Posted on 11/05/2008 12:22:51 PM PST by I still care
If the exit polls are accurate, it looks like the Republican Jewish realignment will have to wait for yet another election.
For months, Barack Obama struggled with Jewish undecideds, and McCain supporters predicted their candidate might win close to 40 percent of Jewish voters. Instead, polls show Obama winning about 78 percent of the Jewish vote against 22 percent for McCain.
To understand why, it’s worth consulting no less a political analyst than Rush Limbaugh.
The conservative talkster recently chatted with a McCain supporter from Michigan who identified herself as Jewish. She asked Rush why her Democratic coreligionists weren’t as concerned as she about Obama’s associations with Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers.
Limbaugh responded that the Jewish vote is emotional, not rational. “Liberals and Democrats are Democrats and liberals first. That’s the only explanation for this,” said Limbaugh, adding, “And no matter what you tell them factually, they’re going to reject it because their attachment to all their things politically are actually emotional.”
Normally I'd assume that more Jews vote Democratic because their values and the policies they support are more in line with the Left’s than the Right’s. As long as there are clear splits between the parties on major issues like abortion and tax policy, isn’t it rational to vote for the party you agree with?
And yet, a new survey by the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU Wagner seems to bolster Limbaugh.
The survey, led by sociologist Steven M. Cohen, confirms that when it comes to health care, government largesse, and defense, to name three issues, “Jews’ political values incline them to support Obama.”
And yet (and here’s where Limbaugh is on to something) the survey also suggests that the Jewish affinity for the Democrats “cannot be well-explained by their differences in political values.”
In fact, “they are more liberal and more Democratic than their values would statistically predict.”
To put it another way, other cohorts with similar demographics and positions on the issues vote for Republicans in greater numbers.
So what’s with the Jews?
It’s all about “political identity,” according to Cohen and his team.
“People like to think of themselves as totally rational and driven by carefully considered values,” they write. “In fact, Jews in the upcoming election also respond to their identities. In their case, they will be reflecting their long-held, multi-generation attachment to the liberal camp in America, and to the Democratic Party.”
In other words, “my father was a Democrat, my grandfather was a Democrat….”
Or, as Limbaugh says, “emotional attachment and the Democrat Party or liberalism comes first.”
Of course, a Jewish Democrat might argue that such loyalty was earned in the course of party history. By this theory, Jews were attracted to the Democrats not just on specific issues, but thanks to Democratic attitudes that seemed more hospitable to the Jewish majority in the 20th century.
Such Jewish Democrats may well remember the “paleoconservatives” and their anti- Semitism. Or the isolationists who opposed FDR and America’s entry into World War II in the coded, and not-so-coded, language of Jew-baiting. While academics debate if FDR could have done more to halt the Shoa, bubbes and zaydas tell stories of how he surrounded himself with Jewish advisers when Jews were struggling for a toe-hold in corporate and academic life.
Fast forward to Pat Buchanan, an anti- Semite whose “cultural war” speech at the 1992 Republican convention prompted Molly Ivins to quip that it “sounded better in the original German.” Or the last few Republican presidential conventions, notable for their lack of black or brown faces. Most Jews may be white, but they still consider themselves a minority.
This obviously selective history suggests why many undecided Jews came back to Obama after getting to know Sarah Palin. According to a slew of interviews, her attacks on “elites”— educated, urban, active in academia and the media — did not go down well with Jewish voters who are disproportionately well-educated, clustered in the big cities, and over-represented in academia and the media. "Main Street." "Real America." For folks whose ancestors came through Ellis Island, Palin's rhetoric sounded like a like a political "no vacancy" sign.
As the New York Times’ conservative, and Jewish, columnist David Brooks lamented, the Republican Party “has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.”
Jewish Republicans deny the Palin factor or say that it pales next to what should be a Jewish priority: defending Israel and defeating Islamism. On these counts, they say, Republicans are the Jews’ best friends, while the Democrats, with a Jimmy Carterish wing that is hostile to Israel, are becoming increasingly bad news.
GOP optimists are also placing their chips on an actuarial solution: Indeed, an Oct. 23 analysis of Gallup polls, reported in the Forward, had Obama winning 74 percent of Jews aged 55 and over, compared to only 67 percent of those under 35.
But if Rush is right, Republicans have their work cut out for them. So long as Republicans send mixed cultural signals, and Democrats continue to pledge fealty to Israel, changing the Jewish vote will be like turning a battleship. There are powerful historical currents still pulling it in one direction.
“Great! If we had the Jews, we would have only lost 51% to
47%.”
