Huge disappointment to me. I had been hoping to see it around 60%. IMO the press attack on Sarah had a lot to do with the failure to keep the number down.
As I posted on another thread, the McCain campaign did an unforgivably poor job of organizing the Jewish vote. For the 1st time since Reagan, this was here for the taking. They also had an unbelievable weapon in Joe Lieberman and even the up and coming Eric Cantor. Joe’s been much less visible in the Jewish circles than I had anticipated he would be and Eric’s been completely invisible. With Nobama’s associations, pro-Palestinian stances in the past, stance against the Iraq war (don’t forget that Saddam was paying $25K for Palestinian to blow up Jewish women and children!), and - in his only vote in which he could profess any stance in the region - vote against labelling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, McCain could have aggressively and accurately branded him as no “friend of Israel”. However, the response was disorganized and tepid, thus allowing Nobama to recast himself as a lifelong “staunch supporter of Israel”. After enough repitition - without effective countering - this canard became accepted fact. Even with covert or overt endorsements from Hamas, Hezbollah, Khaddafi, and Iran, McCain did not even effectively bother to drive home the truth.
Not effectively defining Nobama as existentially dangerous for Israel enabled the typical uber-liberal social issues that appeal (unfortunately) to the majority of American Jews to define their view of Nobama. Hopefully, this piece of rank political malpractice on the part of McCain’s campaign advisers won’t come back to haunt him (and us!).
The Jewish American population is changing. I’m Jewish and I’ve been living in the New York City area since the early 1980’s. There are no longer any predominantly Jewish neighborhoods inside the five boroughs of New York City where the Jews are either Reformed (non-religious and 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation American) or Conservative (mildly religious and 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation American). Every single Jewish neighborhood within New York City is now either Orthodox, Hasidic, or Russian and Israeli. These Jews are more religious and vote Republican. The Americanized less religious Jews are just liberals who live in the suburbs, eat bagels and lox, pay a fortune for their childrens’ tacky Bar-Mitzvahs, and don’t know anything about Judaism. If you start a conversation with them about the coming of the Messiah, they’ll look at you really funny and say “Messiah? that’s just for Christians”. Most of my relatives are like this. They also know nothing about the Israeli/Arab conflict. It’s really pathetic.
What I would say is it is time for the Jews to come home to the party that would actually try to prevent another holocaust.