The Nation's Most Influential Obama Bros Have Taken a Surprising New Stance
(min-width: 1024px)709px,
(min-width: 768px)620px,
calc(100vw - 30px)" width="1560">Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
The Pod Save America media empire has never been animated by an all-encompassing ideology. At its core, this is a podcast hosted by four ascendant politicos from the Obama administration—speechwriters Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett, adviser Dan Pfeiffer, and spokesperson Tommy Vietor—and as such, the programming has traditionally mirrored the impulses of the Democratic establishment. But those whims change over time, and that lands the loyalty of the show in some awkward tonal territory, with the hosts supporting causes they once, to say the least, viewed extremely skeptically. For example: As a longtime listener of the podcast, I found it downright disorienting to hear the boys flirt with a staunchly more moderate stance on immigration during the 2024 election, especially in comparison to the 2020 cycle. But when you recall that party leaders were at the time also rapidly moving to the right on immigration, nobody should've been surprised. Pod Save America was founded on one principle—to be ardent warriors for the Democratic brand—superseding all personal leanings in service to the fabled big tent.
And, folks, that’s why the podcast’s newly adopted stance on Palestine is so noteworthy.
May I draw your attention to an exchange from last Tuesday's episode, which covered the ongoing starvation crisis in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli government's nightmarish mission to maintain the status quo. If you haven't been following the story, the short version is that Israel blocked supply shipments into the region earlier this year, and the resulting absence of resources has effected a socially engineered famine . (The official line of the Netanyahu government is that Hamas is stealing and hoarding the food entering Gaza, though the veracity of that position is dubious at best.) The horrific images that have emerged from the area during these hellish recent months have fomented a sea change in the dialogue around it. Pod Save America is living proof. Here is the transcript, in which both Favreau and Vietor assess the future of Democratic Party interactions with Israel:
Favreau: I don't think Democratic candidates should take money from AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] or vote to fund military support for Israel anymore. With this government? Absolutely not. And that especially includes the next Democratic nominee for president.
Vietor: Things I want to see Democrats at least calling for is cutting off military assistance for Israel. It's a rich country, by the way. They don't need our $3 billion a year. I would like to see talk of sanctioning Israeli government officials that use genocidal rhetoric or talk about ethnic cleansing openly. We should support a ceasefire resolution at the UN There has to be a total mindset change in the Democratic Party. When the war ends, we're not going back to the pre–Oct. 7 status quo. That's not where the party is, and that's not where the world is.
There's a lot to unpack here. Most importantly, this is perhaps the first time I've ever heard the Pod Save boys demand a substantial pivot from Obama-era Democratic orthodoxy. Yes, the national outrage about the hunger campaign in Gaza has reached a genuine fever pitch. When career line-toers like Amy Klobuchar are calling for relief , you know that something is up. But the levers of power still belong to the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, both of whom have received a combined $2.5 million from AIPAC. (For what it's worth, Schumer and Jeffries both released statements about the food shortage, calling for a ceasefire.) If Favreau and Vietor are serious about rescinding their support from Democrats who court donations from the Israel lobby, well, then, Pod Save America has finally found an issue that puts it at odds with the leaders of its party.
Still, the question remains: Are the hosts truly going out on a limb and breaking with the establishment, or do they foresee a more glacial shift in the status quo in which, in future elections, it will be compulsory for Democratic hopefuls to provide a more imaginative policy on Israel?
Honestly, there's a good amount of evidence for the latter. Pod Save America has a knack for staking out a position at the exact moment it sheds its taboo. (I recall the hours after Joe Biden's flatlining debate performance, when the podcast was among the first to call for the man at the top of the ticket to be replaced, an idea that went from unfeasible to undeniable in the span of just a week.) And I think the hosts' political instincts—as well as their uncanny ability to read the tea leaves and barely beat the party to where it's headed next—are on display here with Palestine as well.
After all, it is telling that the topic of Gaza rarely if ever managed to break onto Pod Save America throughout 2024, when the mass death Israel's government has inflicted on Gaza was a Biden problem. In those days, Democrats fell back on the stilted way in which they've always discussed Israel—in which any recognition of Palestinians' humanity or well-being must be subjugated by unwavering support for Israel —and trusted that the old rules would work as usual. But Donald Trump swept every swing state, and when you sift through the wreckage and search for answers, it's clear that the Democrats' hard-earned reputation for phoniness is one of the primary culprits that spun the party into disaster.
And where did that phoniness primarily manifest? The lengths to which the party defended a widely despised war that was growing steadily more grotesque and unforgivable as November drew closer. The end result left millions of Americans with the opinion that Democrats don't believe in anything, or at least anything popular. Pod Save America asserts that a more humane approach to Gaza might be the easiest way to build back that trust.
There was another telling moment, deeper in the episode, when the hosts discussed a tweet made by the official AIPAC account accusing Bernie Sanders of “blood libel.” Setting aside the inanity of accusing a Jewish senator—who lost family members in the Holocaust—of anti-Semitism, Vietor volunteered an analysis that would've been unimaginable on previous iterations of the podcast. “That rhetoric has been so overused. I think the effect has worn off,” he said. “People aren't scared anymore, and that's good.”
It is the podcast's apparatus in miniature. The show is adept at detecting a critical mass—those rare moments when verboten civil aspirations suddenly become actionable. If this is where Pod Save America has settled on Israel, then it's a good bet that millions of liberals have already followed suit. It's up to the rest of the party to meet the moment.
Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter.
