I am fascinated by the process here, which reveals so much about the state of the Democratic Party, the rapidly increasing degradation of responsible media coverage, and ... oddly enough ... how The Jerusalem Post comes out as incredibly judicious on assessing Mamdani's comments about Jews and Palestinians.
All of this but the anti-semitism piece is pretty much encapsulated in one of the most condescending and yet simultaneously incoherent pieces I have ever read at The Hill:
Kurt Davis Jr is an insider's insider in the financial world, a member of both the Council for Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council -- on of those modern-day solons speaking for the status quo in world and national economics as well as foreign policy -- a man coming from the tradition that it doesn't matter whether a Republican or Democrat is in the White House, both parties are expected to listen to the CFR.
Of course President Trump doesn't give a rat fuck what the CFR says, and -- it appears -- that's one of the few things he actually has in common with Zohran Mamdani. That might actually explain the confused tenor of Davis's article, about which the only positive thing I can say is that he avoids trotting out the antisemitism argument.
Davis begins by painting Mamdani as -- if you can believe it -- almost a direct left-wing copy of Donald Trump:
OK I could live with that in some ways, except that the next part of essay almost appears to have been written by a different author who hasn't read the lead-in. Here, Davis treats Mamdani as a typical populist with enticing rhetoric but no ability to govern, and effectively predicts failure for him because of that:
Did you either forget or somehow miss the fact that President Trump has never provided safety, stability, or a balanced budget to the entire country, and has in fact plunged it (twice!) into nightmarish messes, while managing to win two (and nearly three) presidential elections while failing to govern?
In other words, are you so focused on CFR propaganda that you forgot to notice that your first example precludes your second?
Davis then doubles down again on his "competence in governance" theme, then pays lip service to American dissatisfaction with the existing system while warning those dissatisfied Americans that they cannot have meaningful change ... unless the billionaires approve:
The truly amazing part is that Mr Davis's illogic and paternalistic disregard for Mamdani is literally the response of the day on the Democratic side of the spectrum. If anything, many of the old-line Democratic elites are even more brutal. Take, for example, the interview that Democratic pollster and former Clinton adviser Mark Penn gave to Fox.
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If Mamdani is in fact "the most extreme major candidate ever to win such a major office" (and the only office he has actually won is a term as New York Assemblyman), this would literally mean that
(a) Mr Penn believes that Mr Mamdani is more extreme than Donald Trump (who, we recall, has actually become President twice), and
(b) that we have to wonder where exactly Mr Penn locates US Senator Bernie Sanders, who is also a Democratic Socialist and a Jew who has endorses Mr Mamdani, or even
(c) if Mr Penn actually knows enough American history to realize that the Democrats once nominated Senator George McGovern for President, way back in 1972, whose proposed economic program for the nation with its Guaranteed Annual Income went quite a few bridges past Mr Mamdani.
In other words, Mr Penn is acting less like an elite Democratic campaign adviser than some old guy put out to pasture who's mumbling into his gin tonic with the same sort of unintelligibility as James Carville these days.
Even leaving that aside, why SHOULDN'T we make this about "Mamdani versus Trump," since our old-line Democrats have not been winning against Mr Trump? Mamdani is young, photogenic, fast on his feet, and at least he FUCKING SOUNDS LIKE HE WANTS TO FIGHT.
Penn, meanwhile, is so deluded that he thinks Andrew Cuomo could come back and beat Mamdani in the general election after having been humiliated in the primary:
Sadly, Mr Penn, even the best poll that Mr Cuomo could buy for himself disagrees -- giving him only a 50-50 shot at beating Mamdani in the general election -- and you need to take this one with a very large grain of rock salt:
In case you wondered (I did) that photo of Cuomo and family does appear not to be the actual people, but their likenesses as preserved in the New York City Wax Museum of Failed and Disgraced Politicans Who Never Knew When It Was Over For Them ...
Meanwhile, headlines like this from The Independent continue to run, insisting that to support Mamdani risks alienating "top Democratic donors," who haven't been supporting him this far:
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As they originally appeared in The Hill, these quotes were about general giving to the Democratic Party, and neither quote was explicitly tied to Mamdani alone, which the first paragraph below makes clear:
Note the use of "increasingly alarmed about the state of the Democratic Party" rather than "increasingly alarmed about the Mamdani campaign."
Meanwhile, let's go back to the "Mamdani is an antisemite" talking point. Various American corporate media outlets have cherry-picked this or that quotation to either support or deny charges of antisemitism.
But only the conservative Jerusalem Post has actually done the world the service of laying it all out there in about a 98% objective manner:
The JP literally runs down, topic by topic, every comment Zohran Mamdani has made on the record about Jews and Israel. While there are a couple of asides (but only a couple), what the JP does that is refreshing is just present that material ... and stop.
The article doesn't tell you what to conclude. It just puts the material out there.
You need to read the entire article, because I cannot find one that does it better in capturing the complexities and ambiguities of that record. Here is a single example:
"He is clearly pro Palestinian rights but in [to] many in the U.S.'s eyes its not a zero sum game." THAT is an amazing observation ... so why do we have to hear it only from a commenter at the Jerusalem Post?
This is not so much a post about Zohran Mamdani himself, as it is about how the media is processing the story. I choose the word "processing" with some care, as "covering" implies straight reporting, and that is literally no longer what national media does -- left or right.
For example, as The Independent repurposing of the quotes from The Hill, an awful lot of coverage is not from any sort of active journalism, but rather the recycling of quotes from interviews that have already appeared in other sources. Each time this happens, however, a subtly different spin is put on the same words lifted for the story you happen to be reading.
If that seems a lot like the old "telephone game" you used to play in first or second grade, it's because you are paying attention.
So who is Zohran Mamdani -- and would YOU think he's, for example, antisemitic or not? How would you find out? Probably by watching the entire Mamdani - Andrew Cuomo debate, which is easily available here, but the downside is that ... it's 2 1/2 hours long.
So do you want others to pick the highlights for you that tell you what to think about him, or are you going to invest the time yourself?
If you live in NYC and plan to vote, then I'd strongly suggest watching the video.
If you are a Democrat who doesn't live in NYC, but wants to understand the implications for Mamdani/Bernie/AOC for the future of the Democratic Party, then I guess you're going to have to decide for yourself how much to watch.
Just remember: you can no longer trust corporate media to help you with this kind of decision.
