Author: News Polite

Marianne Williamson, the self-help author, is suspending her long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she said in a video address on Wednesday.

She thanked her supporters in the address, urging them to carry on her campaign’s message and run for office themselves.

“If you feel that you have a deeper appreciation of the promise of America and of your responsibility to do something about it,” Ms. Williamson said, then, she added, “this campaign will have succeeded.”

Ms. Williamson on Tuesday placed a very distant third place in Nevada’s primary election, behind President Biden — who won nearly 90 percent of the vote — and behind “none of these candidates,” a ballot option that earned less than 6 percent of the vote. She had put significant effort into campaigning in the state before the primary, but ultimately drew under 3 percent of the vote.

She also placed a very distant second in the South Carolina primary, with just over 2 percent of the vote, but she topped Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota — who had so far been Mr. Biden’s most significant rival. Mr. Phillips was not on the ballot in Nevada, and has pointed to Michigan as the next primary he intends to compete in.

It was Ms. Williamson’s second attempt at running for president. She had earned some publicity early in the Democratic debates during her first run in 2020, but dropped out of the race before the first votes were cast.

Ms. Williamson made it further this time, lasting through two official presidential primaries, as well as the unsanctioned New Hampshire primary that will award no delegates in the nominating contest.

There is one thing a president can do when Congress is an ungovernable mess, polling numbers are blinking red and crises abroad show no signs of resolving themselves. And that thing is: get out of town.

President Biden traveled to New York on Wednesday to headline three fund-raisers, where he presented himself as the last line of defense against the re-election of Donald Trump and as a dedicated — if imperfect — leader who had been around long enough to recognize the existential threat Mr. Trump poses to democratic institutions, including the presidency.

“It is dangerous for us to be engaged in this kind of politics, because it ends up dragging us all to the bottom,” Mr. Biden said during his third reception, where his voice had lowered to a whisper after a day of shaking hands, taking selfies and delivering speeches.

“It’s not that I’m so good, but you have to have someone who can beat somebody.”

Mr. Biden also pre-empted criticism of his age by joking that he was not 81, but “40 times two.” But in the drawing rooms and ballrooms of New York City, any enthusiasm for a second Biden term seemed to be mingled with fear about the thought of a second one from Mr. Trump.

“We’re here for him, and for the next four years,” said Maureen White, a Democratic donor and the host of Mr. Biden’s third reception of the day, as she stood next to the president. “But we’re also here because the consequences of not electing Joe Biden are terrifying.”

Hoping to hit all of the targets, from policy-focused activists to community health care workers who had shouldered the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden campaign organized three distinct events on Wednesday. The first was a small, climate-focused panel on the Upper West Side. The second, a large reception with Latino supporters at the Mandarin Oriental.

The third was held in an opulent residence across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Manhattanites, including the actor Robert DeNiro, attended, with risotto, chicken satay and coconut shrimp on the menu. A small Israeli flag stood among the artwork.

At each event, Mr. Biden retooled his message for the crowd, but largely focused on Mr. Trump. Several times, Mr. Biden diverged from his original point in a story about his upbringing or decades in Congress. By the end of the day, he was recounting a request to deliver Senator Strom Thurmond’s eulogy while talking about the Republican Party.

”They didn’t change their views, but there was a sense, as strange as it sounds, of civility,” Mr. Biden said, recounting his work with Mr. Thurmond and other segregationists. “The point is, we’ve changed drastically.”

At all three events, Mr. Biden largely stayed away from the war in Gaza, and though protests were barely visible from the presidential motorcade, people angry over his support for Israel’s campaign against Hamas had gathered to demonstrate at different points throughout the city.

No president enjoys protesters, and Mr. Biden was kept away from the people who came waving Palestinian flags — people who are also part of the base he needs to keep intact during an election year. Both the president and administration officials have responded to them carefully.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to New York that protesters had the right to “make sure their voices are heard in a peaceful way. We support that. The president supports that. You hear the president when — when situations do occur.”

