Well... in an exclusive interview with JTA's Ron Kampeas, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that Israel deserved the spanking it's been receiving from the Obama adminsitration:
The administration had, I think, real justification for being upset because a process was supposed to be in place that would keep it from being blindsided, and that process failed and once again the U.S. was blindsided and the Israelis have to get this right. They've got to put in place a system that keeps this from happening."
It's worth noting that, as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Berman has taken the lead in the push for new, tougher Iran sanctions and is a staunch supporter of Israel, with strong ties to AIPAC.
Another Jewish Democrat -- Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee -- also has come out with criticism of Israel. Here's his statement:
“There is no excuse for Israel’s announcement of plans to expand housing units in East Jerusalem when Vice President Biden was on the ground meeting with the highest levels of the Israeli government. While the Vice President was on a mission to restart the peace process, such an announcement was a mistake.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
New Ways and means Chair Stark anti Jew
1991: Stark singled out "Jewish colleagues" for blame for the Persian Gulf War, referring to then-Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.) as "Field Marshal Solarz in the pro-Israel forces."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/23/AR2007102302165.html
Just two in a long line of “gaffes”.
Today Stark is an Advisory Committe member of Progressive Majority, a political networking group whose aim is to elect as many leftwing political candidates as possible. Fellow members include such notables as Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Peter DeFazio, Rosa DeLauro, Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Jan Schakowsky, Hilda Solis, John Conyers Jr., Lane Evans, Bob Filner, Barney Frank, Raul Grijalva, Luis Gutierrez, Sheila Jackson Lee, Barbara Lee, Jerrold Nadler, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Henry Waxman, Lynne Woolsey, Eleanor Holmes Norton, John Corzine, and Diane Watson.
Stark has cultivated a reputation among his congressional colleagues for possessing a hot temper. On one occasion in 1990, for instance, he openly described the George H.W. Bush administration's Secretary of Health and Human Services, an African American named Dr. Louis Sullivan, as “a disgrace to his race and his profession” for opposing Stark’s proposals for socialized medicine. This prompted Sullivan to retort: “I guess I should feel ashamed because Congressman Stark thinks I am not a ‘good Negro’ … [and he is] not ready to accept independent thinking by a black man.”
In 1991 Stark impugned his “Jewish colleagues” for supporting the Persian Gulf War. He referred to New York congressman Stephen Solarz, who co-sponsored the Gulf War Authorization Act, as “Field Marshal Solarz in the pro-Israel forces.”
During a private 1995 meeting with Connecticut congresswoman Nancy Johnson, Stark called Johnson a “whore for the insurance industries” and suggested that her knowledge about health care was restricted to what she had heard during “pillow talk” with her husband, who was a physician.
In 1999 Stark attacked conservative California state welfare director Eloise Anderson (who is black and a former welfare mother), saying she would “kill children if she had her way.” Anderson’s sin was to be an advocate of welfare reform.
During a 2003 legislative mark-up session on pension funds, Stark hurled epithets such as “fruitcake” and **&^%#@ ( I blanked this one out: Ed) at Republican colleagues.
During debate on the House floor on October 18, 2007, Stark made the following remarks to Texas Republican Joe Barton:
“Republicans sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war? You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President's amusement.”
A professed Unitarian, Stark has made no secret of his hatred for conservative religious belief. He routinely attacks Republicans for their “blind allegiance to the Holy Rollers of the Christian right” and “the messianic Pharisees of the religious right.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1266
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/23/AR2007102302165.html
Just two in a long line of “gaffes”.
Today Stark is an Advisory Committe member of Progressive Majority, a political networking group whose aim is to elect as many leftwing political candidates as possible. Fellow members include such notables as Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Peter DeFazio, Rosa DeLauro, Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Jan Schakowsky, Hilda Solis, John Conyers Jr., Lane Evans, Bob Filner, Barney Frank, Raul Grijalva, Luis Gutierrez, Sheila Jackson Lee, Barbara Lee, Jerrold Nadler, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Henry Waxman, Lynne Woolsey, Eleanor Holmes Norton, John Corzine, and Diane Watson.
Stark has cultivated a reputation among his congressional colleagues for possessing a hot temper. On one occasion in 1990, for instance, he openly described the George H.W. Bush administration's Secretary of Health and Human Services, an African American named Dr. Louis Sullivan, as “a disgrace to his race and his profession” for opposing Stark’s proposals for socialized medicine. This prompted Sullivan to retort: “I guess I should feel ashamed because Congressman Stark thinks I am not a ‘good Negro’ … [and he is] not ready to accept independent thinking by a black man.”
In 1991 Stark impugned his “Jewish colleagues” for supporting the Persian Gulf War. He referred to New York congressman Stephen Solarz, who co-sponsored the Gulf War Authorization Act, as “Field Marshal Solarz in the pro-Israel forces.”
During a private 1995 meeting with Connecticut congresswoman Nancy Johnson, Stark called Johnson a “whore for the insurance industries” and suggested that her knowledge about health care was restricted to what she had heard during “pillow talk” with her husband, who was a physician.
In 1999 Stark attacked conservative California state welfare director Eloise Anderson (who is black and a former welfare mother), saying she would “kill children if she had her way.” Anderson’s sin was to be an advocate of welfare reform.
During a 2003 legislative mark-up session on pension funds, Stark hurled epithets such as “fruitcake” and **&^%#@ ( I blanked this one out: Ed) at Republican colleagues.
During debate on the House floor on October 18, 2007, Stark made the following remarks to Texas Republican Joe Barton:
“Republicans sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war? You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President's amusement.”
A professed Unitarian, Stark has made no secret of his hatred for conservative religious belief. He routinely attacks Republicans for their “blind allegiance to the Holy Rollers of the Christian right” and “the messianic Pharisees of the religious right.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1266
New Ways and means Chair Stark anti Jew
1991: Stark singled out "Jewish colleagues" for blame for the Persian Gulf War, referring to then-Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.) as "Field Marshal Solarz in the pro-Israel forces."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/23/AR2007102302165.html
Just two in a long line of “gaffes”.
Today Stark is an Advisory Committe member of Progressive Majority, a political networking group whose aim is to elect as many leftwing political candidates as possible. Fellow members include such notables as Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Peter DeFazio, Rosa DeLauro, Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Jan Schakowsky, Hilda Solis, John Conyers Jr., Lane Evans, Bob Filner, Barney Frank, Raul Grijalva, Luis Gutierrez, Sheila Jackson Lee, Barbara Lee, Jerrold Nadler, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Henry Waxman, Lynne Woolsey, Eleanor Holmes Norton, John Corzine, and Diane Watson.
Stark has cultivated a reputation among his congressional colleagues for possessing a hot temper. On one occasion in 1990, for instance, he openly described the George H.W. Bush administration's Secretary of Health and Human Services, an African American named Dr. Louis Sullivan, as “a disgrace to his race and his profession” for opposing Stark’s proposals for socialized medicine. This prompted Sullivan to retort: “I guess I should feel ashamed because Congressman Stark thinks I am not a ‘good Negro’ … [and he is] not ready to accept independent thinking by a black man.”
In 1991 Stark impugned his “Jewish colleagues” for supporting the Persian Gulf War. He referred to New York congressman Stephen Solarz, who co-sponsored the Gulf War Authorization Act, as “Field Marshal Solarz in the pro-Israel forces.”
During a private 1995 meeting with Connecticut congresswoman Nancy Johnson, Stark called Johnson a “whore for the insurance industries” and suggested that her knowledge about health care was restricted to what she had heard during “pillow talk” with her husband, who was a physician.
