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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12468 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Not CW as such, just that the Harris campaign keeps on giving us little nuggets of joy.

According to Josh Shapiro, she didn't reject him, he rejected her, so there! Also allegations that the vetting process for potential VP involved asking if he was an Israeli agent or something. Duelling memoirs!

I don't know if he's ticked off that she passed over him for Walz, or if he's glad to have gotten out before the disaster campaign and is just rubbing it in, or if this is just revenge for hurt feelings and maybe the way she wrote about him in her memoir of the campaign, but it feels like scores being settled.

In Mr. Shapiro’s book, “Where We Keep the Light,” the governor is measured in describing his interactions with Ms. Harris herself. But Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, details a contentious vetting process in which Ms. Harris’s team focused intensely on his views on Israel — so much so that at one point, he wrote, he was asked if he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government.

...As he tells it, he also had reservations about the vice-presidential search process from the start, and says that he ultimately decided to withdraw himself, after meeting with Ms. Harris at the end of the process. He asked to be connected with Ms. Harris to share the decision, he wrote, but says he was told “the VP would not handle bad news well and that I shouldn’t push.”

Having read the memoir, I can well believe that she would scream at her staff for daring to deliver any bad news. But this does contradict Harris' account of the selection process, where there's a distinct impression left that she thought him a bit too big for his boots (and poor Hubby yet again makes the wrong choice):

Storm had picked him up from the parking lot of an elementary school in Glover Park. At the last minute, Storm had traded her Jeep for a vehicle with tinted windows, since discretion in this process was so important to us. Josh went to get in the front seat, but Storm instructed that he needed to be in the back, so he could duck and not been seen. She thought he seemed a little disappointed by that.

When he learned she was the residence manager, he peppered her with questions about the house, from the number of bedrooms to how he might arrange to get Pennsylvania artists’ work on loan from the Smithsonian.

In our meeting he was, as always, poised, polished, and personable.

…Josh had been elected governor in 2022 and was popular in a state with nineteen electoral votes that we badly needed to win. We talked about how to handle the attacks he’d confronted on Gaza and what effect it might have on the enthusiasm we were trying to build. Big protests at the convention were a major concern. As a student, he’d written an op-ed stating that peace with Palestinians was impossible, and this decades-old article had been dragged out to smear him as “Genocide Josh.” He said he felt he’d been able to deal with critics by stating clearly that his youthful opinion had been misguided and that he was fully committed to a two-state solution. He had also publicly called Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time.”

I asked him if he understood the job of vice president. “Because if you do, you’ll be good at it and our administration will be strong.”

He peppered me with questions, trying to nail down, in detail, what role I saw for my VP. At one point, he mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision. I told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation. A vice president is not a copresident. I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership. I had to be able to completely trust the person in that role.

“Every day as president,” I said, “I’ll have ninety-nine problems, and my VP can’t be one.”

Apart from apprehensions for myself, I was also concerned for him. I thought his frustrations with the job might impact his performance in the role. And why take an effective Democratic governor out of a job he liked and was good at? But could I afford to turn my back on such a talented political athlete in such a critical state? Josh assured me he’d do everything to help me win Pennsylvania whether I chose him or not, “because this is the most important election we’ve faced.”

I had time to hash out these thoughts in a debrief with my team. Meanwhile, Storm returned Josh to the pickup location. Storm instructed the state trooper who was arranging transport on an alternate route that would avoid driving by the vice president’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue. She assumed that the press would notice official vehicles with Pennsylvania plates. She was disappointed, ten minutes later, to see those very cars on CNN, cruising right by the residence. That lack of discretion did not play well with her.

…When Kelly left, I got on a Zoom call with the selection committee and my chosen committee of advisers: Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, former Congressman Cedric Richmond, and Tony West. We reviewed what we’d heard from each of these exceptional men and weighed the pros and cons. Their concerns were how adeptly and passionately each of them would defend me. In short, who would be most loyal and effective at the job. The ambition must be for the job, not for the political future beyond.

…Doug and I went back and forth. He had known Josh longer and leaned that way.

…By the time I went to bed, I’d decided on Walz.

Seems there was just the tiniest smidgeon of non-agreement there:

“Her accounts are just blatant lies,” Mr. Shapiro told The Atlantic last year.

In his book, he acknowledged — more diplomatically — that he and Ms. Harris saw the role differently.

...When he returned home, he wrote, his teenage son observed, “It doesn’t seem like you want to do it.” Soon after, he wrote, he tried to communicate that view to Ms. Harris’s team.

This is after Harris saying she dumped him but he probably wanted it to sound like he dumped her:

My next job was to quickly contact Josh and Mark. The news had already started to leak, and they should hear this from me, not the media. Dana Remus later let me know that Josh had been trying to reach me earlier that morning. The only reason I could imagine for him calling was that he’d intuited he wouldn’t be the choice and wanted to withdraw first, so it would be seen as his decision. But nothing was said about that, and he graciously offered to introduce us in Philly.

Just imagine what we were deprived of by Trump's victory. Four glorious years of President Harris and Vice-President Shapiro elbowing each other off the stage as they tried to grab attention for "I'm doing this"/"No, I'm doing this"/"I'm the President, it's my job!"/"Yeah well don't be greedy, you're always hogging the limelight, I have a job too"/"Your job is when I say 'jump' you say 'how high' and don't forget it, Philly boy"/"See if you're still saying that in 2028, Willy's Girl!"

Man I've met Shapiro and I can't bring myself to read these obligatory political memoirs. There's something downright bizarre about an Irish lass playing Real Housewives with them.

I gritted my teeth and got the Harris book because I wanted to see her take on the campaign and if it was any different from the excuses that had been trotted out, and the explanations as to why it crashed and burned (too much to do in too little time and they were too online and it was terribly run).

Nope. Full of "it wasn't our fault, we had too much to do in too little time and it was completely horribly unfair that Trump's campaign had, like, donors and ads and shit".

Then I saw elsewhere this story about Shapiro and his new memoir coming out and what he was saying about the VP thing, and it was too good to resist. This "he said/she said" is a recurrent pattern in Harris' apologia; for instance, she puts all the blame for the Rogan fiasco on Rogan. Ditto with Shapiro, who (as per the quotes) gives a very different version of what went down. She says she decided to go with Walz because everyone on her team loved him and she subtly (for her) puts down Shapiro; he says he decided this was not the right time or right thing for him and he was the one refused. Who to believe? I don't know Shapiro well enough to judge, but I think the truth lies in the middle: Harris didn't like his very visible ambition not to be the yes-man in the corner, and Shapiro figured out that this campaign would do him no favours. So they both wanted to wash their hands of each other. I tend to believe him when he says her staff warned him off giving her any bad news (such as being the one to say 'no thanks' first) because that comes across in Harris' memoir as to how she operates.

But yeah - as a non-American, it's all free entertainment for me (as a distraction from us worrying that Trump's shenanigans will crash our economy like in 2008).

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