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Rep. Tulsi Gabbard delivers a campaign speech during the Iowa State Fair on August 9, 2019. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Tulsi Gabbard Socialist

Tulsi Gabbard Socialist

Zac Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at , where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. Before coming in 2014, he edited TP Ideas, the section of Think Progress dedicated to the ideas that shape our political world.

Gabbard Quits Democrats In Blistering Critique With Strong 2a Component

Gabbard's decision to leave, announced on March 19, has been a long time in the making. He consistently averaged 1 to 2 percent in national polls and performed poorly in primaries; his candidacy served largely as a single-issue protest against American military adventurism rather than a serious bid for the presidency. Her highlight, a devastating attack on California Sen. Kamala Harris' record as a prosecutor in a CNN debate in July, did little to do her any good. So on Thursday, March 19, he came out and endorsed Joe Biden for president.

Ironically, Gabbard could be the real challenger. He is a strong communicator with an interesting resume, a veteran of the Iraq war and a member of the first Hindu Congress. But thanks to a series of choices he's made since being elected to Congress in 2012 — notably an unexplained trip to Syria to meet with the country's murderous leader Bashar al-Assad — he's managed to alienate himself from the Democratic Party leadership and base. A party. Her ongoing ties to a strange religious group called Identity Science, and her frequent clashes with the party elite during the 2020 campaign (including filing a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton) didn't help either.

The result was that Gabbard's campaign never had much of a chance: he was unable to play a significant role in the Democratic primaries, even on a single anti-war regime change issue, because of his past missteps. He stayed in the race for a long time but accomplished very little.

When Gabbard was first elected to Congress in 2012 amid a sea of ​​positive press, the Iraq War veteran looked like a sure thing for the 2020 presidential election. Nancy Pelosi called him a "rising star"; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow estimated that she was "on the fast track to becoming very famous."

Tulsi Gabbard Wrecks Dems With Powerful Anti War Debate Answers

During her first campaign, she successfully apologized for her history of anti-LGBT and anti-abortion views, positioning herself as a progressive economist and critic of the Bush-era wars in the Middle East. The latter is particularly important, as he based his anti-war argument on his personal experience of witnessing the costs of war. This made him immune to the accusations of being "soft on terrorism" that many Democrats feared, making him a strong critic of "nation-building" and "election wars."

Another prominent Hawaiian biracial politician, President Barack Obama, has endorsed his congressional bid. After his victory, Gabbard was given one of the five co-chair positions on the Democratic National Committee, as a sign of the party's confidence in him. Another rising star, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, told Vogue in 2013 that "he's one of the leading voices in the party now."

A presidential campaign shouldn't be short-lived, even in a crowded square like Democratic 2020. But the positions he's taken in Congress on foreign policy and various authoritarian leaders, especially Assad in Syria, are too much for the party to overcome.

Tulsi Gabbard Socialist

Gabbard's downfall came in an odd way: He picked a series of high-profile battles with the Obama administration over foreign policy.

Tulsi Gabbard Drops Out Of The Presidential Race, Endorses Joe Biden

In 2015, terrorism was arguably the biggest fight in American partisan politics. ISIS has just swept through northern Iraq, taking control of the country's second largest city; the obama administration launched a new war in iraq to drive them back.

Republicans blame Obama. One of the most common Republican arguments leading up to that year's midterm elections was that Obama refused to use the phrase "radical Islam," arguing that the president's commitment to political correctness prevented him from identifying the root causes of jihadist violence. : Islamic Theology.

Very few Democrats are willing to repeat the Republican argument on this front. Gabbard is an exception. In early January 2015, he began watching every cable channel he had—including Fox News—and denounced Obama's policies on terrorism. He sounded not unlike the Republican presidential candidate.

"What's so frustrating ... is that our administration refuses to recognize who our enemy is," he said in a January 2015 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "And if that doesn't happen, it will be impossible to come up with a strategy to defeat that enemy." We have to admit that it is about radical Islam."

Editorial: Bitter Hillary's Smear Of Tulsi Gabbard

The problem with this argument, according to the Obama administration and most terrorism experts, is that "radical Islam" paints too broad a brush. The term implies that jihadist militants are part of a unified ideological movement, rather than a series of separate groups that are often at war with each other. It also offends most Muslims around the world. President George W. Bush's counterterrorism team Bush refused to use it for the following reasons.

This extraordinary focus on the threat of terrorism culminated in what is now Gabbard's most famous political position: quasi-support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the dictator responsible for the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the conflict's worst atrocities.

Gabbard argues, along with a minority of foreign policy analysts, that the best way to defeat ISIS in Syria is for the US to align with the Assad regime. He argued that the US should cut funding to rebels fighting Assad, even sponsoring a bill in Congress to cut US support. In the fall of 2015, when Russia began its bombing campaign in Syria, Gabbard celebrated it as a victory against terrorism.

Tulsi Gabbard Socialist

It's bad enough that the US didn't bomb Al Qaeda/Al Nusra in Syria. But it is worrying that we are protesting the Russian bombing of these terrorists. — Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) October 1, 2015

Tulsi Gabbard's Policies: One Cheer For Her 'peace Campaign'

In fact, Russian forces are mostly targeting the Syrian rebel group as a whole, not the al-Qaeda rebel group specifically. The goal was not narrow counterterrorism, but to maintain a regime friendly to Russia, which (at the time) was losing the war.

But there is an internal logic here, which the Kremlin itself openly discussed. If you focus solely on the threat posed by jihadist elements in the Syrian opposition to the American homeland to the exclusion of moral concerns about the Assad regime, then aligning with the Syrian government and Russia makes sense.

It appears that this is how Gabbard, who once described Assad as "brutal," can support Russian intervention on his behalf — even going so far as to compare Obama unfavorably with Putin, a stance that has always been unpopular with Democrats but has become politically kryptonite as a result of Russian election interference. 2016:

Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and had to be defeated. Obama will not bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) October 1, 2015

Tulsi Gabbard In New Hampshire

In January 2017, he traveled to Syria and met privately with Assad, catching the Democratic leadership in Congress off guard. After returning to the US, he went on CNN and parroted the regime's line that there was "no difference" between the main anti-Assad rebels and ISIS. When Assad's forces used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians in April 2017, Gabbard said he was "skeptical" that Assad was responsible, aligning himself with conspiracy theorists against US intelligence and the majority of independent experts.

Nor is Assad the only foreign authoritarian Gabbard has credited with fighting terrorism. He issued a statement celebrating the "courage and great leadership of Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in adopting ... extreme Islamic ideology" - despite Sisi taking power in a coup and massacring more than 800 peaceful protesters in one day.

He also proposed a worldwide policy of US special forces raids and even expressed a willingness to authorize the torture of terror suspects if he became president. He referred to himself in an interview as a "dove" on regime change but an "eagle" on terrorism, neatly summing up his true position.

Tulsi Gabbard Socialist

This attack on Obama alienated him from the party leadership and the mainstream years before he announced his candidacy for the presidency.

Tulsi Gabbard Announces She's Leaving The Democratic Party

He tried courting the New Left — taking a risk endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the 2016 primaries — but that too failed to win him a large following. In 2017, the socialist publication Jacobin published a brutal takedown titled "Tulsi Gabbard Is Not Your Friend," focused on debunking the myth of Gabbard as an opponent of America's wars abroad.

In January 2019, the Intercept, a left-wing anti-war media outlet, published a report purportedly detailing Gabbard's ties to Hindu nationalists. Gabbard has long supported the Indian prime minister

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