Tag Archives: obama

The Jewish Vote

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Glenn Collins explores whether Jews are more inclined to support Clinton or Obama. He finds that it’s up for grabs.

One attorney says, “I think there is going to be a split between established older voters in the Jewish community, with whom Hillary will do well, and younger and more liberal Jews who see Obama as an agent of change.” So this seems to mirror the general Democratic population.

Each candidate has the support of several Jewish politicians:

Aside from [Ed] Koch, prominent Jewish politicians supporting Mrs. Clinton include New York’s other senator, Charles E. Schumer; Senator Dianne Feinstein of California; and Representatives Gary L. Ackerman of Queens, Eliot L. Engel of the Bronx, Jerrold L. Nadler of Manhattan, Anthony D. Weiner of Queens and Brooklyn.

Among Senator Obama’s political supporters are several Jewish members of Congress: Representatives Steve Rothman of New Jersey, Adam B. Schiff of California, Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and Robert Wexler of Florida.

Me, I agree most of all with Ed Koch, who says, “I don’t speak for the Jewish community, and nobody speaks for the Jewish community. The Jews, individually, speak for themselves.”

Campaign Thoughts

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Eight years ago I was in a long-distance relationship with a grad student who lived in Atlanta. He came up north over his spring break, and we spent several days in Boston and one night on Cape Cod.

We stayed on Cape Cod on a painfully freezing Tuesday night in the middle of March. We were the only guests at our bed and breakfast. After checking into our room, we went out in search of dinner only to find the main street was dark and deserted. God knows what we were thinking, Cape Cod in the middle of the week in March. Eventually we found the Lobster Pot, a great seafood restaurant that was filled with people. It was an oasis of warmth and friendliness. We went in and had a great dinner.

When we woke up the next morning, there was a big breakfast waiting for us in the kitchen, along with a newspaper with word that Al Gore and George W. Bush had trounced their respective opponents, Bill Bradley and John McCain, in the previous day’s Super Tuesday primaries.

The next day, we were back in New Jersey and I drove C to the airport to send him off. We said our sad goodbyes at the gate.

Meanwhile, John McCain was dropping out of the race on CNN on the airport TV. He spoke outdoors, with a beautiful Arizona landscape as his backdrop.

For some reason I’ve always remembered that. It just compounded the sadness I was feeling at saying goodbye to C (with whom I broke up amicably three months later). I liked John McCain. He was a Republican, but I liked him, especially because he was running against the Dark Prince, George W. Bush, whom I loathed.

I’d been rooting for McCain to beat Bush. I’d been thrilled when, three days after Bush beat McCain in the South Carolina primary with the help of dirty tricks, McCain came back and beat Bush in the Arizona and Michigan primaries. I was working a part-time job at Barnes & Noble at the time. I watched the news of the Arizona and Michigan victories on the TV in the food court while on my dinner break, my mouth agape. Weird, the details we remember.

And then McCain lost all but the New England states on Super Tuesday, and then he dropped out, leaving Bush as the Republican nominee.

I’d always felt bad for McCain after he lost. Now, eight years later, he seems the likely Republican nominee. Even though I won’t vote for him in the fall, I feel happy for him. Not only is it an amazing comeback from last summer, but I feel like he’s getting what was denied to him eight years ago. He’ll be the second-oldest major party nominee ever (after Bob Dole), which inspires me; I hope I’m still visiting new horizons in my 70s.

Don’t get me wrong; I disagree with the man politically on most issues. But I respect and admire him more than I do any of the other GOP candidates.

So for the first time since JFK was elected almost 50 years ago, the next president will probably be a sitting U.S. senator: Obama, Clinton, or McCain. And I don’t loathe any of them.

It feels good.

First Black President

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Elizabeth Alexander in Salon.com reminds us that Toni Morrison’s anointing of Bill Clinton as “the first black president” 10 years ago never meant what people have lately taken it to mean. He didn’t get that moniker because of what he did for black people; he got it because of the way he was mistreated by the establishment.

Morrison wrote at the height of the Lewinsky scandal in the fall of 1998, when the House was considering impeachment proceedings.

African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”

P.S. Morrison endorsed Obama today.