At one point, when Mr. Biden arrived at the Mandarin Oriental to speak to a large group of Democrats, many of them affiliated with SOMOS, a Latino-led community health group, protesters had gathered 35 floors below.

A crowd that one police officer estimated at about 100 people assembled at Columbus Circle to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel during the country’s war with Hamas. Several voters who consider themselves Democrats or left-leaning and had voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 said they felt unhappy with him and were reconsidering voting at all.

Sam Skinner, a 24-year-old who lives in Queens, said that he voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but that the president’s handling of the war had made him rethink whether he’d vote for him again.

“I do think he is genuinely a dangerous person to have as president,” Mr. Skinner said of Mr. Trump, “but right now Biden seems like the danger, actively endangering peoples’ lives.

“I feel like the Biden strategy seems to be right now waiting for Trump to say something super insane and come across as chaotic,” Mr. Skinner added.

Republican-wrought chaos was indeed Mr. Biden’s main focus. According to Democratic donors, the strategy is a moneymaker: Mr. Biden’s campaign reported having about $46 million in cash on hand at the end of December, compared with $33 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign, according to filings on Wednesday to the Federal Election Commission.

At multiple points during his visit to New York, the president excoriated Mr. Trump for pressuring Republicans to abandon a deal on the border. He chastised Republicans for turning away from supporting Ukraine in its efforts to beat back a Russian invasion: “What are we doing? Stepping back?”

He turned to an often-repeated story on his decision to enter the 2020 presidential race, which came after Mr. Trump refused to condemn a group of white supremacists who held a rally that turned deadly in Charlottesville, Va. And he twice criticized Mr. Trump’s remarks after a school shooting in Iowa in January in which the former president told a crowd that it should “get over” the shooting.

“Just get over it?” Mr. Biden said, raising his voice to a yell. “What the hell is he doing?”

Earlier in the day, protests over Gaza were not detectable from the wood-paneled drawing room of Larry Linden, a philanthropist and climate activist who was the managing director of Goldman Sachs. Standing next to the president, Mr. Linden told a crowd of supporters gathered at his home on the Upper West Side that Mr. Biden “seems to excel at practically everything,” including pulling the United States out of the coronavirus pandemic, all “while maintaining your integrity, decency, faith and likability.”

(A smiling Mr. Biden gamely shook his head at the “excels at everything” part.)

In a later email, Mr. Linden praised the president for his efforts to help the environment, and said that it risked unraveling should he lose in November.

“He has done more to tackle the climate challenge than any other president, ever,” Mr. Linden wrote. “And his likely opponent has made a loud, public commitment to undermine all of those gains, placing the nation and the planet in great peril.”

Liset Cruz and Julian Roberts-Grmela contributed reporting.

“There’s no alliance more historic, nor more important, than the alliance between Black Americans and Jewish Americans.”

That’s what Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, said in 2020 during his organization’s Black-Jewish Unity Week joint event with the American Jewish Committee.

But, Morial told me this week, that alliance is “being tested” by diverging views about the Israel-Hamas war. And that divergence could influence the way both constituencies — both of which traditionally support Democrats — approach this year’s elections.

The relationship between these two communities is longstanding and hit its stride during the civil rights movement. But it hasn’t been without periods of friction.

Marc Dollinger, a professor of Jewish studies at San Francisco State University and the author of “Black Power, Jewish Politics,” sees a strong parallel between now and the period around the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel took control of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem (as well as the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula), and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced.

The next year, just four months before America’s 1968 election, a Times article headlined “Jews Troubled Over Negro Ties” described one point of contention between the two communities as “Jewish resentment over the anti-Israeli stance of Black extremists who, in the parlance of the New Left, accuse the Jewish state of ‘Zionist imperialism’ and ‘oppressions’ against the Arabs.’ ”

Dollinger describes whatever rift may be playing out now as “sort of a Chapter 2.”

