Soccer Dad

Jewish democrats anonymous

My name is David.

I am a reformed Jewish Democrat.

I used to be a Democrat. That's how I first registered. It was necessary if I were to vote in local elections. Sometime in the 80's, a friend prevailed upon me to change my registration. Since then, except for a brief time when I changed my registration for a local election, I have been a Republican.

As a Republican I obviously was more sympathetic to the views of Sen. McCain than I was to any of the Democratic candidates for President.

But what I waited for after the Democratic nomination was a positive reason to vote for Sen. Obama. It never came.

Sen. Obama's supporters treated Jews who did not want to vote for him as mentally deficient at best or, at worst, racist. Obviously, if we didn't want to vote for Senator Obama it was because of those e-mails that claimed he was a Muslim. It had nothing to do with his willing twenty year association with an antisemitic preacher.

And obviously, if we looked at his voting record, AIPAC gave him great grades for his commitment to Israel. But we shouldn't look at his association with Rashid Khalidi or his statement that being pro-Israel doesn't mean being pro-Likud.

And just as obviously he was pro-Israel because the closely associated J-Street folks said that he was pro-peace and thus pro-Israel. The folks on J-Street's advisory board include Henry Siegman who never met an Arab dictator - Hafez Assad of Syria and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia are two - who didn't want peace more than those Israelis; Debra Delee of Americans for Peace Now, whose group sees that more territorial concessions from Israel will bring peace just like the withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza did; anti-Zionist ex-Israelis like Avraham Burg and self-professed post-Zionists like Yossi Beilin. Yes, I'd figure that these folks would have Israel's best interests in mind.

The condescension with which the Jewish non-supporters of Sen. Obama have been treated by the his campaign and its surrogates has been appalling. I don't remember another presidential campaign where the effort to marginalize the Jewish vote has been so heavy handed.

Yes I was once a Jewish Democrat.

But I'm over it now.