Is Gaza becoming Joe Biden’s Vietnam? | Will Bunch Newsletter

My first, albeit vague, political memory is as a 4-year-old, coming in from outside and seeing my mom crying because President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. I have a stronger memory of where I was on the anniversary date of Nov. 22, 2013 (driving my son home from college) because I remember thinking: Now I finally know what 50 years feels like. Tomorrow, I finally learn what 60 years feels like — and again ask why we still don’t know what really happened in Dallas.

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The protest chant is etched in the brain of anyone who grew up during the tumultuous times of 1967-68, when campus unrest over America’s growing involvement in the Vietnam War was the cutting edge of the turmoil that resulted in assassinations, riots, and a new politics of “law and order.” Across college campuses and on marches from the Pentagon to the Oakland Army Induction Center, they yelled: “Hey, hey, LBJ — how many kids did you kill today?”

Flash forward 55 years, and once again America’s college campuses are hotbeds of unrest, and their parents just don’t understand. Idealistic young people who still believe in what their teachers taught them about peace, and not the grown-ups’ cynical realpolitik, have turned against a Democratic president ... again. Today, protesters in the streets of Washington and New York are chanting, “Biden, Biden, you can’t hide — we charge you with genocide!”

The reality is that long after I’m gone, historians will still be debating whether Israel’s retaliatory war — responding to Hamas’ bloody Oct. 7 terror attack leaving more than 1,200 Israelis dead — that has killed as many as 13,000 Palestinians can be called “a genocide,” and whether President Joe Biden’s efforts worsened the war or stopped it from widening.

But this much is already clear: Biden’s strong verbal support for Israel and his October “bear hug” of that nation’s controversial far-right leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has accelerated an already worrisome trend less than a year before the nation votes on his reelection. Voters under age 35 — who played a critical and arguably decisive role in his narrow swing-state victories in 2020 — are abandoning the 46th president in droves, and the human catastrophe in Gaza is a key reason.

A new shock poll released Sunday by NBC News found a whopping 70% of likely voters in that 18-34 age bracket disapprove of Biden’s handling of the Middle East conflict. That’s contributed strongly to a plunge in Biden’s overall approval rating — just 40%, the lowest ever recorded by NBC ― and to the survey giving Donald Trump a narrow, albeit within the margin of error, lead over Biden if the 2024 election were held today.

Luckily for the Delawarean who celebrated his 81st birthday on Monday, the election is not being held today. But his campaign has a lot of work to do in order to win back young voters, or even 40-year-old millennial Democrat Meg Furey of liberal oasis Austin, Texas, who flatly told NBC: “I do not support his support of Israel.”

The Austin region’s most famous native son, Lyndon Baines Johnson, surely could have commiserated. Like Biden, LBJ was a veteran senator and a vice president who entered the Oval Office with an ambitious domestic agenda (and, in a can-do era with big Democratic majorities, Johnson got most of his 1965-66 program passed). But for the 36th president, his rapid escalation of an inscrutable war in Vietnam turned off young voters — many of whom had been enthusiastic about LBJ’s young, assassinated predecessor, John F. Kennedy.

Yes, in some ways it might be a bit much to compare Vietnam to the current crisis in Gaza. The U.S. topped out at sending more than 500,000 troops to Southeast Asia, while no American ground forces have been dispatched to this corner of the Middle East. Protesters in the 1960s opposed the draft, or were horrified by neighbors coming home in body bags. Those things aren’t happening today. But I’d argue that education is the common bond in shaping two generations of peace activists.

As I wrote in my 2022 book After the Ivory Tower Falls, the flood of post-World War II college students were sold on the notion that higher education creates better citizens, as kids flocked to study the humanities and social sciences. But knowledge only heightened awareness of the hypocrisy of American militarism in Vietnam. Today, history seems to be repeating as students ask why a professed democracy occupies the West Bank, with a repressive grip on Gaza.

Hence, the return of that much-talked about 1960s’ phenomenon: the Generation Gap. Back then, it was World War II vets who couldn’t understand why their kids were opposing the U.S. government. Today, boomers raised to see Israel more as the antidote to the Holocaust than as a colonizer, are often aghast at kids today on our college campuses.

Michael Roth — a 1970s’ student protester at Wesleyan University who’s now its president, has seen things from both sides. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, he wrote he continues to look for the hope in student protest. “Student protesters and those complaining about them actually have something fundamental in common,” he wrote. “They agree that college should be a time of possibilities as one learns to think for oneself in the company of others. They share the notion that being a student is ideally about learning freedom.”

I agree with the sentiment. The 1960s’ students were proved right on Vietnam, and protesters demanding a ceasefire are right on Gaza, if all hostages are also freed. But what a political bind for Biden, as 1968 parallels pile up — some of them weird (a Robert F. Kennedy on the ballot, a Democratic convention in Chicago that might draw antiwar protests) and some of them meaningful.

In 1968, a lot of young voters — angered not just by the war but the police riot at that Chicago confab — couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the eventual Democrat, LBJ’s vice president Hubert H. Humphrey. Some voted for a third-party candidate like the Black Panther radical Eldridge Cleaver. That played a key role in Humphrey’s razor-thin loss to “law and order” Republican Richard Nixon, who prolonged the war while another 20,000 U.S. troops died, called college students “bums” on the eve of the Kent State massacre, and prosecuted the Chicago 7 — all before resigning in disgrace.

