The Obama campaign has long taken a tack suggesting that those who don’t support the senator may well be racist. I’ve noted how this has manifested itself in the Jewish community. Sometimes it’s the campaign’s media surrogates who take this tack, sometimes it’s just the usual political organizations.
A week and a half ago the Baltimore Jewish Times looked at the views of Baltimore’s Orthodox community towards Senator Obama and there were two names missing from the article: Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Sen. Joseph Lieberman. What wasn’t missing was the typical “only the ignorant or racist wouldn’t support Sen. Obama comment, delivered by my “representative” State Delegate Sandy Rosenberg.
Mr. Rosenberg stirs his lemonade and chooses his words. He’s heard the bad buzz, too. It sounds like a “typical Republican smear campaign,” he says, carefully crafted to pick up on Jewish fears.
“If they could make John Kerry look like a draft dodger instead of the war hero he was,” Mr. Rosenberg says of the 2004 “Swift Boat” campaign, “imagine what they can do to Obama,” the first black presidential candidate whose middle name is Hussein, to boot.
Well no, the criticisms of Sen. Kerry did not make him look like a draft dodger. They asked whether he betrayed his comrades in arms after he returned stateside. But that’s perhaps too subtle a point.
And what about substantive criticism of Sen. Obama, here’s how the article deals with two:
A woman calls the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES to report that a local radio talk show host said there is a mention on Mr. Obama’s official Web site of “Jews and oven,” an obvious allusion to the Holocaust. [We didn’t find any.]
A member of the Orthodox community assures this reporter that one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers publicly said the hindrance to peace in the Mideast lies in New York and Miami, both cities with large Jewish populations.
As far as the first incident, this did indeed happen. Bill Levinson of Israpundit recorded a screenshot of the offending blog. The reason the reporter couldn’t find it is because the Barack Obama website took it down, but it was up.
Sen. Obama’s website allowed users to set up their own blogs on the campaign’s website. And in quite a few instances, those setting up blogs expressed vile antisemitic sentiments.When it became of these blogs, the campaign correctly deleted them quickly. But it still raises the question of why so many people who feel this way, feel that Sen. Obama is the preferred choice for president.
And the adviser who blamed the lack of peace in the Middle East on Jewish voters has a name.
Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak, seemed to identify Jewish voters when asked to name the biggest obstacles to Middle East peace. “New York City. Miami. We have a large vote…here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it,” McPeak said.
But it’s not just McPeak who was problematic among Sen. Obama’s advisers. He was advised by Robert Malley the only member of the American team at Camp David in 2000 who didn’t blame the failure of the talks on Yasser Arafat. And Zbigniew Brzezinski endorsed the opinion of Walt and Mearsheimer.
And let’s not forget that Sen. Obama said himself that he opposed the Likud. If elections are held in Israel, it might very well be that a President Obama will have to deal with PM Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud. And we know that Obama will go into such a relationship with a negative perception.
(I’d also point out that J-Street, a supposedly “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying group is funded by one Alan Solomont, who is also one of Sen. Obama’s financial supporters. J-Street believes that peace will only come when America pressures Israel to make concessions. I’d have to think that Mr. Solomont sees Sen. Obama as the candidate most likely to support this agenda.)
So instead of answering these concerns, those supporting Obama cite the “Barack is a Muslim” e-mails. (These most likely came from his opponents at the time: other Democrats.) I am informed. And my information tells me that Sen. Obama will not be as supportive of Israel as I would like. Israel is an important issue for me, though it isn’t the only one. I can’t think of any major issue where I prefer Sen. Obama’s approach to Sen McCain.
And let’s get to those two glaring omissions. Rev. Wright, who preached anti-White bigotry and antisemitism from the pulpit is an issue that ought not to go away. Rev. Wright didn’t take over a church that Sen. Obama attended. Sen. Obama sought out Rev. Wright as a way of bolstering his radical credentials. That’s not a smear. It’s a praise, written in a glowing profile of the senator appearing last year in Rolling Stone magazine.
And why is Sen. Lieberman’s ties to Sen. McCain not mentioned in the article. I don’t agree with Sen. Lieberman on domestic issues, but in foreign policy I mostly agree with him. Furthermore in a campaign supposedly about the new politics, Sen. Lieberman is Exhibit A of Sen. McCain’s cross-aisle appeal. It stands in stark contrast the partisanship displayed by Sen. Obama during his short senate tenure.
The most honest assessment from a Democratic official in the article came from former State Senator Paula Hollinger:
To Paula Hollinger, the current rhetoric in the Jewish community has a familiar ring. Mrs. Hollinger, the former veteran state senator from the 11th District, says the Orthodox register Democrat in order to vote in the primary elections. “But 99 percent of the time they vote Republican for president,” she says.
In the 11th District, for example, which includes heavily Jewish precincts in Pikesville and Owings Mills, the vote in presidential elections generally splits 50/50 Republicans to Democrats.
If Obama’s supporters want to convince more politically conservative Jews that he’s the right man, they need to explain and not just vilify.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
I am not only a lifelong Democrat but a former party activist on a very low level…precinct delegate, county committee, state platform committee, etc. Since I’m not an academic I’m not all that concerned with labels, and I’ll be voting for McCain in November, for reasons encapsulated by Elmer Davis’s remark once that “the first requirement of any society is that it win its war.”
And by the way, I’m a fervent supporter of Israel and I would be even if Israelis were Vietnamese.
I am a former Democrat who left the party in 2000 after a string of disappointments. Democrats used to be for free speech, liberty, fair play, and encouraging freedom in the rest of the world. It seems to me the Republicans now are more likely to enhance those goals. Others may disagree, and that is their right.
But I also note that there is a sad trend in many “official” Jewish papers — those sponsored by their local federations in whole or in part — to engage in gleeful and unfettered slander of the Orthodox Jews, institutions, practices and beliefs. Having been a non-Orthodox Jew for the first 29 of my 58 years, I can tell you that the supposed intolerance of the Orthodox community is largely a myth, and pales compared to the bigotry of the official American Jewish establishment (which fortunately is not especially representative of non-Orthodox Jews either, but is not bigoted toward them) toward those of us who are Orthodox.