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Last week, we noted that Vice President Kamala Harris nodded along while a college student accused Israel of “ethnic genocide” and told the student that her “truth should not be suppressed.”

The response to that incident from the Jewish community was intense. Politico reported that the Vice President’s office quickly moved into damage control mode:

On Thursday, Harris' senior staff contacted the influential Democratic Majority for Israel to clean up remarks she made Wednesday at George Mason University where Harris was visiting a classroom of students.

… A senior adviser to Harris also reached out to Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) the co-chair of the Bipartisan Anti‐Semitism Taskforce, a source familiar with the outreach told POLITICO.

Jonathan Tobin gets to the main point of this story in his column this week. He notes that this was not a gaffe or a slip so much as an illustration of how anti-Israel rhetoric has become acceptable on the left:

Does it matter if politicians let lies told by people they meet publicly go unanswered? That’s the question that many in the Jewish community, especially the majority who regularly vote for Democrats, are asking this week in the wake of an incident this week involving Vice President Kamala Harris.

…[W]hy, if the vice president was such a strong supporter of the Jewish state, she didn’t think it appropriate to preface her entirely superfluous defense of the right to dissent with even a hint that the views being expressed were not only wrongheaded but dangerous. That’s especially true since the protests in May the student was referring to, which took place as the Hamas terror organization was launching missiles into Israeli population centers, were largely a defense of the right of Palestinians in Gaza to kill Jews. Such sentiments, in the United States and elsewhere, led to anti-Semitic violence on campus and off.

…Harris went to the school to generate support for her party’s positions from student activists. She had no interest in a Sister Souljah moment in which she would demonstrate either her moderate chops or her pro-Israel bona fides. Speaking up for the Jewish state under those circumstances would have undermined the whole point of the appearance and alienated the very leftist base that is the cutting edge of Democratic Party activism these days. Her instincts were to stay silent because that is what she and many others in her party think are in their best political interests. It was only later when the incident blew up that she and her handlers came to a different conclusion, though it’s likely they still gauge that criticism from pro-Israel groups is a smaller price to pay than the blowback they would have gotten from party activists had she rebuked the student as she should have.

The Wall Street Journal editors are aghast:

President [Joe] Biden checked off another progressive identity box last week by nominating Saule Omarova as Comptroller of the Currency. Some Trump appointees were ridiculed for having supported the elimination of their agencies. Ms. Omarova wants to eliminate the banks she’s being appointed to regulate.

The Cornell University law school professor’s radical ideas might make even Bernie Sanders blush. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior…

How radical is she? You can’t get farther to the left than this:

Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government. In two papers, she has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate to include the price levels of “systemically important financial assets” as well as worker wages. As they like to say at the modern university, from each according to her ability, to each according to her needs.

In a recent paper, “The People’s Ledger,” she proposed that the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it,” and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.” She’d also like the US to create a central bank digital currency—as Venezuela and China are doing—to “redesign our financial system & turn Fed’s balance sheet into a true ‘People’s Ledger,’” she tweeted this summer. What could possibly go wrong?

The editors conclude:

Ms. Omarova is the wrong nominee for the wrong industry in the wrong country in the wrong century.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

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