Despite the fact that Jewish American sentiments don’t necessarily align with sentiments in Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state, or with the policies of Israel’s government, there are parallels between the perceived split years ago and the current cleavage: Many Black Americans, especially younger, politically engaged Black Americans, oppose Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, with particular concern about the death toll among Palestinian civilians.

Many Jewish Americans support Israel’s right to conduct the war and American support for Israel’s war effort in order to eliminate the threat posed by Hamas — and some feel disappointed or even betrayed that many Black people seem to have more sympathy for the Palestinian perspective than the Israeli perspective.

The issues involved feel irreconcilable, because many of those engaged in the debate believe that their positions represent the moral high ground. And nuanced views are sometimes characterized as weak. But there has to be room for nuance.

I believe Hamas is a terrorist organization committed to the eradication of Israel, that its Oct. 7 attack against Israel was ghastly, and that all the hostages taken in the attack must be returned.

At the same time, I believe the carnage in Gaza — thousands of civilian deaths, including thousands of children — is unjustified and unacceptable, even in war. Relief agencies continue to warn of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and as the International Court of Justice ruled last month, Israel must “take all measures within its power” to avoid violations of the international Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

On those points, I adhere to a fundamental humanism. As the Guardian columnist Naomi Klein wrote in October, the progressive response to this war should be “rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.”

It is the absence of these values that Ruth Messinger, a past president of the American Jewish World Service, finds frustrating: an inability, she says, of people to “hold two contradictory ideas at the same time” when considering the war in Gaza, the insistence on an all-or-nothing framing of the conflict on both sides.

When we spoke, Messinger told me that within the Jewish community, when she says she’s a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, but that the way it is defending itself “means death for Gazans and is,” therefore, “bad for the future of Israel and will contribute to the rise of antisemitism,” she is often met with the question: “How can you say all those things that disagree with each other?”

It’s because the conflict is complicated. And people who insist on rendering it in simplistic terms do so to advance an argument rather than to advance understanding.

And in the end, this insistence on flattening out the complexities of the issue could have a devastating effect on politics here. President Biden’s support for Israel in this war has alienated some Black voters. Withdrawing some of that support could alienate some Jewish voters. Yet he needs the strong engagement and support of both groups to win re-election.

But Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, lamented that the current tension between these two constituencies over this issue “definitely threatens our ability to work together in terms of electoral organizing.” And he believes this strain is made worse by the mounting death toll in Gaza and by the singling out of Black leaders for their positions on the war, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s backing of campaign challengers to members of the so-called Squad, a small contingent of progressive members of Congress, all of whom are of color and several of whom are Black.

When I contacted AIPAC to ask if the organization was concerned that its targeting of the Squad could cause political friction between the Black and Jewish communities, a spokesman for the group responded via email, not directly answering my question but writing instead: “We believe it is entirely consistent with progressive values to stand with the Jewish state,” and submitting that, “Our political action committee supports nearly half of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Black Caucus and Hispanic Caucus.”

One worry for Democrats is that young progressives opposed to Biden’s position on the war, including many young Black people, will refuse to vote for him on principle.

But Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who co-founded the bipartisan Congressional Caucus on Black-Jewish Relations and helped to relaunch it last year, made a point I’ve thought about quite a bit recently: “A protest vote here, or a lack of voting as a protest, is going to result in a more toxic, more painful situation” than already exists for Palestinians, if it means again electing Donald Trump.

Even if some voters find that Biden has pushed back enough against Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his prosecution of the war, they should consider that pushback would very likely be nonexistent under Trump. In that way, declining to vote for Biden as a way of expressing support for Palestinians — or at least holding out for a cease-fire — could wind up further hurting the Palestinian cause. The moral position, abstention, could become in effect an immoral act, throwing open the gate and allowing even more danger in.

It may be hard to fathom, but the prospects for the Palestinian people could get worse.