At long last, the president has moved to put distance between the far Left and his party’s center in voters’ minds.
At long last, the president has moved to put distance between the far Left and his party’s center in voters’ minds.
A lmost from the moment Joe Biden distinguished himself from the field of Democratic presidential aspirants by resisting the temptation to cater to the fringe pathologies that afflict progressives cloistered enough to believe their views are popular, his critics insisted that it wasn’t enough. Biden, they said, needed to deliver a “Sister Souljah moment.”
The prescription refers to Bill Clinton’s 1992 decision to single out the rapper and activist Lisa “Sister Souljah” Williamson and criticize her for suggesting America could balance the cosmic scales by dedicating a week to killing white people. Plucking this low-hanging fruit conveyed to voters that Clinton was a “tough-on-crime” Democrat — an impression communicated in similar fashion by Clinton’s decision to take time off the trail to supervise the execution of convicted cop-killer Ricky Ray Rector. Through a strategy of addition by subtraction, Clinton increased his appeal to more voters than he repulsed with his rejection of the boutique progressivism popular among the radical chic.
Like Clinton, Biden has clearly tried on occasion to separate himself from the progressive pack by appealing more to the vast middle of the electorate than the most engaged Democratic primary voters. It didn’t satisfy those who were convinced that Biden needed to make an example of someone. For years, his constructive critics and adversaries alike beseeched him to throw his party’s fanatics overboard. Those entreaties were all ignored. At least, until this week.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if the White House condoned statements from some of the House Democratic Caucus’s most progressive members, who’d responded to Hamas’s slaughter and torture of 1,000 Israelis by drawing elaborate moral equivalencies designed to indict Israel for the murder of its own citizens. “We believe they’re wrong, we believe they’re repugnant, and we believe they’re disgraceful,” Jean-Pierre replied. “Our condemnation belongs squarely with terrorists who have brutally murdered, raped, kidnapped hundreds, hundreds of Israelis. There can be no equivocation about that. There are not two sides here. There are not two sides.”
It was as forceful a statement from the administration as we’ve yet seen from this presidency. It dovetailed with remarks the president had made earlier in the day expressing categorical support for Israel in ways that arguably exceed any of his predecessors. In an address to the nation covered on every network, Biden condemned the “act of sheer evil” perpetrated by the “bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas, whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews.” The group “offers nothing but terror and bloodshed with no regard for who pays the price,” Biden added. “Like every nation in the world, Israel has the right to respond — indeed, has the duty to respond to these vicious attacks.” The president concluded rather unequivocally: “We will make sure the Jewish and democratic state of Israel can defend itself.”
The statement constituted a rejection of every hollow platitude designed to excuse the actions of those who murder Jews for being Jews. It affirmed Israel’s legitimacy and liberality while recognizing it as a nonetheless religious state. It rejected the double standards to which Israel is held by its critics. It spurned the facile logic deployed by those who don’t want to think too deeply about how a society could produce thousands of young men who embarked on a suicide mission against women, children, and senior citizens — or celebrate the parading of the victims’ mutilated bodies through Gaza’s streets. It was clear-eyed and sober. And if anyone was confused about whom the president was separating himself from, Jean-Pierre made it explicit.
This was the Sister Souljah moment Biden and his allies have tried to avoid for so long.
“Is or is not Biden disgusted by mob violence in the service of political nihilism?” the columnist George Will asked pointedly in the white-hot summer of 2020. Will believed it was incumbent on the former vice president to convince the public that he had no soft spot for the “rioting and looting” and the left-wing ideological frameworks that justified violence. Progressives insisted otherwise. “Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment was merely one in a long train of infamous ploys,” the Nation’s Robert Borosage replied. “Biden would be wise to ignore those urging a rerun.”
This sequence of events recurred throughout the first two years of Biden’s presidency, and the outcome was always the same: The president’s handlers remained convinced that preserving the integrity of the Democratic coalition was always the greater imperative.
“So far Biden has governed from the left wing of this party but to show himself a true unifier, he needs to take a cue from Bill Clinton,” Yale University professor Steven Smith advised in 2021. “He needs a Sister Souljah moment.” Washington Post columnist Max Boot agreed, accusing Democrats of “living in a dreamland” when they dismissed voters’ concerns about rising crime rates and the education system’s subordination of students’ needs to teachers’ unions’ demands. To all this, a cacophonous chorus replied, “nah.”
University of Denver professor Seth Masket insisted that it was unlikely that “Democrats would gain anything by slamming a Black Lives Matter activist or trashing adherents of critical race theory.” Indeed, it would only signal that Democrats saw black voters as “expendable.” “The principal trouble with the claim Biden can do wonders via a little measured race-baiting,” New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore claimed, “is that it didn’t do Clinton much good in 1992.” Biden “has zero reason to gamble on separating himself rhetorically from his party.” Once again, the Left won the argument inside the White House.
But the problem presented by Biden’s intemperate left flank wouldn’t go away. Centrifugal political forces were tearing apart his ungainly coalition of suburbanites and campus radicals, columnist Jonah Golberg observed in 2022. Biden himself admitted he was overburdened by the task of keeping “everybody on the same page in my party.” But the internal frisson was not resolving itself peacefully. “Why not pick a fight?” Goldberg asked. The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes went further by calling on Biden to deliver no fewer than four Sister Souljah moments — singling out extremists on crime, education, voting reforms, and political rhetoric whom the president should criticize. But the White House was by then deaf to these appeals. It had convinced itself that voters would compartmentalize the incitement of his party’s most irascible progressives because, in the end, Biden set the tone.
Well, Biden is finally setting the tone again now. His highest priority today is not to paper over irreconcilable divisions between centrist Democrats and progressives who too often appeal to the rubric of oppressed and oppressor to excuse or explain away acts of violence. It’s to separate the latter from the former in the public’s mind, and thus preserve his party’s appeal to the vast majority of Americans whose instinct is to sympathize with Israelis. And who knows? Maybe drawing a line in the sand will convince the far left’s more pragmatic members that retaining their political influence at the cost of their egos is a modest price to pay.