In 1999 Stark attacked conservative California state welfare director Eloise Anderson (who is black and a former welfare mother), saying she would “kill children if she had her way.” Anderson’s sin was to be an advocate of welfare reform.
During a 2003 legislative mark-up session on pension funds, Stark hurled epithets such as “fruitcake” and **&^%#@ ( I blanked this one out: Ed) at Republican colleagues.
During debate on the House floor on October 18, 2007, Stark made the following remarks to Texas Republican Joe Barton:
“Republicans sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war? You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President's amusement.”
A professed Unitarian, Stark has made no secret of his hatred for conservative religious belief. He routinely attacks Republicans for their “blind allegiance to the Holy Rollers of the Christian right” and “the messianic Pharisees of the religious right.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1266
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/23/AR2007102302165.html
Just two in a long line of “gaffes”.
Today Stark is an Advisory Committe member of Progressive Majority, a political networking group whose aim is to elect as many leftwing political candidates as possible. Fellow members include such notables as Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Peter DeFazio, Rosa DeLauro, Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Jan Schakowsky, Hilda Solis, John Conyers Jr., Lane Evans, Bob Filner, Barney Frank, Raul Grijalva, Luis Gutierrez, Sheila Jackson Lee, Barbara Lee, Jerrold Nadler, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Henry Waxman, Lynne Woolsey, Eleanor Holmes Norton, John Corzine, and Diane Watson.
Stark has cultivated a reputation among his congressional colleagues for possessing a hot temper. On one occasion in 1990, for instance, he openly described the George H.W. Bush administration's Secretary of Health and Human Services, an African American named Dr. Louis Sullivan, as “a disgrace to his race and his profession” for opposing Stark’s proposals for socialized medicine. This prompted Sullivan to retort: “I guess I should feel ashamed because Congressman Stark thinks I am not a ‘good Negro’ … [and he is] not ready to accept independent thinking by a black man.”
In 1991 Stark impugned his “Jewish colleagues” for supporting the Persian Gulf War. He referred to New York congressman Stephen Solarz, who co-sponsored the Gulf War Authorization Act, as “Field Marshal Solarz in the pro-Israel forces.”
During a private 1995 meeting with Connecticut congresswoman Nancy Johnson, Stark called Johnson a “whore for the insurance industries” and suggested that her knowledge about health care was restricted to what she had heard during “pillow talk” with her husband, who was a physician.
In 1999 Stark attacked conservative California state welfare director Eloise Anderson (who is black and a former welfare mother), saying she would “kill children if she had her way.” Anderson’s sin was to be an advocate of welfare reform.
During a 2003 legislative mark-up session on pension funds, Stark hurled epithets such as “fruitcake” and **&^%#@ ( I blanked this one out: Ed) at Republican colleagues.
During debate on the House floor on October 18, 2007, Stark made the following remarks to Texas Republican Joe Barton:
“Republicans sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war? You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President's amusement.”
A professed Unitarian, Stark has made no secret of his hatred for conservative religious belief. He routinely attacks Republicans for their “blind allegiance to the Holy Rollers of the Christian right” and “the messianic Pharisees of the religious right.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1266
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
help Joel Pollak Ill. 9 to help israel
"Beverly Sandler" Joel Pollak - outstanding Pro Israel candidate for Illinois' 9th District has the opportunity to bring on Eric Cantor's fund raising team if he can raise an addition $14,000 by Friday morning. At all costs the incumbent Jan Schakowsky (JStreet) must be eliminated from elected office. Could you help out with this? Please help spread the word.
Contributions can be made on his website.
https://secure.piryx.com/donate/NbeJASm1/PollakForCongress/
Contributions can also be made by check.
Please make checks out to:
Pollak for Congress
Send to
P.O. Box 5027
Evanston , IL 60204-5027
So that we can keep track of how much more we need to raise please ask contributors to email me with the amount of their donations.
The US/Israel relationship is worth fighting for and the fight boils down to us!
Contributions can be made on his website.
https://secure.piryx.com/donate/NbeJASm1/PollakForCongress/
Contributions can also be made by check.
Please make checks out to:
Pollak for Congress
Send to
P.O. Box 5027
Evanston , IL 60204-5027
So that we can keep track of how much more we need to raise please ask contributors to email me with the amount of their donations.
The US/Israel relationship is worth fighting for and the fight boils down to us!
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Jews and Palin
Why Jews Hate Palin
Jennifer Rubin
January 2010
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For more than a year, Sarah Palin has been a national Rorschach test. The views expressed about her reveal the distinctions and conflicting perceptions of often antagonistic groups of Americans—the religious and the secular, the conservative and the liberal, the urban and the small town, the elitist and the populist. And now, with the publication of her autobiography, Going Rogue, and Matthew Continetti’s The Persecution of Sarah Palin, the Rorschach tests are being administered anew, and with increasing fervor. For her conservative admirers, she continues to exemplify independence, moxie, common sense, the superiority of the common American over the nation’s elites, and the embodiment of modern womanhood and Christian faith. For her detractors, both conservative and liberal, she is uncouth, unschooled, a hick, anti-science and anti-intellectual, an upstart, and a religious fanatic. There is no group so firmly in the latter camp as American Jews. And there is much to learn in their reaction to Palin, both about her and about the sociological makeup of American Jewry today.
While Palin enjoys support from some prominent Jewish conservatives, it is not an exaggeration to say that, more so than any other major political figure in recent memory (with the possible exception of Patrick J. Buchanan), she rubs Jews the wrong way. In a September 2008 poll by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Jews disapproved of Palin as the pick for McCain’s vice-presidential running mate by a 54 to 37 percent margin. (By contrast, 73 percent approved of the selection of Joseph Biden as Obama’s.) Ask an average American Jew about Palin and you are likely to get a nonverbal response—a shiver, a shudder, a roll of the eyes, or a guffaw. Naomi Wolf, the feminist writer, sputtered that Palin was the “FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal,” articulating the mixture of contempt and fear that seemed to grip many Jewish women. The disdain is palpable and largely emotional. While 78 percent of American Jews voted for the Obama-Biden ticket, it is fair to say that most did not harbor animosity toward or contempt for Senator John McCain; the same cannot be said of their view of Palin. Prominent Jews like Reagan-era arms-control official Kenneth Adelman, who expressed great admiration for McCain, proclaimed that the selection of Palin was beyond reason: “Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office, I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency.”
What is it about Palin that so grates on American Jews? It is more than that she is a conservative and that the vast majority of Jews are not, although this cannot be ignored. As recent polling by Gallup amply demonstrates, Jews remain the most Democratic of any religious group (66 percent of Jews say they are Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with only 47 percent of Catholics, 43 percent of Protestants, and 20 percent of Mormons) and the most supportive of President Obama. Only African-Americans demonstrated a higher percentage of support (95 percent) for Obama’s candidacy and have remained comparably loyal. While there is a range of opinion within the Jewish community, as revealed by an AJC 2009 poll—which showed that majorities of Conservative and Reform Jews approved of the Obama administration’s handling of U.S.-Israel relations, while only 14 percent of Orthodox Jews did—only 16 percent of Jews now identify themselves as Republican.
