Election Day was not a time of rejoicing for Democrats. And Jewish Democrats weren’t spared. Jewish legislative branch totals decreased from 39 to 34.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the Tea Party wave was just too strong. Sarah Palin’s Alaska magic worked. Jewish candidates that took endorsements from the liberal, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, Goldstone fan (you choose) J Street got creamed. The results were clearly a rejection of Obama’s dangerous foreign policy, including his disproportionate pressure on Israel.
Conventional wisdom would be wrong.
No, not because Christine O’ Donnell, Delaware’s resident Tea Party (now retired) witch, lost. One losing Tea Party witch does not constitute a trend. (Though it does seem to suggest she may have lost her power when she retired from spell-casting.)
But, 95 losing Tea Party or Tea Party-backed candidates just might be a trend worth noting. The Tea Party did gain five endorsed Senators and 40 House members, but 68% of Tea Party-backed candidates lost. All this at a time when Republican candidates as a whole — and the Tea Party is clearly nestled within the Republican Party — enjoyed an overall midterm ascendancy. Perhaps the pundits droning on about the Tea Party’s success should have also noticed that at a time when voters clearly expressed a preference for many of the Tea Party’s positions, they didn’t also transfer their votes in greater numbers to the Tea Party-backed candidates.
The reality is that each race had its own set of unique issues that played some part in a voter’s decision. It is hard to draw sweeping conclusions. Since there have been only two occasions in the last 75 years that a President’s party has not lost seats in an off-year election, many of the results, if not the entire shellacking, was expected. It is also to be expected that politicians, analysts, candidates and organizations that backed candidates would spin the results in a manner that best suits their cause.
One interesting organizational battle for the “hearts and minds” is between J Street, the 2 1/2 year old progressive pro-Israel organization that raised over 30% of all pro-Israel PAC money, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), and indirectly, the Zionist Organization of America.
The RJC claimed that J Street’s “top” candidates, all Democrats — one Republican accepted and later rejected J Street’s endorsement — did poorly, which proved J Street’s approach on Israel was also rejected.
J Street, on the other hand, countered that over 2/3 of the candidates they backed won, and regardless, exit poll data clearly showed that “despite millions of dollars worth of partisan and neo-conservative attempts to turn Israel into a wedge issue this election cycle (they)…failed to change the way American Jews voted.” J Street pointed to a Gerstein/Agne Strategic Communications poll, commissioned by J Street, that noted 66% of Jews supported Democratic candidates and that just 7% of Jews considered “Israel decisive in how they vote.” Jewish voters placed Israel eighth on their list, behind their top three issues of the economy, health care and the deficit, similar to the ranking of non-Jewish voters.
On the other hand, Morton Klein, President of The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), had a different view: ” The American public has been unnerved by …Obama bowing before foreign despots like the King of Saudi Arabia; his return of the gift of a famous bust of Winston Churchill to Britain,….after refusing to display it anywhere in the White House; offering open-ended negotiations and lots of carrots but no sticks to Iran over its nuclear weapons program, only to be ridiculed; the wasting of two years before allowing largely ineffective anti-Iran sanctions to pass….; letting down of our Czech and Polish allies by discontinuing plans to install missile defense systems on their territory; the bullying pressures on small, democratic Honduras to reinstate a lawless president favored by Latin American despots like Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega; the humiliation of his repeatedly apologizing abroad for U.S. actions; his erasure of the term ‘radical Islam’ and ‘Islamism” from government use; the renaming of ‘terrorism’ as ‘man-made disasters’; his support for civilian, rather than military tribunals to deal with foreign terrorists; and, last but not least, his policy towards Israel.”
So what’s the reality? Is Mort’s (no longer) repressed anti-Obama animus the correct view?
Polling data suggests that the economy and health care were really the main concerns of voters, including Jewish voters. Foreign policy issues, including Israel, were low on all voters’ lists. Jews still voted Democratic in overwhelming numbers. The Tea Party-backed candidates did not fair as well as Republican candidates as a whole. And, based on all the data, it is illogical to conclude that J Street PAC money hurt the candidates that it supported.
Mort Klein and the RJC may have seen their preferred party make impressive gains, but the reason for those gains can best be understood by looking at unemployment figures, health care, the growing deficit and historical midterm voting trends. Don’t be surprised if in two years we once again mimic history and swing more Democratic, or that we have scrums of people ready to give us their profound self-serving perspectives about the American voter.
