June 11, 2008
Jewish Democratic Donor Joins McCain Team
That is the headline from TheHill.com. Even though it mentions "Donor" in the singular, the McCain camp claims there is more where that came from:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is attracting elite Jewish Democratic donors who backed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and are concerned about Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) stance toward Israel, say McCain backers who are organizing the effort to court Democrats.So claims the Republicans. Not surprisingly, the Democrats deny there is a problem:McCain has already had several fundraising events with Jewish Democrats in Washington and Florida, say his supporters.
He also has the backing of Democrat-turned-Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.), who made history as the first Jewish vice presidential candidate and has recently raised questions about Obama's foreign policy vision for the Middle East.
Stephen Muss, the Florida developer, is the biggest Democratic donor and fundraiser to pledge his support for McCain and the Republican National Committee, said a GOP official. Muss has given tens of thousands of dollars to help Democratic candidates in recent years, including $80,000 to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics and CQ MoneyLine.
..."Many Jewish Democrats are sensing there is such an existential threat to Israel that you have to vote for an individual who strongly supports the U.S.-Israel relationship," said Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), chairman of the GOP's Jewish Victory Coalition.
Prominent Democratic fundraisers, however, say they have not encountered Clinton donors who are planning to defect to McCain.The fact remains that Senator Joe Lieberman is actively campaigning for McCain among Democrats and Independents and could be influential among Jewish voters:
"I've talked to a lot of people in the past couple of days and I have not spoken to anybody who was supporting Hillary Clinton and who has indicated any likelihood of supporting McCain," said Steve Grossman, a former co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a former chairman of AIPAC, who raised tens of thousands of dollars for Clinton this election cycle.
Read the entire article.Lieberman has launched a new bipartisan grassroots group, Citizens for McCain [see modest web page here], to attract Democrats and independent voters to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
Lieberman could become a potent weapon for Republicans seeking to pick off Jewish Democrats. As the Democratic Party's former vice presidential nominee and a former Democratic candidate for president, Lieberman is assumed to have an expansive list of Jewish Democratic donors from around the country.
It's going to get interesting.
Powerline describes just how potent a weapon Lieberman might be:
If there is one major politician who strikes fear into the heart of Barack Obama, it is Joe Lieberman, who has emerged as a primary surrogate for John McCain in this campaign. It isn't just that Lieberman is so highly regarded by a small but not insignificant number of Democrats and a decent number of independents. It's because Lieberman successfully executed something like the model John McCain hopes to use in this election to defeat a leftist opponent in the fact of a heavy pro-Democrat tide.That explains the Newsweek hit job.Specifically, Lieberman was able to rely on his popular "brand," including his reputation for independence, to defeat a leftist Democrat in a liberal state despite his staunch support for a very unpopular war (today, almost two years later, the war is merely unpopular). This is essentially what McCain hopes to accomplish. Although McCain lacks Lieberman's consistently liberal record on domestic issues (and for that reason won't carry Connecticut), he's making a good run so far at eroding Obama's support among independents and Hillary Clinton-supporting Democrats.
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Lieberman's treason to his party, his militant and petty undercutting of the Democratic Party at every conceivable turn, deserves little respect. While McCain may win Florida and Lieberman may help him do it, I hope I live long enough to see Lieberman go down in painful ruin. The liberal netroots tried hard to get him but through a deliberate refusal of the Republican Party to nominate a real candidate and back one, Lieberman won Connecticut after getting primaried out. Now a majority of Connecticuters want Joe gone, gone, gone; they have seen that he is not an "independent Democrat" but is a Republican operative with his nose under the Democratic tent.
To think that this man backstabbed Obama, his backer in the Democratic primary - the worst mistake made by Obama in the last two years. To think that this man backstabbed the party that nominated him for Vice-President. Obama should have backed Lamont from the beginning in CT and decapitated Lieberman through a sound beating in the primary (not just a loss), and now Obama will pay hard for his naivete. That is actually a fair criticism of Obama's leadership skills: the inability to identify and decapitate a traitor early.
Posted by: Bruce at June 13, 2008 2:16 AMSo Bruce, I take it you're not a Republican...
I don't know anything about Lieberman's popularity--or lack thereof--in Connecticut, but I assume you have a poll or something to back up your claim that they want Lieberman out.
I don't know about Obama's naivete--I think his gaffes generally point to his ignorance and inexperience--but when it comes to politics, he has a history of playing hardball (after all, he is from Chicago):
Obama knows his way around a ballot:
The day after New Year's 1996, operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.
There they began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city's South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.
It's a lengthy record filled with core liberal issues. But what's interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.
Republicans controlled the Illinois General Assembly for six years of Obama's seven-year tenure. Each session, Obama backed legislation that went nowhere; bill after bill died in committee. During those six years, Obama, too, would have had difficulty naming any legislative achievements.
Then, in 2002, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Republicans on the national and local levels led to a Democratic sweep of nearly every lever of Illinois state government. For the first time in 26 years, Illinois Democrats controlled the governor's office as well as both legislative chambers.
The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James "Pate" Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.
Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama's. He became Obama's kingmaker.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city's most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:
"He said, 'Cliff, I'm gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'"
"Oh, you are? Who might that be?"
"Barack Obama."
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
"I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen," State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. "Barack didn't have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.
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So no, Bruce, of Obama's weaknesses--decapitation of an opponent is not one of his weaknesses.
Posted by: Daled Amos at June 13, 2008 9:41 AM