It follows, then, that Palin’s vocal and unabashed conservatism on social and economic issues does not sit well with most American Jews. But it is not impossible for a conservative to capture at least some measure of support from the American Jewish community. George W. Bush scored about a quarter of American Jewish votes in 2004. It is doubtful that Palin would receive a fraction of that. (Bush’s father set the low bar, 11 percent, in 1992.) Rarely does one hear an American Jew reply, “I don’t like her position on health care” or “I’m pro–gay marriage and she isn’t.” This is not just about differences over issues or party labels. There is something more fundamental at play.
On one level, part of the explanation lies in misunderstanding and media-induced panic. As Continetti documents in his telling book,* the media frenzy that surrounded Palin upon her surprise selection by McCain at the end of August 2008 led to distortions and outright falsehoods that had particular toxicity in the Jewish community. The most inflammatory of these was her alleged support for Patrick J. Buchanan. As Continetti writes,
The notion quickly took hold over the press corps that Palin was a supporter of paleoconservative writer and commentator Patrick Buchanan. . . . Buchanan’s positions on World War II, Israel, the Iraq war, social mores and trade are outside the Republican mainstream. Support for Buchanan would have been a major liability for Palin.
Such support would have been considered an acute liability, of course, by American Jews, who know and properly loathe Buchanan for his anti-Semitism.
The press ran with the story, despite its falsity, that Palin was a Buchananite. She had, in fact, supported the wonkish and pro-Israel Steve Forbes for president in 2000. Her association with Buchanan consisted solely of her attendance at a speech during a 1999 visit to Alaska by the candidate at which she wore a Buchanan button, “out of politeness,” she later explained. Nevertheless, the image took hold and was used to good effect by Obama’s team to frighten Jews. Robert Wexler, a Florida congressman tasked with overcoming Jewish concerns about Obama, unleashed a blast almost immediately upon the announcement of McCain’s choice, declaring:
John McCain’s decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans. Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel, even going as far as to denounce bringing former Nazi soldiers to justice and praising Adolf Hitler for his “great courage.” At a time when standing up for Israel’s right to self-defense has never been more critical, John McCain has failed his first test of leadership and judgment by selecting a running mate who has aligned herself with a leading anti-Israel voice in American politics. It is frightening that John McCain would select someone one heartbeat away from the presidency who supported a man who embodies vitriolic anti-Israel sentiments.
An Obama spokesman chimed in the same day, telling a Florida paper that “Palin was a supporter of Pat Buchanan . . . a Nazi sympathizer.”
The notion was planted that Palin herself was, by association, anti-Israel, and Jews remained convinced of that, despite her unflinching support for the Jewish state, the presence in her gubernatorial office of an Israeli flag, and her eagerness to attend a rally protesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the UN in the fall of 2008 (which was canceled at the behest of Obama supporters, no doubt to deprive Palin of that platform).
But this invented affiliation with Buchanan is inadequate to explain the anti-Palin fever gripping American Jews, which can best be understood as the result of her alignment with a series of issues and cultural markers that antagonize a large segment of the American Jewish community. If one were to invent a political leader designed to drive liberal, largely secular, urban, highly educated Jews to distraction, one would be hard pressed to come up with a more effective figure than Palin.
Although she made her way in Alaska politics as a political outsider and governed with a focus on ethics reform and energy policy, Palin came to be far more identified during the presidential campaign with a cluster of highly fractious social issues—abortion, contraception, and church-state separation. In point of fact, as governor she refused to convene a special legislative session on abortion and appointed a Planned Parenthood board member to the state supreme court. No matter. The image that voters received of her was of an extremist on social issues intent on rolling back the long-fought-for gains liberals had achieved. And after all, she was unabashedly pro-life, a woman whose Down-syndrome son literally became the poster child for the Alaska Right to Life organization.
This, to say the least, did not go over well with American Jews. Jews are overwhelmingly pro-choice, more so than any other group. (In a 1980 NBC poll, 89 percent of Jews responded that the decision to have an abortion should be the woman’s alone.) And the vast majority of Jewish women, as Norman Podhoretz writes in Why Are Jews Liberals?, “think that the absolute right to an abortion had been inscribed on the tablets Moses brought down from Sinai.” If the media repackaged Palin as an especially strident pro-lifer and social-conservative extremist as part of the effort to marginalize her with mainstream voters, that effort was particularly effective in turning off Jewish voters, for whom these issues are among the most potent.
Likewise, the distortions of Palin’s views on church-state matters played directly into the fears of liberal and largely secularized Jews (stoked since the emergence of the Moral Majority and heightened by the increased political activism of evangelical Christians) that she would seek to impose a specifically Christian agenda on the nation. Again, Palin’s actual record went largely undiscussed. In a radio interview during her tenure as governor, Palin specifically declared that she would not push for a creationist curriculum. During the 2008 race, she told interviewers that local schools should be teaching science and designing their own curricula. However, Jews, like all voters, were bombarded with news reports to the contrary.
In her first national interview, Charles Gibson of ABC News mangled the details of a June 2008 talk she gave at the Assembly of God church she attended in her hometown of Wasilla. “You said recently,” Gibson told her, “in your old church, [that] our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Palin had actually said something far different. She had encouraged the assembled to “pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God.” This was an unexceptionable sentiment; Abraham Lincoln made the same point when he famously declared that “I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.” In reporting her words falsely, Gibson was building on the very caricature of the Religious Right that works to such devastating effect on American Jews in particular. Indeed, even when it comes to her support for Israel, Palin’s position is rejected by many liberal Jews because of a suspicion that her enthusiastic backing of the settlement movement is based on eschatological expectations that reinforce their own prejudices against Evangelicals.
Certainly, Palin’s status as an unabashed conservative and as exemplar of the Religious Right would have been sufficient to alienate the majority of American Jews. Yet if that were all, and that is plenty, Palin still would not provoke the degree of hostility with which most Jews regard her. Something else bothers them more. That something else is Palin herself.
_____________
American Jews are largely urban, clustered in Blue States, culturally sophisticated, with more years of college and postgraduate education than the average American. According to Tom W. Smith’s 2005 Jewish Distinctiveness in America: A Statistical Study, “Jews attach great importance to seeking knowledge and highly value education and science. Their pursuit of education leads them to higher occupational status, better vocabulary scores, and more vociferous newspaper reading. It also influences many attitudes and values, which, in America, tend to become more liberal with higher education.” It is not surprising, then, that Jews historically have not warmed to politicians who do not project intellectual sophistication. George W. Bush is in fact an avid reader and a possessor of two Ivy League degrees, but his populist persona and avowed contempt for liberal academics were red flags to Jews.
So it was with Palin, and, if possible, even more so than with Bush. Although she grew up in a household where her mother read poetry aloud, and Palin herself read voraciously as a teenager and initially chose a career in journalism, she, like Bush, soft-pedaled her intellectual interests—and, more important, suggested that her policy views and problem-solving abilities were derived not from what she had learned in books but rather from character and instinct. For those for whom an Ivy League education is the essential calling card for leadership of any sort, an elite-bashing populist with a journalism degree from the University of Idaho who lacks both a mellifluous grasp of policy and a self-consciously erudite vocabulary was always going to be a hard sell. As Continetti observes with savage irony, “The American meritocratic elite places a high priority on verbal felicity and the attitudes, practices and jargon that one picks up during graduate seminars in nonprofit management, government accounting and the semiotics of Percy Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark.’” Given that Jews are overrepresented in these sorts of professions, it is not surprising that they would be among those most put off by Palin.
