The Backlash Against Biden Makes Perfect Sense

Voters are not supposed to let their elected officials off the hook for terrible decisions, but that is what a lot of Biden cheerleaders would like these voters to do now.

Matt Yglesias hasn’t given this one much thought:

Or consider the Muslim and Arab-American groups upset that the administration has been too supportive of Israel in its war with Hamas. That is a perfectly legitimate criticism — but at the same time, at no point in the 2020 campaign did Biden suggest he was planning to abandon America’s longstanding alliance with Israel.

So the sense of betrayal in many of these complaints seems misplaced.

If Yglesias were trying to understand why so many of these otherwise reliable Democratic voters are now saying that they will never support Biden again, he might start by acknowledging the real substance of their complaints. There have been many reports on the backlash against Biden over Gaza. None of the voters that reporters talked to about Biden’s handling of the war expected that he would cease to support Israel or that he would initiate any radical changes to U.S. policy. No one knows better than Muslim and Arab-American voters that those things weren’t going to happen, so this isn’t a case where Biden didn’t live up to someone’s unrealistic expectations.

These voters object to Biden’s entirely one-sided and unconditional backing of a devastating military campaign. They object to his lack of empathy for the Palestinian victims killed, wounded, and displaced in this war, and they object to his apparent dismissal of the death toll. In short, they object to his enabling of an Israeli government that is slaughtering innocent people by the thousands and displacing them by the millions, and they object to his outrageous refusal to support a ceasefire. Even if Yglesias can’t understand the sense of betrayal, it shouldn’t be hard to understand voters’ disgust and opposition.