Why Some Liberals Think It's Weird For Kamala Harris To Consider Josh Shapiro For VP

I admit I'm solidly Team Walz.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is reportedly on Kamala Harris’s VP shortlist. It seems as if he’s a solid choice for a running mate: He’s governor of a must-win swing state, where he won election in 2022 by 15 points over election-denying MAGA candidate Doug Mastriano. (Sen. John Fetterman defeated Mehmet Oz by just five points.)

Some liberals had objected to Shapiro because of his hardline position on Israel. As attorney general, he joined Republican state treasurer Stacy Garrity and threatened Ben & Jerry’s when the company refused to sell its products in Israel’s West Bank settlements. (Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are themselves Jewish.) Shapiro amplified Rep. Elise Stefanik’s disingenuous, opportunistic attacks on campus protests against the Israel-Gaza war. He also compared pro-Palestinian protesters to the Klu Klux Klan.

I’m not convinced any of this is fatal to Shapiro’s chances. There’s an argument that Harris would benefit from a Jewish running mate who’s a staunch defender of Israel. Of course, Jewish Americans aren’t a monolith, and there’s a significant difference in opinion about Israel among younger and older Jews. According to a Pew Research survey, “45% of Jews under 35 have a favorable view of the Israeli government, while 53% have an unfavorable view. Jews ages 50 to 64 are the only age group in which a majority express a favorable opinion of the Israeli government (64%).”

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But there’s more …

Fellow Democrat Erin McClelland, who’s running for state treasurer in November’s election, has accused Shapiro of helping cover up a sexual harassment allegation against former aide Mike Vereb, who resigned last September.

Three weeks earlier, Shapiro’s administration had agreed to pay $295,000 to settle claims from a governor’s office employee. Vereb had allegedly made repeated sexual advances toward the employee and made gross, Clarence Thomas-level comments about her, other staff members, and a female state senator. This was 2023.

Shapiro has presented himself as a champion of sexual abuse survivors. He investigated the Catholic Church when he was attorney general. Obviously, Vereb was shown the door but female state lawmakers wanted to know how much Shapiro knew about Vereb’s reported conduct.

However, the most serious pushback against Shapiro comes from his position on public education.

About those school vouchers …

Shapiro supports taxpayer-funded private school vouchers. Yes, Shapiro is a Democrat. Conservatives predominately support school voucher programs, because they’re a pretty blatant effort to abandon public education. Vouchers plunder funds from public schools, which serve 90 percent of students, and redirect them to private schools, which have no legal obligation to accommodate all students, specifically those who are disabled or special needs.

Voucher programs are usually spun as “school choice.” Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos claimed in 2018 that she supported vouchers for “families that don't have the power, that can't decide: ‘I’m gonna move from this apartment in downtown whatever to the suburb where I think the school is gonna be better for my child’ if they don’t have that choice — and they are assigned to that school, they are stuck there. I am fighting for the parents who don't have those choices. We need all parents to have those choices.”

Of course, the math doesn’t quite math. Not everyone can “choose” to flee their struggling school. Shapiro tried to have it both ways when he told reporters at a 2022 campaign event: “I think it’s very important that we fully fund public education, and I also think it’s really important that we empower parents to put their kids in the best place for them to be able to succeed.”

The governor’s budget has significantly increased funding for public schools, but behind the scenes, he’s reportedly tried to convince Democrats to set aside public money for vouchers.

Students First, a pro-voucher special interest group, donated money to Shapiro when he was gearing up to run for attorney general. That reportedly cost him the Philadelphia teachers union’s endorsement in 2016. During the 2022 gubernatorial campaign, the Commonwealth Leaders Fund PAC stopped running anti-Shapiro ads when Shapiro tentatively embraced school vouchers.

Although a coalition of education activists has urged Harris not to pick Shapiro as her running mate, the Pennsylvania State Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, along with 50 other labor unions, have endorsed Shapiro for vice president.

This reminds me of that odd pro-voucher plot line on The West Wing. (The episode was written by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and prompted a letter from then-Senator Hillary Clinton — not about vouchers but military bases.)

James Pickens Jr. (X-Files and Grey’s Anatomy) plays the mayor of Washington, D.C., who supports a pilot school voucher program that would “pay for maybe a couple hundred kids to go to private school, out of 68,000 in the D.C. public school system.” He just wants to “help some kids get a better education.”

This surprises Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford, who you hip kids know from Get Out) because “we’re against vouchers, period. And by ‘we,’ I mean the entire Democratic Party. You’re still a Democrat, right?” Josh could be smug at times, and “at times,” I mean always. This episode aired in 2004 when Democrats weren’t even collectively aligned on abortion, guns, or gay rights. Later that year, after George W. Bush won re-election, Democrats considered “softening” their stance on abortion rights: Democratic Party strategist Donna Brazile said, “Even I have trouble explaining to my family that we are not about killing babies.” (Maybe she wasn’t very good at her job.)

The mayor later tells President Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) that even the D.C. school board president has changed her mind about vouchers. “After six years of us promising to make schools better next year, we’re ready to give vouchers a try. We’re ready to give anything a try,” he says.

Bartlet responds, “You start handing out tuition vouchers for private school, you’re sending the message that it’s time to give up on public schools.” The mayor, who’s Black, points out that neither Bartlet nor Josh have much credibility on the subject as they didn’t actually attend public school. (Pro-voucher Republicans would often ding Democrats for supporting public schools in theory while in practice sending their own kids to private schools.) He’s skeptical about investing more in D.C.’s public schools because they already “spend over 13,000 per student, that’s more than anywhere else in the country, and we don’t have a lot to show for it.”

The mayor adds, “I have a few thousand names on the waiting list for vouchers already. Go into any one of my schools, ask kids who want to go to college what they think of vouchers. They'll ask where they can sign up.”

They’ve reached an impasse so Bartlet sends for his personal aide, Charlie (Dule Hill). Charlie’s also Black and a big fan of the mayor. When the West Wing debuted in 1999, the president’s entire senior staff was white, and with the exception of Press Secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janey), they were all white men. That’s how you wind up with awkward scenes like this one.

Charlie had graduated from Roosevelt High School in D.C, but he wanted to attend Gonzaga College High School, a private Catholic college-prep school for boys. There were no shootings or metal detectors at Gonzaga, but he obviously couldn’t afford the tuition. He tells the president, “I wish they would have had [a voucher program] when I was in school.”

That convinces the president, who tells the mayor he’ll sign the bill with the voucher rider. The mayor admitted he had a few thousand names on the voucher waiting list, and this bill will only offer slots for a couple hundred students. Charlie imagines that had such a program existed when he was in school, he might’ve beaten the odds, but what if he hadn’t? And what happens to the other Charlies left behind?

Public school advocates believe that every child deserves a quality education. Yes, we can do better at delivering on that promise, but school vouchers would offer a limited number of lifeboats to a select few. The rest can drown.

I’m not so melodramatic as to think that Harris picking Shapiro for the ticket would somehow mean the end of public schools, but there’s reason to worry about the longterm implications. The school voucher proponents have a lot of money to throw around, and if there’s no downside to accepting the cash, they might soon start to see a significant return on their investment.

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