POLLs show a tightening presidential race; the Jewish vote could prove decisive. And the signs suggest it won’t break as much for Barack Obama as it traditionally has for Democrats.
Start with a poll done last month for the American Jewish Committee: It gave John McCain some 30 percent of the Jewish vote, with another 13 percent “not sure” – truly striking numbers, given Jews’ historically overwhelming preference for Democrats.
Some pundits attribute this to Jewish racism, but no empirical evidence buttresses that insulting analysis. What the numbers really seem to suggest is that Obama, despite his undeniable appeal as a personality, has yet to overcome fears about where he stands on key issues of concern to a significant fraction of Jewish voters. As in the past, the burning issue is the direction of US foreign policy.
Yes, at this year’s American-Israel Public Affairs Committee convention, Obama pledged to “make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, unbreakable tomorrow – unbreakable forever.” But there are many reasons why that was not enough.
On Iran, Obama has joined in with President Bush and John McCain in declaring that he won’t let the ayatollahs acquire nuclear weapons. But then there’s his stated willingness to sit down personally with Iranian leaders without preconditions. This plainly helped him against Hillary Clinton when he was tacking left in the Democratic primaries – but now the prospect of a presidential summit with Iran’s Holocaust-denying president has raised concerns at all levels of the Jewish community.
Amplifying those fears is the fact that Obama opposed the non-binding congressional resolution labeling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, which passed the Senate by a wide margin with support from both parties. Also worrisome: Obama’s off-handed remark that the Iranian-aligned terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas have “legitimate claims” against Israel.
Lurking behind the anxiety over Obama is a more fundamental shift in US politics: the growing willingness to believe – and to state out loud – that American Jews have undue and harmful influence on our foreign policies.
These voices contend that the Israel lobby caused our country to become embroiled in the war in Iraq. They say America wouldn’t be facing the threat of Islamic terrorism but for the support for Israel forced upon us by a powerful and wealthy Jewish minority.
This thesis bears a striking resemblance to the ideas advanced by the isolationist Charles Lindbergh on the eve of World War II. In his notorious speech of Sept. 11, 1941, Lindbergh warned: “The leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”
This line of thinking, somewhat updated, has long enjoyed currency on the far right. But ideas about American Jews exercising outsized power for nefarious ends have now migrated to the left – and not merely the far left.
A key step was the publication last year of “The Israel Lobby,” a book by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Crude versions of the same thesis have been articulated by the black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan.
More significantly for this election, they’ve been echoed by Obama’s pastor of 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who has publicly honored Farrakhan at his church. Yes, Obama disassociated himself from Wright earlier this year – but only after months of hesitation, and amid unpersuasive claims to be surprised by Wright’s views.
Most important of all, many people around Obama still support at least a “soft” version of the canard. For example, Gen. Tony McPeak, his national security adviser, has been insisting that US Mideast policy is dictated and distorted by certain ethnic groups concentrated in New York and Florida – in other words, by Jews. And Zbigniew Brzezinski, another leading Obama adviser and a former top aide to President Jimmy Carter, has showered praise on the work of Walt and Mearsheimer.
It is in the light of such attitudes that we must consider the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s celebration of the fact that an Obama presidency would break the “Zionist” grip on US foreign policy.
Of course, Jackson doesn’t speak for Obama, and Obama’s campaign promptly disavowed his remarks. But Jackson’s glee may not be completely unfounded. Obama’s foreign-policy record is so slim that Jewish voters may find it impossible to separate what he really believes about Israel, Iran and other issues of burning interest, from what he finds expedient to say on the campaign trail to groups like AIPAC.
John McCain, despite his manifest deficiencies as a candidate, and his association with a Republican Party that most Jews have long regarded with suspicion, is at least a known quantity with no record of vacillation on the key issues of Jewish concern.
In view of the uncertainties surrounding Obama, his candidacy might not fare particularly well, by historical standards, among Jewish voters on Nov. 4. A large enough minority of Jews breaking to the GOP might even tip the balance for McCain in key battleground states.
Note the irony: If Jews do determine the next leader of the Free World, they’ll do it not by acting as a monolith, but instead by splitting into two large, opposing factions.
Gabriel Schoenfeld is a visiting scholar at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J.