Jews, who have excelled at intellectual pursuits, understandably are swayed by the notion that the presidency is a knowledge-based position requiring a background in the examination of detailed data and sophisticated analysis. They assume that such knowledge is the special preserve of a certain type of credentialed thinker (the better the university, the more unquestioned the credential) and that possessing this knowledge is the key to a successful presidency. This was not the prevailing conception of the presidency through most of American history; indeed, the very idea of a technocratic president is of recent vintage. The argument that such knowledge might be acquired or accessed when necessary by a person who has demonstrated a more instinctual skill set—the capacity to make decisions and to lead people—does not resonate with those for whom intellectual rigor has been a defining characteristic and a pathway to success.
Palin’s intellectual unfitness in the eyes of Jews was exaggerated during the course of the campaign as they, like other Americans, received an incomplete image of her abilities and talents. In Going Rogue, Palin devotes dozens of pages to eye-glazing particulars about Alaska state budgets, energy deals, and the new methodology her administration devised for calculating Alaska’s share of revenue from resource development. By offering this level of detail in her book, Palin is attempting, she and her boosters hope, to establish her bona fides as a fiscal sharpshooter and cagey negotiator who took her job very seriously and whose skills were cultivated without reliance on an elite university education. But that understanding of Palin’s work as a public servant—as someone who solved difficult problems and did so by working across partisan lines—was obscured during the 2008 campaign by the successful effort to paint her as a know-nothing lightweight with a stunted vocabulary.
That latter image was forged in a disastrous CBS interview with Katie Couric. During the course of it, Palin appeared miffed when asked to name her favorite news publications. Whether this was evidence of her lack of interest in reading and current events or whether it was a display of intellectual modesty (she would later say she refused to answer out of irritation), Jews found such reticence hard to fathom and quickly came to believe it was not reticence but utter ignorance. When rumors circulated that she had “banned books” (she had not), that image became intensified, as pro-Obama media outlets suggested ominously that she was not simply lacking in sophisticated book learning but was literally anti-book.
Her personal life made her even more alien to American Jews. She comes from the wilderness, brags about hunting and eating native animals, and is a proud gun owner. Then there is the matter of the composition of her family. Outside the Orthodox community, where large families are increasingly the norm, having five children, as Palin does, is aberrant to American Jews. According to Smith’s study, Jews “have fewer brothers and sisters than any other ethnic/racial or religious group (2.4 vs. an average of 3.8)” and “the smallest current household size of any ethnic/racial or religious group (2.5 vs. an average of 2.9).”
Palin calls herself a “hockey mom” and brags aloud about the athletic prowess of her children, while Jews are more likely to sport “My child Is an Honor Student” bumper stickers. Palin’s oldest, Track, has joined the military, while many Jews lack a family military tradition. Not for the Palins the quiet pride in good grades and good boards; the family’s esteem is tied up more in Sarah’s husband Todd Palin’s “iron dog” snowmobile racing skills.
And, of course, there is Palin’s youngest. Pro-life Americans saw Palin’s son Trig, born with Down syndrome in April 2008, as an affirmation of Palin’s deeply held beliefs, a rare instance in which a politician did more than mouth platitudes about a “culture of life.” But in affluent communities with large Jewish populations, Down-syndrome children are now largely absent due to the widespread use of diagnostic testing and “genetics counseling.” Trig was not a selling point with many Jewish women who couldn’t imagine making a similar choice—indeed, many have, in fact, made the opposite one.
Palin’s unprecedented success as a working-woman politician—from PTA member to governor in 12 years, even as she raised a family with a Teamster husband living elsewhere for his job six months out of the year—was overlooked or dismissed as Jewish women and others focused obsessively on trivialities. Palin had been a star high-school basketball player in her teens and entered a beauty pageant (to put herself through school), both of which served to transform her, in Wolf’s eyes, into “Sarah ‘Evita’ Palin . . . Rove and Cheney’s cosmetic rebranding of their fascist putsch” and, for others, into a “bimbo” who was an “insult” to women (in Gloria Steinem’s words). Even worse, Palin was and is more overtly sexual and more athletic than her critics. And she was slammed for it, called a “sexy librarian,” a “slutty flight attendant,” or even more noxiously, in the words of a reporter for Salon.com, “a Republican blow-up doll.”
Popular Jewish and non-Jewish female politicians—from Senator Diane Feinstein to Madeleine Albright to Hillary Clinton—have been modest to the point of frumpiness in appearance and professional in style, and therefore perfectly acceptable to Jewish women who aspired to similar positions of responsibility. Palin was another story, even if the story was in large part fictional. As Continetti documents, Palin had to live through a sex-infused attack. There was Topco’s “This Is Not Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll” and a plethora of phony Internet photos displaying Palin in everything from an American-flag bikini to nothing at all. Respectable columnists like Kathleen Parker suggested that Palin had basically seduced McCain to get the vice-presidential nomination (“his judgment may have been clouded”), while reporters described her October 2009 UN visit as “speed dating.”
And there is the matter of social class. As she recounts in Going Rogue, Palin and her husband had labored at jobs most professional and upper-middle-class Jews would never dream of holding—waitressing, picking “strawberries in the mud and mosquitoes . . . for five cents flat,” sweeping parking lots, and many “messy, obscure seafood jobs, including long shifts on a stinky shore-based crab-processing vessel.” Her populist appeal and identification with working-class voters are rooted in a life experience that is removed by one or two generations from the lives of most American Jews. Her life is what they were expected to rise above.
As Continetti argues, Palin should have represented a success story about upward mobility through hard work, but instead she was on the receiving end of class animosity from elite media and opinion makers who had never before really been asked to accept the notion that someone outside their socio-economic circles could be qualified for the nation’s highest office. Palin is unique among recent presidential candidates in that regard. Democrats John Edwards and Dick Gephardt made a fetish of their families’ modest means, but by the time they achieved prominence, they had firmly ensconced themselves in the upper middle class, as is true of virtually all national politicians these days. Palin was married to a blue-collar worker who labored alternately on a fishing boat and an oil pipeline.
In a real sense, by the way she lives and the style she has adopted, Sarah Palin is the precise reverse image of an American Jewish professional woman. The two are polar opposites. The repulsion is almost magnetic in nature.
_____________
It is conceivable that Palin could make inroads in the Jewish community? On the one hand, she doesn’t have anywhere to go but up. Certainly her willingness to speak in favor of the special relationship America has with Israel could mitigate some of the damage done to her reputation, once news of her support for the Jewish state and opposition to the administration’s effort to put “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel finally gets through to the Jewish community.
And if Palin is determined to convince skeptics that they have her all wrong, she will need to, as many well-meaning conservatives have advised, sharpen her approach to a range of issues beyond energy policy (where she has demonstrated expertise) and refine her vision of what she dubs “commonsense conservatism.” While she is an expostulator of the idea, prominent throughout American political history, that a leader with a commonsense approach to decision-making is best suited to governing the United States, she must accept the obligation to speak with authority and command about pressing public-policy issues. She will have to make voters comfortable with the idea that she is neither ignorant nor lacking in intellectual agility.
Unless she is content to write off significant segments of the electorate (and she may be), Palin cannot simply play to her natural base by castigating elite politicians and opinion makers as indifferent or hostile (which many are) to the values of ordinary Americans; she must also demonstrate that she can go toe-to-toe with them in articulating positions on the issues that all candidates are expected to address. And she must explain why her particular life skills and experience are more reliable indicators of successful leadership than elite credentials. Much of the country may be primed to hear a critique of the shortcomings of Ivy League–educated elites, but voters will expect to hear just how it is that Palin’s background, philosophy, and proposals would mark an improvement over the present.
