For those who thought the low point in the history of attempts to influence the Jewish vote was the discovery several years ago that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) had a step-grandfather who was Jewish (yes, her grandmother’s second husband), there is good news.
The Republicans have gone their Democratic rivals one better while introducing vice-presidential pick Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to the public.
Palin does not have a long history of stands on Jewish issues. Why should she?
Neither the town of Wasilla, Alaska, where she was mayor, nor the 49th state, where she served as governor for the last two years, have large Jewish populations or much of a foreign policy.
But Palin does have a little Israeli flag in her office, or at least did last winter. I know that because in an e-mail forwarded around the world, Jewish Republicans point to the flag as a sign of her interest in the Jewish state.
For those of you who want to check this out yourself, the evidence can be found at alaskapodshow.com/index.php/2008/02/20/my-visit-to-juneau-alaska.
It is the Web site of an Alaskan HDTV hiking show, which featured an interview with the athletic VP hopeful in February. The tiny flag can be seen on the far right of the picture at the edge of the window.
Palin is obviously sharp and articulate, and her thin political résumé has been offset by a winning style and a record as a reformer that skyrocketed her into a spot on a national ticket.
But her introduction to the big leagues has illustrated two points — one Jewish and one general — about our current political culture these days.
First, Sarah Palin’s little flag and the subsequent obligatory kind comments about her from Alaskan rabbis, whose events she has graced with her official presence, illustrate what should have become obvious a long time ago: The partisan impulse to pretend that all candidates are longtime bosom buddies with the Jewish community is getting a little silly.
Unlike 2004, when just about everyone running except George W. Bush was producing a Jewish relative, the two nominees, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, aren’t pretending to be members of the tribe.
Not every pol running for office who wants Jewish votes or money grew up in a Jewish neighborhood like former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo who liked to boast to Jewish audiences that was the “shabbes goy” for a synagogue in Queens, N.Y., where he was raised.
Nor can a politician who is not from the Northeast and has not worked on foreign-policy issues match a record of stands on Israel such as the one that Palin’s Democratic counterpart, Sen. Joe Biden, can offer.
Like Palin’s running mate, Biden has a paper trail a mile long on Jewish issues that, ironically enough, has allowed some critics to mine from it comments criticizing specific Israeli policies, in trying to tarnish the Democrats’ spin.
Like McCain’s stands, Biden’s history of engagement with Jews and the pro-Israel community is a reasonable argument to be made by those who advocate his election. However, that the top of the Democratic ticket couldn’t match Biden’s record on Israel won’t stop Jewish Democrats from voting for Obama.
Instead, they have chosen to judge the candidate on the positions that he has articulated during the course of the campaign.
Since Obama has, more or less, jumped through every rhetorical hoop the pro-Israel community has asked him to jump through, they have every right to now claim that their candidate is every bit as entitled to the label “pro-Israel” as anyone else.
All of which ought to remind those partisans whose job is to spin the candidates to the Jewish public that what we need is substance, not nonsense. Whether or not some of McCain’s or Obama’s or Biden’s or Palin’s “best friends” were or are Jewish isn’t material.
This is not 1948 when, as the story goes, intervention by President Harry Truman’s former business partner and army buddy, Eddie Jacobsen, helped influence White House policy on the creation of a Jewish state.
Nowadays, the people most likely to lobby wavering presidents for Zionism are evangelical Christians. Whether Palin, an evangelical, will help further that cause remains to be seen (though her statements regarding her strong belief in support for Israel to members of AIPAC attending the Republican convention this week were as convincing as those of Obama), but the outcome probably won’t depend on whether or not she has attended as many bar mitzvahs as Biden.
What really matters is whether these people will adhere to the nonpartisan and nondenominational tradition of sympathy for Zionism that has deep roots in the history of American religion, culture and politics.
What we need from them are credible pledges to avoid pressuring Israel and to support its right of self-defense, as well as tough action on Iranian nukes, not testimonials from Jewish friends.
In other words, the entire genre of “Jewish ties” discussions of the candidates is not all that it is cracked up to be.
Secondly, the reaction to the Palin nomination by the bloggers and the Internet fruitcakes, much like the Internet whispering campaign against Obama, demonstrates how low the political debate in this country is getting.
The same site on the Internet that the Republican Jews were so proud of because it showed the flag in Palin’s office was deluged with postings alleging that the interview “proved” that Palin had faked her pregnancy, which resulted in the birth this spring of her fifth child, who suffers from Down syndrome.
In reaction to this vile stuff posted — not just on the Alaska HDTV page, but on influential leftist political sites such as the DailyKos — Palin was forced to reveal that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant.
To his credit, Obama — who has been stung himself by the radical right-wing Internet onslaught putting forward the fantasy that he is an Islamist “Manchurian Candidate” — asked his followers to back off.
But the nature of political jabbering in our current universe of 24/7 cable news and Internet postings in which every nitwit can self-publish lies about anyone and anything means that nothing can stem the ugly flow of slander.
Mudslinging is hardly new in American politics, but the Internet has given it a place in the mainstream that it has never gotten before.
Some partisan Democrats feel that they can say and do anything in the cause of halting what they falsely claim is a Republican effort to destroy democracy and institute fundamentalist tyranny.
In turn, some Republicans think anything goes in the cause of keeping what they worry is a man who will deliberately lose the war on Islamist terror out of the White House.
In such an atmosphere of hate and screaming, rational debate seems to be harder to find than a minyan in Wasilla, Alaska.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent.
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