officials: New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait upbraided the protesting staffers, writing:
If an elected official hires you to look out for their interests, and instead you attend rallies and sign petitions labelling that elected official a moral monster, I’d say your professional credibility is very much in doubt. Indeed, that behavior indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of the job of congressional staffer.
But the letters calling for a ceasefire are simply demanding politicians live up to the ethical stances—or the “professional credibility”—they campaigned and governed on. And they might even be helping to preserve their electability among certain demographics: a new poll conducted by Marist, NPR, and PBS shows that 56 percent of Democrats—and nearly half of people under 45—think Israel’s response to the Hamas attack has been “too much.”
With Biden facing tough headwinds against former President Donald Trump going into an election year—and with presidential campaigns notoriously relying on the grueling labor of young organizers—that poll isn’t promising for the Biden campaign. As Juliana Amin, a former official on Warren’s campaign, told Vox, the letter signers are "the people who do the work that campaigns need, that wins elections, that uplift people and their platforms, and I know a lot of people who aren’t willing to do that work anymore if Democrats continue" on their current path. (Though, to be clear, voters between the ages of 18 and 29 already have some of the lowest turnout of all age brackets, accounting for just 15 percent of voters in the 2020 election, according to Gallup. But Gen Z and Millennial voters have also been important for the Democratic Party, favoring Biden over Trump by a margin of about 20 points in 2020.)
Not only that, but with Biden’s original promise of student loan relief being struck down by the Supreme Court in June, he might have a tough road ahead if he wants to win the votes of young people next November.
—Julianne McShane