Other than missing out on their campaign contributions, and acknowledging the shame they should feel, talk of the Jewish vote is much ado about not much.
Now the Hispanic vote on the other hand, could make a real difference.
Jewish folks don't listen to Rush Limbaugh in great numbers. Instead, they read and listen and trust the MSM. Oops. Thats about 70% of it.
The rest is that many Jewish folks are more Democrat than Jew and admit it.
This just isn't so. Folks just believed the press. The lies and all of the money worked. Many folks wanted a Black man to win as well, but mostly this has been a big fraud and Jews were sucked in just the same as everyone else.
Thats what happens when you don't have a press that is interested in finding the truth.
Thats what happens when 100,000's of votes are fraudulently cast and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.
This is a hard time, and Jewish folks are as much to blame as others, and stand to suffer more for this error. Thats the way of it.
So you are a fair weather friend, huh? Support Israel because Israel is important, not because some folks to never see the inside of a Temple or Shul don't seem to get it.
This is important. Folks almost got it.. but in the end Obama's performance in the first debate where he wasn't a drooling mouth breather was enough to decide right wing radio was just plain nuts. Its amazing what you heard if you didn't look for the truth because the press never delivered any of it.
What has got to do with not beating Obama
I repeat if he couldn’t beat Obama he was going to beat any democrat
No faithful Jew is in the least worried about Hell. It doesn't work that way for Jews. The suffering is visited on our children, unto the 10th generation. In Deuteronomy, the Blessings are few and the Curses are many. Jews fear overboard religious Christians because of the memories from Europe.
Jews were oppressed in Europe and in the Islamic countries for most of the Common Era. After a quick bout of murder and mehem, the Islamic countries came to tolerate Jews until fairly recently, the 20th Century.
In Europe, there were periods of peace and prosperity punctuated by horror.
Times when Christians and Jews got along well, only to be followed by which ever killing field you would like to name.
Jews don't trust Christians because they tend to get frustrated that Jews aren't going to be Christians ever. And they see how fickle Christians can be once they are frustrated, just like the folks in this thread who are willing to toss Israel under the bus because they are not happy how folks voted.
The most dangerous Evangelical in America for the secular crowd is Rev. John Hagee because he gets it. This is why he is trashed at every opportunity. Because Jews and Evangelicals could find common ground and he is trying to find the way. That makes him dangerous.
As this election cycle just ended. I remember what it was like. No truth from the press. Obama getting 150 Million as if by magic from "the internet", and the glorious timing of the Financial Meltdown created by Fannie May, Freddy Mac, Goldman-Sachs, ACORN, Obama and company. It is pretty much stunning it was anywhere near as close as it was.
At the beginning of this cycle, I would have told you.. I would never vote for McCain, he managed to clime out of that hole.. in an amazing way.
It just was too much.
Only if you let it be so. Are you planning to help?
Conversion to the Republican party is the only way any of those guys can be saved.
No doubt that test will be made with Rahm and Barack in charge of things ~
He had to then renounce and denounce McCain/Feingold, seek its repeal AND renounce all other uses of similarly fascistic methods that seek to control speech.
By now he should have figured out that McCain/Feingold is an abysmal failure.
If we were real smart we'd send some letters to the political powers that be where this Sullivan puke is going to end up that he's bad ju-ju not to be allowed to be in the Republican party.
Someone ought to then speak out on behalf of the party to proclaim that it's NOT policy of the Republican party to prosecute border guards for doing their jobs, and that anyone who thinks thats a good idea should stay out!
This sort of talk is why Jews run in fear from Christian buy our thing or "its the ovens for you!" straw man
Lieberman is a Democrat but he gets it. Jews can be what they want to be, folks have rights and needing saving isn't what they want.
I am sure you meant this as a joke but its just the sort of thing that just reinforces this sense of bullying that adds to the culture of fear.
I was awkward in my post.
Ever since I saw Charles Krauthammer diss Sarah, right off the bat, I knew she would have a problem with the Jews.
It’s not that I don’t think she drove the Jews away. It’s that I think she wasn’t responsible for the loss - she mobilized the base in a way that countered the loss of the Jewish vote.
someone here made mention of “cultural jews”...
would someone please explain to me what a “cultural jew” is?
The GOP abandoned the conservative principles...
In my opinion “W” was not a true conservative...he was more moderate to left...
Palin is not to blame here...If McCain did not have her on the ticket he would have lost like Mondale and won only AZ.
I put the blame on McCain not handling Palin correctly as well as running a campaign with no resonating message...
Hardly. I’m simply playing on the stupidity of those who refuse to learn anything.
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