All that, even if done expertly, may only minimally lessen the animosity toward her. Palin’s anti-elitism and her embrace of social conservatism, which are now integral to her persona, will in all likelihood continue to make her unpopular with the great majority of Jews. She is not about to change her appearance, her stance on abortion, or her disdain for media elites. And Jews are not about to cast aside their preference for those leaders whom they perceive as intellectually worthy—and socially compatible.
Jennifer Rubin
January 2010
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For more than a year, Sarah Palin has been a national Rorschach test. The views expressed about her reveal the distinctions and conflicting perceptions of often antagonistic groups of Americans—the religious and the secular, the conservative and the liberal, the urban and the small town, the elitist and the populist. And now, with the publication of her autobiography, Going Rogue, and Matthew Continetti’s The Persecution of Sarah Palin, the Rorschach tests are being administered anew, and with increasing fervor. For her conservative admirers, she continues to exemplify independence, moxie, common sense, the superiority of the common American over the nation’s elites, and the embodiment of modern womanhood and Christian faith. For her detractors, both conservative and liberal, she is uncouth, unschooled, a hick, anti-science and anti-intellectual, an upstart, and a religious fanatic. There is no group so firmly in the latter camp as American Jews. And there is much to learn in their reaction to Palin, both about her and about the sociological makeup of American Jewry today.
While Palin enjoys support from some prominent Jewish conservatives, it is not an exaggeration to say that, more so than any other major political figure in recent memory (with the possible exception of Patrick J. Buchanan), she rubs Jews the wrong way. In a September 2008 poll by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Jews disapproved of Palin as the pick for McCain’s vice-presidential running mate by a 54 to 37 percent margin. (By contrast, 73 percent approved of the selection of Joseph Biden as Obama’s.) Ask an average American Jew about Palin and you are likely to get a nonverbal response—a shiver, a shudder, a roll of the eyes, or a guffaw. Naomi Wolf, the feminist writer, sputtered that Palin was the “FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal,” articulating the mixture of contempt and fear that seemed to grip many Jewish women. The disdain is palpable and largely emotional. While 78 percent of American Jews voted for the Obama-Biden ticket, it is fair to say that most did not harbor animosity toward or contempt for Senator John McCain; the same cannot be said of their view of Palin. Prominent Jews like Reagan-era arms-control official Kenneth Adelman, who expressed great admiration for McCain, proclaimed that the selection of Palin was beyond reason: “Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office, I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency.”
What is it about Palin that so grates on American Jews? It is more than that she is a conservative and that the vast majority of Jews are not, although this cannot be ignored. As recent polling by Gallup amply demonstrates, Jews remain the most Democratic of any religious group (66 percent of Jews say they are Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with only 47 percent of Catholics, 43 percent of Protestants, and 20 percent of Mormons) and the most supportive of President Obama. Only African-Americans demonstrated a higher percentage of support (95 percent) for Obama’s candidacy and have remained comparably loyal. While there is a range of opinion within the Jewish community, as revealed by an AJC 2009 poll—which showed that majorities of Conservative and Reform Jews approved of the Obama administration’s handling of U.S.-Israel relations, while only 14 percent of Orthodox Jews did—only 16 percent of Jews now identify themselves as Republican.
It follows, then, that Palin’s vocal and unabashed conservatism on social and economic issues does not sit well with most American Jews. But it is not impossible for a conservative to capture at least some measure of support from the American Jewish community. George W. Bush scored about a quarter of American Jewish votes in 2004. It is doubtful that Palin would receive a fraction of that. (Bush’s father set the low bar, 11 percent, in 1992.) Rarely does one hear an American Jew reply, “I don’t like her position on health care” or “I’m pro–gay marriage and she isn’t.” This is not just about differences over issues or party labels. There is something more fundamental at play.
On one level, part of the explanation lies in misunderstanding and media-induced panic. As Continetti documents in his telling book,* the media frenzy that surrounded Palin upon her surprise selection by McCain at the end of August 2008 led to distortions and outright falsehoods that had particular toxicity in the Jewish community. The most inflammatory of these was her alleged support for Patrick J. Buchanan. As Continetti writes,
The notion quickly took hold over the press corps that Palin was a supporter of paleoconservative writer and commentator Patrick Buchanan. . . . Buchanan’s positions on World War II, Israel, the Iraq war, social mores and trade are outside the Republican mainstream. Support for Buchanan would have been a major liability for Palin.
Such support would have been considered an acute liability, of course, by American Jews, who know and properly loathe Buchanan for his anti-Semitism.
The press ran with the story, despite its falsity, that Palin was a Buchananite. She had, in fact, supported the wonkish and pro-Israel Steve Forbes for president in 2000. Her association with Buchanan consisted solely of her attendance at a speech during a 1999 visit to Alaska by the candidate at which she wore a Buchanan button, “out of politeness,” she later explained. Nevertheless, the image took hold and was used to good effect by Obama’s team to frighten Jews. Robert Wexler, a Florida congressman tasked with overcoming Jewish concerns about Obama, unleashed a blast almost immediately upon the announcement of McCain’s choice, declaring:
John McCain’s decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans. Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel, even going as far as to denounce bringing former Nazi soldiers to justice and praising Adolf Hitler for his “great courage.” At a time when standing up for Israel’s right to self-defense has never been more critical, John McCain has failed his first test of leadership and judgment by selecting a running mate who has aligned herself with a leading anti-Israel voice in American politics. It is frightening that John McCain would select someone one heartbeat away from the presidency who supported a man who embodies vitriolic anti-Israel sentiments.
An Obama spokesman chimed in the same day, telling a Florida paper that “Palin was a supporter of Pat Buchanan . . . a Nazi sympathizer.”
The notion was planted that Palin herself was, by association, anti-Israel, and Jews remained convinced of that, despite her unflinching support for the Jewish state, the presence in her gubernatorial office of an Israeli flag, and her eagerness to attend a rally protesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the UN in the fall of 2008 (which was canceled at the behest of Obama supporters, no doubt to deprive Palin of that platform).
But this invented affiliation with Buchanan is inadequate to explain the anti-Palin fever gripping American Jews, which can best be understood as the result of her alignment with a series of issues and cultural markers that antagonize a large segment of the American Jewish community. If one were to invent a political leader designed to drive liberal, largely secular, urban, highly educated Jews to distraction, one would be hard pressed to come up with a more effective figure than Palin.
Although she made her way in Alaska politics as a political outsider and governed with a focus on ethics reform and energy policy, Palin came to be far more identified during the presidential campaign with a cluster of highly fractious social issues—abortion, contraception, and church-state separation. In point of fact, as governor she refused to convene a special legislative session on abortion and appointed a Planned Parenthood board member to the state supreme court. No matter. The image that voters received of her was of an extremist on social issues intent on rolling back the long-fought-for gains liberals had achieved. And after all, she was unabashedly pro-life, a woman whose Down-syndrome son literally became the poster child for the Alaska Right to Life organization.
This, to say the least, did not go over well with American Jews. Jews are overwhelmingly pro-choice, more so than any other group. (In a 1980 NBC poll, 89 percent of Jews responded that the decision to have an abortion should be the woman’s alone.) And the vast majority of Jewish women, as Norman Podhoretz writes in Why Are Jews Liberals?, “think that the absolute right to an abortion had been inscribed on the tablets Moses brought down from Sinai.” If the media repackaged Palin as an especially strident pro-lifer and social-conservative extremist as part of the effort to marginalize her with mainstream voters, that effort was particularly effective in turning off Jewish voters, for whom these issues are among the most potent.
