Politico to go: Are Jewish voters abandoning Obama?

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It seems as if the straw has broken the camel’s back. According to multiple sources, Democrats of the Jewish faith are waking up to the fact that Barack Obama is not a friend of Israel. And many of them are considering holding back their campaign donations and their votes back from the President’s re-election campaign. Giving further credence to the reports, the re-election campaign is taking additional steps to “spin” the administration’s Israel story to make it seem more favorable to the Jewish State.
Ben Smith of Politico interviewed dozens of Jews who supported the President in 2008 and reported this typical story.
“David Ainsman really began to get worried about President Barack Obama’s standing with his fellow Jewish Democrats when a recent dinner with his wife and two other couples — all Obama voters in 2008 — nearly turned into a screaming match.”
Ainsman, a prominent Democratic lawyer and Pittsburgh Jewish community leader, was trying to explain that Obama had just been offering Israel a bit of “tough love” in his May 19 speech on the Arab Spring. His friends disagreed — to say the least.
One said he had the sense that Obama “took the opportunity to throw Israel under the bus.” Another, who swore he wasn’t getting his information from the mutually despised Fox News, admitted he’d lost faith in the president.”
But it wasn’t just this particular speech, it seems as if it is a cumulative effect of all of the times Obama has thrown Israel and its leaders under the bus since he was elected president.
“It’s less something specific than that these incidents keep on coming,” said Ainsman.
Ainsman is correct. Obama’s “war on Israel” began just a few days after his inauguration with the appointment of Samantha Power to the National Security Council (Power once famously called for an invasion of Israel to force her to accept a peace plan.) And was quickly followed up with his Cairo speech where he downplayed the role of terrorism, made Hamas seem like a rowdy boys glee club, called for the internationalization of Jerusalem, and used the Palestinian party line (that Israel owes its existence to the Shoah) to describe the Israeli presence not only in the Judea and Samaria but its VERY existence at all.
Perhaps in response to the reports or due to some internal polling, the President’s re-election campaign is planning to send out surrogates to go on the offensive against pro-Israel groups critical of the president’s Israel policy.
According to the Washington Post this Obama Jew-squad will include Jewish Obama fundraisers, such as former Conference of Presidents leader Alan Solow, former U.S. Reps. Mel Levine and Robert Wexler, and billionaire Penny Pritzker, whose fundraising rolodex was a major factor in the 2008 campaign.
This group of house-Jews will work hard to convince that Obama is really pro-Israel, but short of Bobby Ewing stepping out of the shower and claiming the last two years were just a bad dream, or lying, I am at a loss at how they will be able to convince people that the President is really a buddy of the Jewish State.
The effort to make this point will also be proactive with surrogates publishing op ed pieces that represent the White House’s point of view. It will include a renewed effort to highlight other aspects of Obama’s record that have gone under-discussed, like increased military cooperation between Israel and the United States.
But this point is very true, the fact that this is becoming a key effort of the Obama administration is more proof that the re-election campaign is either losing Jewish money or internal polls are beginning to show that many Jews are considering either voting GOP or at the very least not voting for President in 2012.
The truth is even hard-core pro-Israel Jews do not vote on only one issue. The only Democrat that didn’t receive the majority of the Jewish vote was Jimmy Carter when he ran for re-election. Certainly Israel wasn’t the only reason that 55% of American Jews voted against Jimmy Carter in 1980. But, just as what happened 31 years ago, Barack Obama’s anti-Israel policies are causing liberal Jews to take the rose-tint off their glasses and evaluate what has happened since January 2009. Despite that Obama will most likely receive the majority of the Jewish vote, albeit a smaller percentage than in 2008, but should trends continue (and depending who the GOP nominates) many Jewish Democrats may “skip” the President line at the voting booth and concentrate on the remaining candidates.
While Jews do not make up a major segment of voters, they could be making the difference in key battleground states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Ohio.
Whether the President’s PR Hebrew hit squad is successful or not, its formation is an indication that the reports are true, the reelection committee is getting a bit nervous about losing the Jewish vote in 2012.

Jeff Dunetz is the Editor/Publisher of the political blog “The Lid” (www.jeffdunetz.com). Jeff contributes to some of the largest political sites on the internet including American Thinker, Big Government and Big Journalism. Jeff lives on Long Island.