Israel Matzav

Stupid Jews sticking with Obama

“The enthusiasm factor is down,” acknowledged Betsy Sheerr, a Pennsylvania Obama supporter who expects to be among the conveners of the campaign’s Jewish leadership council in Philadelphia.

But the 2012 list of volunteer bundlers does indicate that Obama has not lost the Jewish Democratic elite who made up a significant proportion of his support in 2008.

Republican-affiliated groups like the Emergency Committee for Israel and the Republican Jewish Coalition have worked to drive a wedge between American Jews and Obama over Israel and Iran. Asked about the return of all of Obama’s 2008 top bundlers to his camp, RJC executive director Matthew Brooks said, “These people are the committed of the committed. The question is what success do these people have when they go to their Rolodex and try to get contributions?”

Alan Solow, a former chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and a major Obama fundraiser, said the would-be donors in his Rolodex are responding just fine. “I’ve made many calls to prior supporters of the president, including members of the Jewish community, and I don’t have any sense of any fall-off in support,” he said.

But Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Council for World Jewry, who hosted a campaign fundraiser attended by the president in November, said, “I think it’s a challenging time to do fundraising. In the Jewish community, it may not only be the fact that many Jews are concerned about the U.S.-Israel relationship, but also the economy. I can’t say that it wasn’t difficult getting people to contribute.”

Though lobbyists who collect donations on behalf of a candidate are required to report their activities to the Federal Elections Commission, non-lobbyist volunteer fundraisers are not. In 2008, campaigns released their own lists of their non-lobbyist volunteer fundraisers. The Obama campaign released lists of its 2012 bundlers, the most recent in early October.

With more than a year to go before the election, most of the $500,000-level bundlers from 2008 have yet to raise an equally large sum for the 2012 campaign. Peter Buttenwieser, a longtime Obama stalwart and prominent Jewish supporter in Pennsylvania, was among the campaign’s top fundraisers in 2008, but had raised under $100,000 by the end of September, when the campaign released its most recent bundling data. DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, on the other hand, had already raised more than half a million dollars for the 2012 campaign.

Missing from the latest 2012 bundler list are top-level 2008 fundraisers Solow, and billionaire DreamWorks founder David Geffen. But Solow told the Forward that he is fundraising for the campaign. A spokesperson for the Obama campaign said that Geffen is also fundraising. Geffen did not respond to a request for comment.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Campaign 2012, campaign finance, liberal Jews

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:31 PM