The Jewish dilemma for Barack Obama
By Wes Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
The
Democrats have a Jewish problem, and his name is
Barack Obama. Reluctantly, many Jews, loyal
Democrats by birth and tradition, have concluded
that he’s not The One they thought he was.
With
even greater reluctance, the White House has
concluded that their Jewish problem is real,
growing, and they better do something about it.
Mitt
Romney’s dramatic declaration Sunday in Jerusalem
that preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon
is America’s “highest national security priority”
and military force should not be excluded, and that
he regards Jerusalem as the true capital of Israel,
puts in stark relief the difference between what the
two candidates think about America’s only real ally
in the Middle East.
Mr.
Romney is willing, even eager, to give heartfelt,
emphatic, unadulterated, full-throated support for
the Jewish state in its hour of greatest peril since
the founding. Mr. Obama can’t do that because he
doesn’t “feel the love.” He sprang from a culture of
radicalism where Israel was regarded as
illegitimate, if not evil. He gives the clear
impression that he doesn’t like Jews very much.
Mr.
Obama repeats only empty, bland assurances that
everything is OK, that the friends of Israel
shouldn’t worry because the messiah from Chicago is
on the watch. U.S.-Israeli ties, he told a rally the
other day in Palm Beach, are stronger than ever.
That’s bunk, as Sen. John McCain bluntly told a
television interviewer: “Everybody knows that
relations with Israel have never been worse.”
Bland
assurances are no longer enough to satisfy betrayed
true believers; the monolithic Jewish support for
Democrats, any Democrat, is fraying around the
edges. Merely telling skeptical and suspicious
Jewish voters not to believe their own eyes and ears
is no longer effective. No one expects Mitt Romney
to win a majority of Jewish voters on Nov. 6, or
anything close to it. He doesn’t have to. If he can
peel away three or four percentage points in certain
swing states, particularly Florida and Ohio, that
would change the game.
John
McCain spent a lot of time, attention and money to
attempt this four years ago. George W. Bush made
such an attempt in 2004. Neither worked. But 2012 is
a different ball game.
Jewish voters, like others of various passions and
persuasions, have had four years to confront buyer’s
remorse. Four years of Barack Obama have taught even
slow learners to pay attention.
The
proof is that a group of the slow learners, Jewish
liberals still in love with Mr. Obama even if he
isn’t in love with them, are putting together a
campaign to answer the Republican Jewish Coalition’s
successful work to get the friends of Israel to wake
up and sniff the odor of harsh reality. This is not,
a Democratic operative told Politico, the Capitol
Hill daily, a case of Obama being “swift boated.”
Nobody is telling stories about the president. His
Jewish critics are merely laying out what everybody
who has been half-awake during the past four years
already knows.
Aaron
David Miller, who has worked for several Democratic
presidents over a quarter of a century, warns
Democrats of “turbulence ahead” in a commentary in
Foreign Policy magazine that has shaken up Jewish
assumptions. “I’ve watched a few presidents come and
go on this issue,” he writes, “and Obama really is
different. Unlike [Bill] Clinton and George W. Bush,
Obama isn’t in love with the idea of Israel. He has
a harder time making allowances for Israeli behavior
he doesn’t like. . . the president doesn’t emote on
many policy issues, with the possible exception of
health care. But on Israel, he just doesn’t buy the
‘tiny state living on the knife’s edge with the dark
past’ argument.”
Alas,
the knife’s edge is exactly where Israel lives, like
it or not, and Israel must act accordingly. Mitt
Romney, like his constituents – some Jewish, most
not, and many of them evangelical Christians –
understands that. Mr. Romney, like that
constituency, is not embarrassed to “emote” about
it. Barack Obama can’t “emote” because to him Israel
is not a natural friend and ally, bound to America
by considerations of blood, faith and circumstance,
but a nuisance. Why can’t Israel just go away?
This
is hard for Jews, who have been voting Democratic
since their grandfathers rallied to FDR and the New
Deal, to accept as the new reality. It has been
easier to pretend there’s no problem. But now there
is a problem, and it’s too big to hide with
convenient pretense.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington
Times.