By Rabbi Michael Lerner
Network of Spiritual Progressives
In the days leading up to the Super Tuesday presidential primary sweepstakes, the Obama campaign has been making a special effort to reach out to Jewish voters. Representatives of the campaign have been visiting Jewish retirement homes, synagogues, and wherever else they can find a willing audience. Faced with Clinton campaigners making charges that he is not sufficiently pro-Israel, Obama himself wrote a letter to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Khalizad last week urging that the U.S. reject any resolution critiquing Israel’s cut off of fuel and food to a million residents of Gaza “that does not fully condemn the rocket assaults Hamas has been conducting on civilians in southern Israel.”
It’s a problem that won’t go away. Jewish voters are only 2 percent of the U.S. population, but they are mostly concentrated in the states with the highest number of delegate and electoral votes (New York, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois), they contribute financially to politicians disproportionately to their percentage of the voters, and they are often in key roles as opinion shapers in the communities in which they work or live.
Democratic Party appeals to the Jewish vote are not much different than the appeals that happens to other constituencies like the labor movement, the women’s movement, Latino voters, African Americans, farmers, seniors or children, or Republican pandering to the anti-immigrants, Southern whites, or Catholic and Evangelical anti-abortion voters. They are as American as apple pie, even at the times when “appealing” slides into “pandering.”