One particular moment from his childhood in Gaza was seared into his memory. RG: As Maram Al-Dada, a 34-year-old aviation engineer in Orlando, Florida, prepared to speak at a rally in May 2021, he couldn’t help but think of his family. This is a story on the consequences of that choice. Democrats have it in their power to set rules around outside spending in primaries but have simply chosen not to do so. That’s a fair ethical standard.īut if we allow a system to prevail that requires a candidate to make those compromises just to be considered for office, we guarantee we’ll only get compromised candidates if we allow a system where the choices are either to lose nobly or to win on the terms of multimillion-dollar Super PACs, we’re the ones who lose. As you listen to this story, consider what would have happened if Frost had made different decisions along the way, perhaps decisions that many of the listeners would have preferred he made: Would he then have been elected to Congress?Īlright, but from there, we can say: Well, it’s better not to be elected than to compromise one’s principles. I’ve heard some readers describe this story as a takedown of Max Frost, and people are entitled to read it however they want, but my own humble opinion is that that misses the broader picture. In November, Frost was elected to his first term representing Florida’s 10th Congressional District. The story centers around a young Democratic House candidate named Maxwell Alejandro Frost. And with Israel’s increasingly rightward shift, it raises questions about whether Democrats should be allowing outside spending to so fundamentally shape the process Democratic voters used to choose their candidates, and by extension, decide what kind of party they want representing them in Washington. I also wanted to put out a new version of this story because while it’s about last year’s Democratic primary, and it uses one primary campaign in particular as the vehicle to tell the story, it’s about much more than that - and is particularly relevant as we head into the next election cycle. And if you really, really liked it, go and leave a review at Apple podcasts or somewhere like that. And if you like it, or you don’t like it, email us at to let us know what you thought of this format. I wanted to do an audio version of this story, because it’s increasingly hard for people to read super long features and investigations on a phone or a laptop, and they don’t easily slot into a Kindle. (Check out our episode from January 6, titled “Israel’s Rightward Turn” for more background on that.) Mellman’s explanation, though, takes on a different flavor now with the extreme-right in power in Israel. The money behind these organizations, of course, has other reasons to oppose the wing of the Democratic party that wants higher taxes on billionaires and wealth to be redistributed downward. So he’s trying to beat the Israeli right by first beating the American left. In the story, Mark Mellman, the head of the DMFI, justifies his strategy explicitly on the basis of his pro-Israel politics, telling me that the left in the United States is too critical of Israel, and that the Israeli right uses the American left to fearmonger their way into power. What brought them all together, though, was the goal of beating progressive Democratic candidates in Democratic primaries. The story is ostensibly about the role played by an unusual coalition of big money groups: AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, a Super PAC backed by LinkedIn-billionaire Reid Hoffman, and another Super PAC funded by the now-indicted Sam bank and freed. Today we’re bringing you something a little bit different - an audio version of a recent story I wrote for The Intercept. This week on Deconstructed, host Ryan Grim revisits his reporting on how the Democratic Majority for Israel, Mainstream Democrats PAC, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent so much money on the politics of Israel that the question of Israel-Palestine now dominates Democratic primaries.
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