On Campus and in Gaza, Chaos Threatens Biden’s Campaign
WASHINGTON—The time had come to take a stand, and so President Biden gripped both sides of his lectern and made an urgent vow to the marbled atrium filled with Holocaust survivors and their descendants.
“People are already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror,” he said, speaking seven months to the day since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. “It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas that took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten, nor have you. And we will not forget.”
Biden’s speech to the annual Holocaust remembrance ceremony at the U.S. Capitol came at a fraught moment for his foreign policy and political hopes alike. This week, Israeli troops moved into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, seemingly crossing what Biden had previously called a red line. Cease-fire talks in Cairo were on a knife’s edge, with Hamas claiming to have accepted truce terms Israel called intolerable. Anti-Israel demonstrations continued to convulse dozens of campuses, leading to police crackdowns and canceled commencement ceremonies.
Against this backdrop, the stakes for Biden’s speech went beyond the fate of a distant conflict. The war and the protests have sharply divided Democrats between pro-Palestinian progressives and the pro-Israel establishment, and the president’s slow and equivocal response has inflamed both sides. Images of hate and disorder have undermined Biden’s claim to be a unifying, values-driven leader who could restore order to a chaotic nation and world. Many Democrats privately worry that the college conflagrations have exacerbated the unpopular incumbent’s existing political weaknesses and pose a grave danger to his re-election hopes.
“My biggest concern is that Republicans are going to run a message of law and order, the border, cities, law enforcement, and now the protests,” a pro-Israel Democratic lawmaker said, contending that that message would be appealing to independent, moderate and suburban voters concerned about safety and stability. “Especially given his age, showing resolve and strength is so important. Once you start equivocating, you look weak.”
No protests disturbed Biden’s Tuesday speech, in which he drew a direct if implicit line connecting the conditions that led to Hitler’s murder of six million Jews and the hateful displays that have marked many of the current protests, which Biden called “a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world.”
“Vicious propaganda on social media. Jews forced to hide kippahs under baseball caps, tuck Jewish stars into their shirts. On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class. Antisemitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state,” he said. “Too many people denying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and Oct. 7.…It’s absolutely despicable, and it must stop.”
It was Biden’s most forceful denunciation yet of the excesses of the protests, which have led to more than 2,000 arrests on more than 40 different campuses from coast to coast, according to the Associated Press. Organized in part by groups that have praised Hamas and view Israel as illegitimate, their ranks have swelled with students, faculty and outside activists who see the protesters’ struggle as part of a broader progressive campaign. Though there has been little violence, some protesters have occupied and vandalized buildings and public spaces.
A few miles from where Biden spoke, the bronze statue of George Washington on the central quad of the university that bears his name remained surrounded by a student encampment, a kaffiyeh wrapped around its head and the word “GENOCIDAL” scrawled in red on the statue’s base.
The protests are broadly unpopular, according to polls. A YouGov survey for The Economist conducted last week found just 28% of Americans supported the demonstrations, while 47% opposed them and the rest didn’t have an opinion. But pluralities of under-45 respondents (40%) and Democrats (46%) supported the protests, putting the president’s party and an important segment of his base somewhat at odds with the population as a whole.
Large majorities across demographics support the protest crackdowns: Less than a quarter of voters across the age groups and parties said colleges’ responses had been “too harsh” in the YouGov poll. A separate survey by Morning Consult found 76% wanted police to “protect campuses from violence.”
Some Biden allies think the protests represent only a small, unrepresentative fringe, and have been blown out of proportion by Republicans seeking to amplify images of disorder. Surveys have found that Israel ranks low on most voters’ list of concerns, including young voters’. A Generation Lab survey of college students published by Axios found large majorities opposed disruptive protest tactics and just 12% blamed Biden for the situation in Gaza, though more students supported than opposed the protests overall.
“The lizard brain of the modern Republican party is that they gain power based on chaos, urban riots, protests and crime,” said Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. But 2024 isn’t 1968, he said, and people are realizing that the reality on the ground is far different than the dire picture the GOP would like to paint. He pointed to the modest increase in Biden’s recent polling to argue that the president’s approach is working. “I know they’re going to try to make this case that with Biden we’ve seen a rise in chaos and uncertainty, but I think he can counter by saying he made the country far better and he’s been a successful president, which is true.”
Still, some Democrats are concerned that the idea of a world and nation falling apart while the president seems powerless to stop it or not fully in control is believable to many voters and plays directly into the hands of Biden’s opponent, former President Donald Trump, who has always emphasized strength and domination above all. Confronted in a recent Time magazine interview with the criticism that his approach smacks of authoritarianism, Trump replied, “I think a lot of people like it.”
Despite spending most days on criminal trial in a Manhattan courtroom, Trump has continued to campaign on a message of law and order and has criticized Biden for not responding more forcefully to the protests. He has compared the situation to the 2017 alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., calling that “a little peanut” compared with “the kind of hate that you have here” on campuses. During that two-day demonstration, originally intended to protest the removal of Confederate statues, some participants chanted “Jews will not replace us!” and a woman was later killed when a car rammed into a group of counterdemonstrators. Trump was harshly criticized when he refused to take sides in response, declaring, “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Though Democrats reject the comparison, there are arguable parallels: a demonstration on a controversial topic that featured stark expressions of antisemitism that might not have been shared by all participants, in response to which a president seemed reluctant to fully condemn those he thought of as his ideological allies.
Biden, who has said Charlottesville inspired him to run for president, has always made a fundamentally moral case against his predecessor and has vowed to defend democracy and freedom against authoritarianism and bigotry at home and abroad. The question is whether voters will view him as the candidate of moral clarity in light of his reluctance to wade into the current convulsion.
“The veneer of civilization is paper-thin,” Biden said on Tuesday, the marble hall echoing with his amplified voice. “We are its guardians. We must never rest.”
Write to Molly Ball at [email protected]