Israel Matzav

Obama driving Jews to ... become Republicans

It's been two years since the pamphlet pictured below was published, but apparently now it's starting to have an impact.

This past week, there was a Pew poll issued that has mainly been in the news because of its data regarding the number of Americans who believe that President Obama is a Muslim. But the poll has another piece of bad news for Obama: The number of Jews identifying as Republicans or as Independents who lean Republican has increased by 50% since President Obama took office. And that's the highest number of Jews ever identifying as Republicans (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

In a Pew Research Center report issued on Thursday and entitled “Growing Number of Americans Say Obama Is a Muslim” (tragic in its own right), there was another bit of bad news for Obama: the number of Jews who identify as Republican or as independents who lean Republican has increased by more than half since the year he was elected. At 33 percent it now stands at the highest level since the data have been kept. In 2008, the ratio of Democratic Jews to Republican Jews was far more than three to one. Now it’s less than two to one.

This is no doubt a reaction, at least in part, to the Obama administration having taken a hard rhetorical stance with Israel, while taking “special time and care on our relationship with the Muslim world,” as Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, put it in June. If that sounds like courtship, it is.

And then the article drops this bombshell.

(It should be noted that the Pew poll was taken before Obama’s bold support for the right of Muslims to build a community center and mosque a few blocks north of ground zero.)

And we can only guess by how much that 33% has increased as a result.

Could Obama be the first President since Jimmy Carter to garner less than a majority of the Jewish vote? Could he be the first President since statistics regarding the Jewish vote have been kept to lose the Jewish vote?

Wherever the truth lies, it is fair to say that it doesn’t bode well for Obama. While Jews are only 2 percent of the United States population, their influence outweighs their proportion. Furthermore, in crucial battleground states like Florida, their vote is critical. Obama won Florida by 3 percentage points in 2008. Jews represented 4 percent of the overall vote in that state.

As Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City, told Fox News in April, “I have been a supporter of President Obama and went to Florida for him, urged Jews all over the country to vote for him, saying that he would be just as good as John McCain on the security of Israel. I don’t think it’s true anymore.”

The president now has another, more visible chance to reverse this perception. On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that Israel and the Palestinians would resume peace talks in Washington early next month. The administration has to decide how heavy its hand will be in guiding these discussions and what its tone will be with the two parties — who gets the tough love and who gets the free love.

Maybe that's why Netanyahu has agreed to these ridiculous talks. If they last that long, they are scheduled to end at the beginning of the 2012 election campaign. And if they drag out longer (which is likely if they are to go anywhere), Obama will find himself choosing between his beloved 'Palestinians' and Jewish financial and electoral support for his re-election campaign.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:11 PM