Aternative blog post title: Why Jews still will vote for Obama, regardless.
I know, you have a dream, that one day American Jews will judge political candidates by the content of their character not the “D” or “R” next to their names. I told you time and again to keep in mind the ancient proveb: “Don’t get your hopes up.”
And hoping against hope, you thought NY-09 had changed everything.
But you did not consider the Rabbinic Left (via @RJCHQ)(emphasis mine):
I listened to President Obama’s rabbi call yesterday. The whole operation was managed by the Reform movement with leftist Rabbi David Saperstein acting as chairperson and droolingly thanking the President for all he had done. Rabbi David Saperstein is married to Ellen Weiss, formerly Senior Vice President for News of National Public Radio who was forced to resign after she summarily fired former NPR columnist Juan Williams for having said on the Bill O’Reilly show that he worried when he gets on an airplane and sees “people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.” (“Juan Williams: I Was Fired for Telling the Truth” ). Agudat Israel, the Orthodox rabbinic group, was included but they were at the bottom of the list so that none of their rabbis had a chance to ask a question. This is hardly a surprise since Orthodox rabbis are least likely to be in Obama’s corner. Two questions were selected, one on the economy and the other on the Middle East. There were no surprises. It was an electioneering effort by the President which was warmly received by the rabbinic left….
The Rabbinic Left rules the Reform movement, also known as the marketing wing of the Democratic Party. It’s real and it exists. This Thursday is the first day of the Jewish New Year, the time when the Rabbinic Left gets a captive audience to trumpet the latest DNC talking points.
And consider the September 2011 survey by the American Jewish Committee showing Obama beating Romney 50-32, Perry 55-25, Bachmann 59-19, Christie 53-26. As summarized by Jennifer Rubin (full survey here), who cautions that the survey may underrepresent Reform and “Just Jews”:
In sum, Obama is grossly underperforming among Jewish voters. But the dichotomy between what Jewish voters think of Obama’s performance and how they will vote remains. Jews may be moving away from their reflexive attachment to the Democratic Party, but they have hardly renounced it.
This love affair is uniquely a Reform/Just Jews movement phenomenon, as Rubin links in an update to a further breakdown of the numbers showing that the Orthodox community to be more hostile to Obama and more likely to vote against him.
So, while Obama is not doing as well yet as he did in 2008, he still is doing well. And there’s always the Jewish New Year in 2012 for the Rabbinic Left to seal the deal.
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Comments
we don’t need them all ….obama won by about 3 -4 % of the vote …if we take 5 % and swing it to our side or convince it to stay home we win …personally I think its mission acomplished already
I confess: I recognized the hilarious application of Monty Python’s bit, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.”
Thank you, Professor.
This is an intra-Jewish situation. It is real. I see no extra-Jewish factors that can affect it. I remember the Reformed and Conservative students and Rabbis at the then-Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary maligning my mentor, the great Hasidic Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. For several reasons, Jews, wrongly IMO, tend to submit to perceived prevailing power concentrations in areas and countries where they are a numerical minority even though, sometimes, an academic, professional and financial peer or majority. That tendency betrays the Hasidic preaching of inner strength, independence, resilience and ecstatic calm. A. J. Heschel embodied those qualities and through them inspired more than this admirer. The Reformed Rabbi combination is a real, intra-Jewish situation.
This weird loyalty to a Democratic Party that has long-since been hijacked by antiSemites (among other truly unAmericans) is incomprehensible to me. But it’s something I saw again while I was doing what I could for Scott Brown here in MA. I’d talk to people who truly believed that they were still a part of a Democratic Party that has long-since disappeared (arguably that never existed, but still). I chipped away at that, being in MA and all, by pointing out the difference between JFK’s (a beloved (D) here in MA) rabid anti-Communism and work against unions, his “ask not” speech, his belief in America and uniting rhetoric, and what we hear from BO, Pelosi, and Reid (this was during the peak of the healthcare debate, of course, so Pelosi and Reid were still relevant). It got people thinking. Wondering. Doubting. And voting for Brown.
Is there something similar we can do to point out how far Obama’s disgusting antiSemitism is from the Dem Party of yore? I simply can’t grasp how any Jewish person–actually any American person–can be opposed to Israel’s stance and support this failed embarrassment of a president.
I’m reading through the survey and I’m not so sure that the Synovate panel they used is necessarily reflective of actual voters. I don’t see any questions about voting history.