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Election Night
Frontline Voices
Today on the show, we'll hear my interview with Dr. Mireille Rabais, visiting associate professor of politics at the University of Otago in New Zealand and associate professor of francophone studies, Middle East studies and women's gender and sexuality studies at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. She's the author of the new book, Hezbollah in International Law.
But first, WBAI general manager and City Hall reporter Bob Hennelly will join us with an analysis of this week’s New York primary.
That's all covered in this week’s Frontline Voices.
Less than a year after Mayor Zoran Mamdani bested veteran politician and former governor Andrew Cuomo to become mayor of New York, the rookie politician has once again upended conventional political wisdom and helped to defeat two congressional incumbents backed by the Democratic Party Beltway establishment.
In fact, in nine of the 10 primary contests where the mayor's Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, backed a challenger, that candidate prevailed.
Is it the man, a movement or the moment?
WBAI's general manager and City Hall reporter Bob Hennelly thinks it’s a bit of all three with voter angst over Gaza and ICE turbo charging voter intensity.
Hennelly sees an historical parallel between this period and the Vietnam War when widespread youth protests would sideline Lyndon Johnson, a sitting US President from seeking re-election.
Mamdani’s three victorious House of Representative picks, former City Comptroller Brad Lander, Assembly Member Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier all made pushing back against ICE and calling out the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza central to their campaigns.
The corporate news media frames Mamdani as a “kingmaker” which in a way trivializes the gravity of events like the issues driving the movement he’s helped to mobilize like the broad daylight murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration officers or deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children.
No doubt, we will also continue to see from the right wing media a conflation of being opposed to the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza and annexation of its neighbor Lebanon with anti-semitism.
This is a generation with the ability to connect the dots between a military industrial economy that continues to blow the world up and the squeeze here at home on basics on healthcare and education.
In the ‘morning after’ analysis even on MS there were pundits wringing their hands that the success of Mayor Mamdani and the DSA were the equivalent of the GOP’s Tea Party movement which set the stage for MAGA and the Trump regime.
Yet so far, judging by Mayor Mamdani's first several months in office, he appears to be delivering on his pledge to focus on affordability by keeping his commitment to priorities that transcend a particular ideology like providing free universal child care from six weeks to five years old.
What got less attention nationally primary night was the DSA’s considerable down ballot success in winning in primary contests for the state legislature where for so many years the New York Health Act, that would provide universal healthcare as a human right, has been stuck.
Nationally, this concept has been long championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at a time when polling shows a growing majority of Americans are increasingly outraged by the rising cost of healthcare.
