There’s good news and bad news for President Obama in a new survey of American Jewish opinion released Thursday by the Workmen’s Circle. First, the bad news: Jewish voters favor Obama over Mitt Romney by about two to one — 59% to 27%, with 14% undecided. If undecideds follow the same 2-to-1 split, the result will be 68% to 32%. This points to a 10% drop from November 2008, when Obama got 78% of the Jewish vote, according to national exit polls at the time. The good news is that it’s not November yet, and if you compare June 2012 to June 2008, Obama is doing considerably better now than he was then. At this point in 2008 Jews were backing Obama by only 62% to rival John McCain’s 31%, according to Gallup’s tracking poll. Obama dropped further in July 2008, to 61-34, before beginning a steady rise in August. In fact, a surge might already be discernible this year, if we compare the Workmen’s Circle survey with a similar survey released two months ago, April 3, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute for the Nathan Cummings Foundation.
Will the president repeat his 2008 late-summer uptick? Hard to say. Romney isn’t likely to give him the sort of gift McCain offered when he chose the spectacularly unqualified Sarah Palin as his running-mate. On the other hand, everything else in the Workmen’s Circle poll, which was conducted by Professors Steven M. Cohen and Samuel Abrams, points to a Jewish public that remains solidly liberal. Given the starkly conservative cast of the Republican campaign so far, it seems unlikely that Romney could muster more enthusiasm among Jewish voters than the more moderate McCain did in 2008. It could be that distress over Obama’s Israel policies will lower his Jewish support, but both surveys show Israel playing very little role in Jewish voters’ thinking. In fact, Cohen’s statistical analysis of respondents’ preferences and demographic characteristics indicates that people who have strong opinions about Israel tend to show a host of other tendencies that factor as strongly if not more so into their decisions.
In some ways the Workmen’s Circle survey confirms the trends that turned up in the Cummings Foundation survey in April; in other ways the WC sample is more conservative (I’m not sure why, and I won’t speculate right now). In certain ways, both polls — and a third one, the American Jewish Committee annual survey, released April 30 — look remarkably similar. Remarkable, that is, considering that they use different methodologies, draw on different population samples and reflect a variety of sponsors’ ideologies from the upscale liberal Cummings Foundation to the grittier left-liberal Workmen’s Circle to the devoutly centrist AJC.
The foreign policy chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton, is under furious attack for a speech she gave March 19, several hours after the deadly shootings at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, in which she mentioned the Toulouse attack and deaths of Palestinian youths in Gaza in the same sentence.
First Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, called the supposed analogy “inappropriate.” Then others piled on: Defense Minister Ehud Barak called her words “outrageous.” Interior Minister Eli Yishai demanded she resign. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized her more indirectly, just before a meeting with French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, who had flown to Israel for the funerals of the Toulouse victims. The Anti-Defamation League expressed “outrage.” The American Jewish Committee expressed “profound dismay.” For a more detailed critique, here’s Middle East scholar (and my old high school chum) Barry Rubin, dissecting what’s wrong.
Actually, what’s wrong is the false notion that Ashton’s words were, as Barry puts it, “a statement” issued “in response to the Toulouse shooting.” They were nothing of the sort. As I write in my latest Forward column, she was delivering the keynote address at a U.N.-E.U. conference on the challenges facing Palestinian refugee youth. She concluded with a sad litany of unrelated tragedies around the world that clearly share nothing except that young people die. Here’s the video of the speech.
How did everyone get it so wrong?
The Palestinians’ United Nations statehood ploy has drawn an array of responses around the world, from enthusiasm in Turkey to anxiety to Washington and panic in Jerusalem. And one prominent Israeli center-left politician, Isaac Herzog, proposes a counter-intuitive Israeli gambit of voting for the statehood bid—under certain conditions (as I’ll explain below).
Nothing, however, quite matches the sublime pragmatism of the American Jewish Committee. The organization, once known for its patrician reserve, sent out an e-mail fund-raising pitch today urging readers to click on a link to donate money and save Israel from imminent disaster.
With only hours left until the start of the UN debate and our critical, round-the-clock diplomatic marathon, I’m hoping you’ll help with a generous gift today.
How will a gift to AJC stop the apocalypse? Simple:
Our team here at AJC is gearing up for 70 face-to-face meetings with high-ranking diplomats in the next 10 days.
Our goal? Persuade countries to oppose Palestinian efforts to attain UN endorsement of a unilaterally declared state…
The Palestinian leadership, the letter explains,
has been charging relentlessly down this path. If they get their way, it could effectively end the peace process and instigate a new cycle of violence.
AJC is leading the effort in calling for cooler heads to prevail and for charting a course to peace.
We’re counting on you for your help. Please, don’t wait to make your gift.
A very different approach to empowering cooler heads came over the weekend from Isaac Herzog, a leader of the Israel Labor Party’s centrist wing. Writing on CNN.com’s Global Public Square blog , the former senior cabinet minister (in the Sharon, Olmert and Netanyahu governments, until Labor quit last January) offered the following proposal:
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