Likewise, the distortions of Palin’s views on church-state matters played directly into the fears of liberal and largely secularized Jews (stoked since the emergence of the Moral Majority and heightened by the increased political activism of evangelical Christians) that she would seek to impose a specifically Christian agenda on the nation. Again, Palin’s actual record went largely undiscussed. In a radio interview during her tenure as governor, Palin specifically declared that she would not push for a creationist curriculum. During the 2008 race, she told interviewers that local schools should be teaching science and designing their own curricula. However, Jews, like all voters, were bombarded with news reports to the contrary.
In her first national interview, Charles Gibson of ABC News mangled the details of a June 2008 talk she gave at the Assembly of God church she attended in her hometown of Wasilla. “You said recently,” Gibson told her, “in your old church, [that] our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Palin had actually said something far different. She had encouraged the assembled to “pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God.” This was an unexceptionable sentiment; Abraham Lincoln made the same point when he famously declared that “I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.” In reporting her words falsely, Gibson was building on the very caricature of the Religious Right that works to such devastating effect on American Jews in particular. Indeed, even when it comes to her support for Israel, Palin’s position is rejected by many liberal Jews because of a suspicion that her enthusiastic backing of the settlement movement is based on eschatological expectations that reinforce their own prejudices against Evangelicals.
Certainly, Palin’s status as an unabashed conservative and as exemplar of the Religious Right would have been sufficient to alienate the majority of American Jews. Yet if that were all, and that is plenty, Palin still would not provoke the degree of hostility with which most Jews regard her. Something else bothers them more. That something else is Palin herself.
_____________
American Jews are largely urban, clustered in Blue States, culturally sophisticated, with more years of college and postgraduate education than the average American. According to Tom W. Smith’s 2005 Jewish Distinctiveness in America: A Statistical Study, “Jews attach great importance to seeking knowledge and highly value education and science. Their pursuit of education leads them to higher occupational status, better vocabulary scores, and more vociferous newspaper reading. It also influences many attitudes and values, which, in America, tend to become more liberal with higher education.” It is not surprising, then, that Jews historically have not warmed to politicians who do not project intellectual sophistication. George W. Bush is in fact an avid reader and a possessor of two Ivy League degrees, but his populist persona and avowed contempt for liberal academics were red flags to Jews.
So it was with Palin, and, if possible, even more so than with Bush. Although she grew up in a household where her mother read poetry aloud, and Palin herself read voraciously as a teenager and initially chose a career in journalism, she, like Bush, soft-pedaled her intellectual interests—and, more important, suggested that her policy views and problem-solving abilities were derived not from what she had learned in books but rather from character and instinct. For those for whom an Ivy League education is the essential calling card for leadership of any sort, an elite-bashing populist with a journalism degree from the University of Idaho who lacks both a mellifluous grasp of policy and a self-consciously erudite vocabulary was always going to be a hard sell. As Continetti observes with savage irony, “The American meritocratic elite places a high priority on verbal felicity and the attitudes, practices and jargon that one picks up during graduate seminars in nonprofit management, government accounting and the semiotics of Percy Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark.’” Given that Jews are overrepresented in these sorts of professions, it is not surprising that they would be among those most put off by Palin.
Jews, who have excelled at intellectual pursuits, understandably are swayed by the notion that the presidency is a knowledge-based position requiring a background in the examination of detailed data and sophisticated analysis. They assume that such knowledge is the special preserve of a certain type of credentialed thinker (the better the university, the more unquestioned the credential) and that possessing this knowledge is the key to a successful presidency. This was not the prevailing conception of the presidency through most of American history; indeed, the very idea of a technocratic president is of recent vintage. The argument that such knowledge might be acquired or accessed when necessary by a person who has demonstrated a more instinctual skill set—the capacity to make decisions and to lead people—does not resonate with those for whom intellectual rigor has been a defining characteristic and a pathway to success.
Palin’s intellectual unfitness in the eyes of Jews was exaggerated during the course of the campaign as they, like other Americans, received an incomplete image of her abilities and talents. In Going Rogue, Palin devotes dozens of pages to eye-glazing particulars about Alaska state budgets, energy deals, and the new methodology her administration devised for calculating Alaska’s share of revenue from resource development. By offering this level of detail in her book, Palin is attempting, she and her boosters hope, to establish her bona fides as a fiscal sharpshooter and cagey negotiator who took her job very seriously and whose skills were cultivated without reliance on an elite university education. But that understanding of Palin’s work as a public servant—as someone who solved difficult problems and did so by working across partisan lines—was obscured during the 2008 campaign by the successful effort to paint her as a know-nothing lightweight with a stunted vocabulary.
That latter image was forged in a disastrous CBS interview with Katie Couric. During the course of it, Palin appeared miffed when asked to name her favorite news publications. Whether this was evidence of her lack of interest in reading and current events or whether it was a display of intellectual modesty (she would later say she refused to answer out of irritation), Jews found such reticence hard to fathom and quickly came to believe it was not reticence but utter ignorance. When rumors circulated that she had “banned books” (she had not), that image became intensified, as pro-Obama media outlets suggested ominously that she was not simply lacking in sophisticated book learning but was literally anti-book.
Her personal life made her even more alien to American Jews. She comes from the wilderness, brags about hunting and eating native animals, and is a proud gun owner. Then there is the matter of the composition of her family. Outside the Orthodox community, where large families are increasingly the norm, having five children, as Palin does, is aberrant to American Jews. According to Smith’s study, Jews “have fewer brothers and sisters than any other ethnic/racial or religious group (2.4 vs. an average of 3.8)” and “the smallest current household size of any ethnic/racial or religious group (2.5 vs. an average of 2.9).”
Palin calls herself a “hockey mom” and brags aloud about the athletic prowess of her children, while Jews are more likely to sport “My child Is an Honor Student” bumper stickers. Palin’s oldest, Track, has joined the military, while many Jews lack a family military tradition. Not for the Palins the quiet pride in good grades and good boards; the family’s esteem is tied up more in Sarah’s husband Todd Palin’s “iron dog” snowmobile racing skills.
And, of course, there is Palin’s youngest. Pro-life Americans saw Palin’s son Trig, born with Down syndrome in April 2008, as an affirmation of Palin’s deeply held beliefs, a rare instance in which a politician did more than mouth platitudes about a “culture of life.” But in affluent communities with large Jewish populations, Down-syndrome children are now largely absent due to the widespread use of diagnostic testing and “genetics counseling.” Trig was not a selling point with many Jewish women who couldn’t imagine making a similar choice—indeed, many have, in fact, made the opposite one.
Palin’s unprecedented success as a working-woman politician—from PTA member to governor in 12 years, even as she raised a family with a Teamster husband living elsewhere for his job six months out of the year—was overlooked or dismissed as Jewish women and others focused obsessively on trivialities. Palin had been a star high-school basketball player in her teens and entered a beauty pageant (to put herself through school), both of which served to transform her, in Wolf’s eyes, into “Sarah ‘Evita’ Palin . . . Rove and Cheney’s cosmetic rebranding of their fascist putsch” and, for others, into a “bimbo” who was an “insult” to women (in Gloria Steinem’s words). Even worse, Palin was and is more overtly sexual and more athletic than her critics. And she was slammed for it, called a “sexy librarian,” a “slutty flight attendant,” or even more noxiously, in the words of a reporter for Salon.com, “a Republican blow-up doll.”
