Democrats Are Apparently Okay with Foreign Election Interference Now
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Last night, Jamaal Bowman lost his New York primary to George Latimer, in a race that if you only judged by who spent how much in it, would lead you to assume the future of Israel was at stake. AIPAC, Israel’s right-wing Likud Party’s lobbying arm, spent a staggering $14.5 million in a bid to unseat one of the least powerful Representatives in Congress, comprising a total of sixty percent of all spending in the race and making it the most expensive House primary in American history.
How exactly is that not foreign election interference?
Anyone who was even semi-conscious during the Trump years became familiar with the trope of Russia interfering in our elections. I covered that saga extensively for Paste politics and while it was clear as day that Trump has some sort of business interests rooted in Russia, the notion that Putin was controlling his every move was an MSNBC-driven fever dream that their hero Robert Mueller’s final report threw cold water on. Overnight, Rachel Maddow went from a journalist with a skill to bring local news to a national audience to MSNBC’s version of Sean Hannity, spewing conspiracy theories left and right without merit. The threat of Russia intervening in elections to help Trump kept many a Democrat up at night during those years.
Hillary Clinton, the biggest loser in the modern history of presidential politics who believes she was “right” about the “vast Russia conspiracy,” signed on to a vast Israeli Likud Party conspiracy to unseat Bowman when she endorsed George Latimer long after most of that AIPAC money had been spent. That may sound uncharitable to a stripe of Democratic fanboy, but a sprawling plan by a foreign government and their Republican allies in America to unseat a Democratic congressman took place out in the open, and the Democratic Party, who typically aggressively defends its incumbents (especially against any challenge from the left), could barely be bothered to lift a finger to help Bowman.
Sunrise Movement, a climate-focused political action organization who supported Jamaal Bowman in the primary, told Splinter that “AIPAC’s rise is the Democratic Party’s fall. The more Democratic leaders let far-right billionaires buy our elections, the more they torpedo the coalition of young people and people of color we need to defeat Donald Trump and fascism. The climate deniers and insurrectionist apologists funding AIPAC have no place in the Democratic Party.”
Democrats like Hillary Clinton waxed poetic about the grave threat outside forces present to democracy, but after last night’s election where her endorsed candidate won with AIPAC’s immense help, perhaps her main issue with Russia was that Vladimir Putin was not paying her instead.