washington | Like two surly dinner guests who won’t let an argument go, President Bush and John Kerry won’t get off topic when they take their case to American Jews: It’s all Israel all the time.
The prospect of swaying likely voters in a handful of battleground states has brought unprecedented attention to Jewish voters this election season, yet the discussion overwhelmingly has focused on Israel, an issue that no longer pushes Jewish buttons the way it once did.
In increasingly bitter exchanges, each campaign’s surrogates and advertisements paint the opposing candidate as coddling terrorists, if not imperiling Israel’s very existence.
David Harris, the American Jewish Committee’s executive director, said the parties still perceive Israel as a potent issue among Jews, even as polls by the AJCommittee and others show the Jewish state declining in importance among Jewish voters.
Harris said the strategy is to nudge Jewish voters back into believing Israel is in danger — thereby returning the issue to top priority status.
“Jewish voters want to be satisfied the candidate understands the importance of the U.S.-Israel issue and will work to strengthen it,” Harris said. “If the adversary can puncture a hole in that belief, it may cause some voters to rethink their original positions.”
In its final sweep in the days before Election Day, Nov. 2, each side was attempting just such a jab.
“I will make Israel safer than George W. Bush is because I will stand up to those countries that are still supporting Hamas and Hezbollah,” Kerry, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, said in Florida on Sunday, Oct. 24.
At the same time, his campaign distributed an appeal from Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz that called Bush’s Middle East policies “disastrous” for Israel.
For its part, Bush’s campaign distributed a Washington Post column by Charles Krauthammer suggesting that Kerry’s plan to assert control in Iraq is to “sacrifice Israel” to Arab and European nations. The notion got further reinforcement by The New York Times columnist William Safire on Monday, Oct. 25, when he asked Jewish voters who tend to vote Democratic to “give a little added weight” to Israel’s security and vote for Bush.
Richard Cohen used his own Washington Post column on Tuesday to hit back: “No doubt, George Bush is a true friend of Israel. But so was Bill Clinton and so would be John Kerry,” he wrote. “The issue is not who cares more for Israel, but who can be effective in reducing the violence and bring about a peaceful solution. So far that’s not George Bush.”
Such high-profile appeals — from the candidates and their surrogates, made in the country’s prime Op-Ed real estate — underscored the weight each side accords the Jewish vote.
That was also evident in this week’s final push in Florida culminating a monthlong sweep of Jewish communities in swing states.
Republicans were running their Democratic Jewish trophy, former New York Mayor Ed Koch, through a grueling tour of synagogues and Jewish Community Centers in the southern part of the state on Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct. 26 and 27.
The Kerry campaign was bringing former President Clinton, Dershowitz, Kerry’s Jewish brother, Cameron, TV comic Larry David and an array of congressmen into Fort Lauderdale and Miami on the same days.
Additionally, each side made one of its top foreign policy officials available to an American Israel Public Affairs Committee summit in Hollywood, Fla. Richard Holbrooke made Kerry’s case and Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, spoke for her boss.
Throughout the grueling and often contentious campaign, the candidates at times have gone into contortions to make their Israel bona fides.
Israel was one of a small elite of nations that made it into nomination acceptance speeches at both conventions. That didn’t stop each side from accusing the other of not mentioning it enough — although there never has been a convention standard for mentioning Israel.
Bush and Kerry each brought Israel into the debates, managing to squeeze mentions into questions about getting troops out of Iraq, although they were never asked about it.
The Bush campaign’s rhetoric reached such a pitch that by the end of August, senior campaign staffer and Bush’s former Jewish liaison, Tevi Troy, was telling college students at the party convention in New York that Bush’s re-election was a “life or death” matter for the Jews.
Democratic posturing never achieved such a fever, but Kerry’s campaign was not immune to distortions. One campaign trope is that Bush did nothing to stem Saudi funding of terrorists, although terrorism experts agree that the kingdom is rolling back the funding precisely because of effective pressure from the administration.
At the same time, the Kerry campaign sought to reassure Jewish voters that he will always be guided first by Israel in pursuing an international coalition to resolve the situation in Iraq and bring peace to the region.
Such pitches on Israel defy two recent major polls that showed Israel dropping as a priority for U.S. Jews. The Jewish state ranked sixth as a factor in presidential voting in a July poll by Democratic pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, behind issues like terrorism, the economy, the Iraq war and health care.
In the AJCommittee’s August poll, Israel ranked last when respondents were asked what they thought was the most important component of their Jewish identity.
Yet the pitches may make sense for the Republicans in the sense of the party having little else to offer the Jews, said Theodore Mann, a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
“It’s a card they had to play, knowing as they do — correctly — that Israelis prefer Bush and thinking as they do — incorrectly — that Jews are one-issue voters,” said Mann, who is on the board of the Israel Policy Forum, a group that supports U.S. engagement in the peace process.
Republicans, of course, reject that, noting that some Jews share the Republican agenda on economic and social issues as well. They also may have had in mind the Jewish vote in Florida, a state Bush cannot afford to lose. The community is weighted to the elderly, and older Jews rank Israel higher among their priorities.
“Israel looms much larger among the elderly,” Harris said. “If I were appealing to Jewish voters in Greenwich Village, I would approach them differently than I would in Palm Beach County.”
Bush’s apparent inability to crack the traditional 3-1 Jewish support for Democrats is frustrating some Republicans. The latest polls, taken in late summer, show Kerry winning anywhere between 69 and 75 percent of the Jewish vote, with Bush getting between 22 and 24 percent.
THE JEWISH VOTE 2004:
‘Life and death’ election may leave community bitterly divided
With focus on presidency, congressional races fly under radar
In Florida, it’s a frenzy to sway the Jewish vote
Election forums in synagogues lead to claims of partisanship