Popular Jewish and non-Jewish female politicians—from Senator Diane Feinstein to Madeleine Albright to Hillary Clinton—have been modest to the point of frumpiness in appearance and professional in style, and therefore perfectly acceptable to Jewish women who aspired to similar positions of responsibility. Palin was another story, even if the story was in large part fictional. As Continetti documents, Palin had to live through a sex-infused attack. There was Topco’s “This Is Not Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll” and a plethora of phony Internet photos displaying Palin in everything from an American-flag bikini to nothing at all. Respectable columnists like Kathleen Parker suggested that Palin had basically seduced McCain to get the vice-presidential nomination (“his judgment may have been clouded”), while reporters described her October 2009 UN visit as “speed dating.”
And there is the matter of social class. As she recounts in Going Rogue, Palin and her husband had labored at jobs most professional and upper-middle-class Jews would never dream of holding—waitressing, picking “strawberries in the mud and mosquitoes . . . for five cents flat,” sweeping parking lots, and many “messy, obscure seafood jobs, including long shifts on a stinky shore-based crab-processing vessel.” Her populist appeal and identification with working-class voters are rooted in a life experience that is removed by one or two generations from the lives of most American Jews. Her life is what they were expected to rise above.
As Continetti argues, Palin should have represented a success story about upward mobility through hard work, but instead she was on the receiving end of class animosity from elite media and opinion makers who had never before really been asked to accept the notion that someone outside their socio-economic circles could be qualified for the nation’s highest office. Palin is unique among recent presidential candidates in that regard. Democrats John Edwards and Dick Gephardt made a fetish of their families’ modest means, but by the time they achieved prominence, they had firmly ensconced themselves in the upper middle class, as is true of virtually all national politicians these days. Palin was married to a blue-collar worker who labored alternately on a fishing boat and an oil pipeline.
In a real sense, by the way she lives and the style she has adopted, Sarah Palin is the precise reverse image of an American Jewish professional woman. The two are polar opposites. The repulsion is almost magnetic in nature.
_____________
It is conceivable that Palin could make inroads in the Jewish community? On the one hand, she doesn’t have anywhere to go but up. Certainly her willingness to speak in favor of the special relationship America has with Israel could mitigate some of the damage done to her reputation, once news of her support for the Jewish state and opposition to the administration’s effort to put “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel finally gets through to the Jewish community.
And if Palin is determined to convince skeptics that they have her all wrong, she will need to, as many well-meaning conservatives have advised, sharpen her approach to a range of issues beyond energy policy (where she has demonstrated expertise) and refine her vision of what she dubs “commonsense conservatism.” While she is an expostulator of the idea, prominent throughout American political history, that a leader with a commonsense approach to decision-making is best suited to governing the United States, she must accept the obligation to speak with authority and command about pressing public-policy issues. She will have to make voters comfortable with the idea that she is neither ignorant nor lacking in intellectual agility.
Unless she is content to write off significant segments of the electorate (and she may be), Palin cannot simply play to her natural base by castigating elite politicians and opinion makers as indifferent or hostile (which many are) to the values of ordinary Americans; she must also demonstrate that she can go toe-to-toe with them in articulating positions on the issues that all candidates are expected to address. And she must explain why her particular life skills and experience are more reliable indicators of successful leadership than elite credentials. Much of the country may be primed to hear a critique of the shortcomings of Ivy League–educated elites, but voters will expect to hear just how it is that Palin’s background, philosophy, and proposals would mark an improvement over the present.
All that, even if done expertly, may only minimally lessen the animosity toward her. Palin’s anti-elitism and her embrace of social conservatism, which are now integral to her persona, will in all likelihood continue to make her unpopular with the great majority of Jews. She is not about to change her appearance, her stance on abortion, or her disdain for media elites. And Jews are not about to cast aside their preference for those leaders whom they perceive as intellectually worthy—and socially compatible.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Remember those congressman who support Goldstone trashing Israel
Remember those congressman who support Goldstone trashing Israel
Congress debates Goldstone
By Ron Kampeas · November 3, 2009
The U.S. House of Representatives is debating a resolution condemning the Goldstone report, the U.N. Human Rights Council-mandated report into last winter's Gaza war, and which accuses Israel and Hamas of war crimes.
The non-binding resolution demands that the Obama administration do what it can to keep the report from advancing through the U.N. system.
It's an unusual set up. Debate on such resolutions, if they're mother and apple pie enough, are controlled by the resolution's sponsor; If it is on a partisan matter, or if there are two sponsors, one from either party, there are two traffic controllers, one for Democrats, one for Republicans.
There are three "traffic controllers" this evening: U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee who introduced the resolution; Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the committee chairman who co-sponsored the resolution; and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the member who visited Gaza in the war's immediate aftermath, and who opposes the resolution.
Another wrinkle:
Ros-Lehtinen objects to Ellison's request to enter the 574-page report into the congressional record. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), who opposes the resolution and who accompanied Ellison to Gaza, objects to Ros-Lehtinen's objection, saying that an opening statement allowing the entry of extraneous documents applies generally.
Berman appears to back Ellison's request, although noting that there is a page limit -- no one seems to know what it is -- beyond which the clerk must estimate the cost. Ros-Lehtinen then emphasizes that she wants to know how much it would "cost the taxpayers for the printing of the biased report."
The resolution passes by acclamation -- the acting Speaker (whom I can't place) casts her eyes about the room and sees two thirds standing in "aye." Ros Lehtinen exercises her right to ask for a count, not because she can't believe she won, but because it's a fun way to target those who voted against come election time.
The count, ultimately, is 344 for, 36 against (all but three are Democrats) and 22 "present."
During the debate, much of the opposition has to do with how the House leadership placed the resolution on the "suspension calendar" which brings it straight to the floor, bypassing committees. This is not unusual -- for mom and apple pie resolutions (from commemorating major U.S. victories to naming post offices.) It is for controversial resolutions. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if 344- 36-22 is controversial. (Not being ironical, I genuinely am chickening out of this call.)
Here's Ellison:
Why are you voting on a resolution without holding a single hearing?
Ellison and others on his side want Goldstone to testify, and each person speaking in olpposition notes that Goldstone's report treats both sides in the conflict.
Other notable quotes from the opposition:
--Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) quotes David Ben-Gurion: "Without moral and intellectual independence there's no anchor for national independence."
--Baird holds up photos, first of Israeli children in Sderot undergoing a bombing drill, and then of a father mourning three dead toddlers in Gaza. He talks so long even Ellison asks him to shut up. Must have been a companionable trip.
--Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) is one of several opposing the resolution who note that Goldstone's report has an out for Israel: Investigate yourself.
--Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) both argue that the resolution harms U.S. security by damaging its reputation as an honest broker. "American made white phsosphorous shells were used by Israel in civilian areas, causing horrible burns to Palestinian children," McCollum says. "There must be only one standard for respecting human rights."
--Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) says he will vote "present," because he is upset his colleagues haven't read the report. "I havent had the time to read 575 pages," he says. "The process has been totally inadequate."
--Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who sounds a little too practiced at sounding outraged, comes up with presidential debate -worthy quips about voting for up is down, night is day, etc. (Some anti-Kucinich bug erased my notes on his speech.)
In support:
--Most fiery in support is the majority leader, U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) Baird scored his colleagues for not even having visited Gaza; Hoyer bellows: "They (Hamas) targeted civilians. How do I know?" (Glares in Baird's direction.) "I've been there!"