Nixon was the worst nightmare of all those protest kids, and yet he seems like Snow White in contrast to the 2024 risk posed by Donald Trump, who would cozy up with Israel’s far-right extremists, crush free speech on college campuses, and call up troops against protesters on the road to autocracy. Biden is a savvy politician and a survivor, and he has 11 months to summon those skills and listen to the voices of America’s youth — or follow the tortured path trod by LBJ.

Question: Aaron Nola back with the Phillies. Your thoughts. Or, Why is Trump considered young at 77? — Via Sy Snyder (@PoliticsPA) on X/Twitter

Answer: Sy, I’m as baffled about the second thing as everyone else. On the first, a) I’m so grateful for a non-politics question, and b) I am very much of two minds about the future of the Phillies and the likelihood that Nola will be a Philadelphia lifer with his new, seven-year, $172 million contract. My head totally understands why the team saw the Louisiana native (and anti-vaxxer) as their best option, given his 200-innings-a-year durability that protects a fragile bullpen. But my heart is dreading the next fifth inning meltdown when Nola surrenders back-to-back-to-back homers. The Phillies may be insane in repeating the same things year after year and expecting different results, but ask me again this time next year.

Those of you who weighed in on last week’s question — has Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s strong support of Israel and refusal to call for a ceasefire changed your opinion of him? — were fairly unanimous in voicing disappointment, if not contempt, for a Democrat who is bucking the prevailing pro-peace sentiment of the party’s base. Joe Quinlan wrote that he had a Fetterman yard sign, campaigned for him and even donated $100 in 2022, but “now we’re angered and disgusted by Fetterman’s defense of apartheid Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and the Palestinian people.” Added Bridget Gawinowicz: “That I am disappointed is an understatement. As a leftist, my politics are rooted so deeply in the humanity and safety of everyone.” So ... good luck in 2028, dude.

This week’s question: Universities across America — many strapped for cash — are cutting back or downgrading offerings in the humanities and social sciences (literature, philosophy, foreign languages, etc.) while boosting science and technology. Is the purpose of higher education to prepare young people for a job, or to mold better citizens? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

It’s considered the ultimate truism in American pop culture today: Nothing is more powerful than Taylor Swift. Just ask the bevy of ex-boyfriends who’ve been sliced and diced by the Pennsylvania-born queen of pop in at least 21 songs. Even her current romance with Jason Kelce’s also-football-playing brother has repainted the macho world of the NFL in a Swiftian bright pink. In the middle of her massive, worldwide Eras Tour, it seemed like nothing could possibly derail the Taylor train — until the night she met greenhouse-gas pollution.

In Brazil’s iconic beachside city of Rio de Janeiro, Taylor Swift was defeated, at least for one night, by climate change.

I know what you’re already thinking: Isn’t it always hot in Rio? Not like this. Last week, at the peak of an ongoing heat wave in South America, the heat index in the city topped out at 137 degrees, the highest ever recorded. And this is spring in the continent; summer is still a month away. Climate experts blame the killer combination of manmade global warming and the El Niño weather pattern that has turned the South Pacific into a hot tub. “We have never seen anything like it,” said hydrologist Javier Tomasella, as some regions in South America’s most populous nation burn in wildfires, while others dry up in “desertification.” This happened as the world’s average temperature exceeded normal by 2-degrees Celsius — a key danger signal for climatologists — for the first time ever.

Swift and her fans had certainly never seen anything like the sauna that awaited them in Rio’s massive Nilton Santos Olympic Stadium on Friday night. Watchers said Swift looked faint at one point, and it’s estimated that as many as 1,000 fans passed out. The singer also joined her fans in a chant of “Water!” — an apparent plea to concert officials who’d inexplicably barred fans from bringing their own bottles. Ana Clara Benevides Machado, who’d traveled 880 miles to see Swift’s first-ever concert in Brazil, had a fatal heart attack while Swift was performing.

The woman’s death, and a forecast of more unbearable heat, led a heartbroken Swift to do the unthinkable in a letter she penned from her dressing room on Saturday: She postponed the second show. (It was moved to Monday, with the ripple effect of dashing hopes she’d appear in Kansas City at the Eagles-Chiefs showdown.) “The safety and well being of my fans, fellow performers, and crew has to and always will come first,” she wrote on Instagram.

It was the right call, but I’d love to see more. As noted in this space recently when Swift advocated for voter registration, probably no one — not Biden, not Trump — is paid more attention right now than this 33-year-old singer. She could truly use her platform to make her fans safer by calling for more forceful action on climate change. Global warming may have won on Saturday night, but I would never bet against Taylor Swift in the long run.

Two issues never go away: Donald Trump’s corruption and immigration. Those worlds collided in the fall of 2019 during the drama of House hearings into whether to impeach the 45th president over his efforts to bully Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine into probing alleged corruption involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Many of the key witnesses against Trump — including Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill — were immigrants or children of immigrants who cited their coming-to-America stories as reasons for standing up to corruption, in defense of the democracy that brought them here. I wrote: “The fact that in the current president of the United States and caretaker of the American Experiment, Donald Trump, these first- and second-generation patriots saw a reflection of the kind of corruption and abuses of absolute power that their parents once fled has added a layer of poignancy to impeachment that few saw coming.” Check out the rest from Nov. 21, 2019: “Impeachment’s hidden messages about immigration and what it means to be American.”

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