Posted on 09/24/2013 4:07:31 AM PDT by darrellmaurina
WASHINGTON (JTA) – On a Saturday night following Shabbat, Nick Muzin arrayed on his dining room table what would turn out to be the winning strategy to elect the first black Republican to Congress from South Carolina in more than a century.
The next night at the same table in his Charleston, S.C., home, Muzin hosted his weekly Talmud class. Associates say the duality typifies Muzin, the 37-year-old Orthodox Jewish dynamo now leading the effort by House Republicans to expand the party’s appeal following Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama last November.
The ascension of Tim Scott from the South Carolina statehouse to the U.S. House of Representatives — and last December to the U.S. Senate — is relatively well known.
First elected to the House in 2010 as a leader of the Tea Party, Scott won reelection last November before being tapped just a few weeks later by Gov. Nikki Haley to fill the seat vacated by retiring Sen. Jim DeMint. Scott’s quick ascendance, the rarity of his being a black Republican and his Tea Party stature has earned him national attention.
Less well known is the role of Muzin, the Montreal-born doctor, lawyer and Jewish scholar who has been instrumental in paving Scott’s way. Muzin, who is a naturalized American, was a policy adviser on Scott’s 2010 campaign and until December was his chief of staff.
(Excerpt) Read more at jta.org ...
Political cooperation between black Republicans and Orthodox Jewish Republicans to support Israel and Tea Party conservatism is not exactly everyday news.
I can't agree with everything Muzin says in this article, but things like this are encouraging:
“In Muzin’s case, his political trajectory baffles even some of his friends. In 2000 he rallied for the Gore-Lieberman ticket, but in 2004 he told the Yale Daily News that encounters with liberals at Yale had driven him rightward. ‘I find that the student body here is ultra-liberal and extremely intolerant,’ Muzin, then vice president of Yale’s conservative Federalist Society, told the campus paper.”
When people are moving in the right direction, I'd rather focus on places where we agree than rather than some places where we disagree.
Good article. Thanks for posting.
It should be. They are natural political allies.
The DOP is our natural enemy, set on destroying us for our own good (”Mean paternalism, making all their mistakes for them”), so naturally, we should be allies.
Thanks darrellmaurina.
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