Hoyer says he respects Kucinich and agrees that trhe Palestinians deserve Americans' empathy: "We ought to have empathy for the Palestinians who have been put at great risk by their leaders. Why are they there? because the Arab community does not want to absorb them and its leaders will not seek a meaningful peace.
Hoyer (and Berman in his wrapup) also note what they say are the dangers of allowing the report to progress: Inhibiting warfare against terrorists, dealing with "asymmetrical" threats.
--Ros Lehtinen keeps introducing colleagues by enumerating their committee memberships; it seems a lot of Republicans who don't like Goldstone serve on the Agriculture Committee.
--Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) imagines rockets raining into Indiana from Michigan. This metaphor usually invokes neighboring countries -- Hoyer mentions Canada and Mexico -- not states; My brain is stuck on a snapshot of thousands of infuriated Hoosiers paddling across Lake Michigan.
He also says his colleagues, well, bug him. "There shouldn't be one vote -- not one vote -- against Israel. These people who have been making these comments on the other side of the aisle really bother me."
--Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the minority whip, is one of several speaking in support of the resolution who note that Israel ceded Gaza in 2005. "Every time it (Israel) makes concessions in peace it results in terrorism."
--Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) is outraged that the report concludes that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians and says that the report -- and the process that led to it -- should prompt the Obama administration to reconsider its decision to join and fund the UNHRC.
--Berman wraps up and addresses his colleagues critiques. He too would have preferred more time, but nots that the UNHRC endorsement of the report is due to be debated tomorrow (Wednesday) in the U.N. General Assembly:
What's the rush? The only rush -- I would prefer we had more time, I would prefer we had more discussion -- but the U.N. General Assembly wants to send this to U.N. Security Council and then then to the International Criminal Court.
He also makes this eloquent point to those who opposed the resolution and noted Goldstone's record as a judge and prosecutor, helping to bring about an end to Apartheid in his native South Africa, find Nazis in Argentina, prosecute war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Some of Berman's favorite judges joined in the World War II-era decision to intern Japanese, he says. and continues:
Congress debates Goldstone
By Ron Kampeas · November 3, 2009
The U.S. House of Representatives is debating a resolution condemning the Goldstone report, the U.N. Human Rights Council-mandated report into last winter's Gaza war, and which accuses Israel and Hamas of war crimes.
The non-binding resolution demands that the Obama administration do what it can to keep the report from advancing through the U.N. system.
It's an unusual set up. Debate on such resolutions, if they're mother and apple pie enough, are controlled by the resolution's sponsor; If it is on a partisan matter, or if there are two sponsors, one from either party, there are two traffic controllers, one for Democrats, one for Republicans.
There are three "traffic controllers" this evening: U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee who introduced the resolution; Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the committee chairman who co-sponsored the resolution; and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the member who visited Gaza in the war's immediate aftermath, and who opposes the resolution.
Another wrinkle:
Ros-Lehtinen objects to Ellison's request to enter the 574-page report into the congressional record. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), who opposes the resolution and who accompanied Ellison to Gaza, objects to Ros-Lehtinen's objection, saying that an opening statement allowing the entry of extraneous documents applies generally.
Berman appears to back Ellison's request, although noting that there is a page limit -- no one seems to know what it is -- beyond which the clerk must estimate the cost. Ros-Lehtinen then emphasizes that she wants to know how much it would "cost the taxpayers for the printing of the biased report."
The resolution passes by acclamation -- the acting Speaker (whom I can't place) casts her eyes about the room and sees two thirds standing in "aye." Ros Lehtinen exercises her right to ask for a count, not because she can't believe she won, but because it's a fun way to target those who voted against come election time.
The count, ultimately, is 344 for, 36 against (all but three are Democrats) and 22 "present."
During the debate, much of the opposition has to do with how the House leadership placed the resolution on the "suspension calendar" which brings it straight to the floor, bypassing committees. This is not unusual -- for mom and apple pie resolutions (from commemorating major U.S. victories to naming post offices.) It is for controversial resolutions. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if 344- 36-22 is controversial. (Not being ironical, I genuinely am chickening out of this call.)
Here's Ellison:
Why are you voting on a resolution without holding a single hearing?
Ellison and others on his side want Goldstone to testify, and each person speaking in olpposition notes that Goldstone's report treats both sides in the conflict.
Other notable quotes from the opposition:
--Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) quotes David Ben-Gurion: "Without moral and intellectual independence there's no anchor for national independence."
--Baird holds up photos, first of Israeli children in Sderot undergoing a bombing drill, and then of a father mourning three dead toddlers in Gaza. He talks so long even Ellison asks him to shut up. Must have been a companionable trip.
--Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) is one of several opposing the resolution who note that Goldstone's report has an out for Israel: Investigate yourself.
--Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) both argue that the resolution harms U.S. security by damaging its reputation as an honest broker. "American made white phsosphorous shells were used by Israel in civilian areas, causing horrible burns to Palestinian children," McCollum says. "There must be only one standard for respecting human rights."
--Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) says he will vote "present," because he is upset his colleagues haven't read the report. "I havent had the time to read 575 pages," he says. "The process has been totally inadequate."
--Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who sounds a little too practiced at sounding outraged, comes up with presidential debate -worthy quips about voting for up is down, night is day, etc. (Some anti-Kucinich bug erased my notes on his speech.)
In support:
--Most fiery in support is the majority leader, U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) Baird scored his colleagues for not even having visited Gaza; Hoyer bellows: "They (Hamas) targeted civilians. How do I know?" (Glares in Baird's direction.) "I've been there!"
Hoyer says he respects Kucinich and agrees that trhe Palestinians deserve Americans' empathy: "We ought to have empathy for the Palestinians who have been put at great risk by their leaders. Why are they there? because the Arab community does not want to absorb them and its leaders will not seek a meaningful peace.
Hoyer (and Berman in his wrapup) also note what they say are the dangers of allowing the report to progress: Inhibiting warfare against terrorists, dealing with "asymmetrical" threats.
--Ros Lehtinen keeps introducing colleagues by enumerating their committee memberships; it seems a lot of Republicans who don't like Goldstone serve on the Agriculture Committee.
--Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) imagines rockets raining into Indiana from Michigan. This metaphor usually invokes neighboring countries -- Hoyer mentions Canada and Mexico -- not states; My brain is stuck on a snapshot of thousands of infuriated Hoosiers paddling across Lake Michigan.
He also says his colleagues, well, bug him. "There shouldn't be one vote -- not one vote -- against Israel. These people who have been making these comments on the other side of the aisle really bother me."
--Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the minority whip, is one of several speaking in support of the resolution who note that Israel ceded Gaza in 2005. "Every time it (Israel) makes concessions in peace it results in terrorism."
--Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) is outraged that the report concludes that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians and says that the report -- and the process that led to it -- should prompt the Obama administration to reconsider its decision to join and fund the UNHRC.
--Berman wraps up and addresses his colleagues critiques. He too would have preferred more time, but nots that the UNHRC endorsement of the report is due to be debated tomorrow (Wednesday) in the U.N. General Assembly:
What's the rush? The only rush -- I would prefer we had more time, I would prefer we had more discussion -- but the U.N. General Assembly wants to send this to U.N. Security Council and then then to the International Criminal Court.
He also makes this eloquent point to those who opposed the resolution and noted Goldstone's record as a judge and prosecutor, helping to bring about an end to Apartheid in his native South Africa, find Nazis in Argentina, prosecute war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Some of Berman's favorite judges joined in the World War II-era decision to intern Japanese, he says. and continues:
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