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YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — A major Republican tack against Barack Obama has a simple theme: By his friends you shall know him.
For the McCain campaign, in recent weeks, this has meant repeatedly linking the Democratic presidential nominee to William Ayers, the former member of the Weather Underground.
But Jewish Republicans had been employing the strategy for many months in the run-up to the Nov. 4 vote, with the goal of portraying Obama as soft and unreliable in his support for Israel.
Jewish GOPers point to Obama’s 20-year membership in the church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his associations — however limited — with Palestinian activists and his consultations with some foreign policy experts seen as critical of either Israel or the pro-Israel lobby.
To buttress this line of attack, they stress Obama’s stated willingness to meet with Iranian leaders. Hovering in the background — and at times right up in the voters’ faces — have been Internet campaigns and outright pronouncements by some conservative pundits depicting Obama as an Arab or a practicing Muslim.
Obama has responded by explaining how he has dropped troubling relationships, touting his ties to some Jewish communal leaders in Chicago, casting himself as a lifelong supporter of Israel and presenting himself as a leader who would work to revitalize black-Jewish relations.
He has insisted repeatedly that Israel’s security is “sacrosanct,” AND cited his defense of Israel’s military tactics during the 2006 war in Lebanon.
He has pressed for tighter US sanctions against Iran as part of his pledge to do everything in his power to block Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
The US senator from Illinois has spoken thoughtfully about Jewish holidays and religious traditions, as well as the early influence of Jewish and Zionist writers on his worldview.
And last Martin Luther King Day, Obama used the pulpit of the slain civil rights leader to condemn anti-Semitism in the black community.
“I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time,” Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic earlier this year, noting “theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris.”
“So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves.
“And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.”
Such policy and ideological pronouncements were enough to secure support during the Democratic primaries from a few pro-Israel stalwarts in the US Congress (most notably Robert Wexler of Florida) and the media (New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz).
Even the recently defunct New York Sun — a neoconservative newspaper that had plenty of problems with Obama’s domestic and foreign policies — felt inspired to publish an editorial in his defense on the general question of support for Israel.
“We’re no shills for Mr. Obama, but these Republicans haven’t checked their facts,” the newspaper declared in the Jan. 9, 2008 editorial. “At least by our lights, Mr. Obama’s commitment to Israel, as he has articulated it so far in his campaign, is quite moving and a tribute to the broad, bipartisan support that the Jewish state has in America.”
Despite such sentiments and Obama’s feverish efforts to allay Jewish concerns, polls showed him having trouble with Jewish voters — first during the primary season, when he reportedly trailed his main party rival, US Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and then throughout much of the general election race, when surveys showed him failing to match the totals of previous Democratic nominees.
In recent weeks, as the Republican ticket has had to cope with the nation’s economic collapse and the declining popularity of vice-presidential choice Sarah Palin, Obama has been able to flood swing states with waves of newfound Jewish surrogates who were either neutral or with Clinton during the primaries but are now speaking out for him.
Their effectiveness was in evidence last week in a Gallup Poll that showed Obama breaking through a plateau that had dogged him for months: The Democratic candidate garnered 74% Jewish support, matching past Democratic candidates and bypassing the persistent 60% showing since the primaries.
The trend toward Obama was tangible earlier this month at the B’nai Israel synagogue in Rockville, Md., where the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Noah Silverman made the case for GOP nominee John McCain in a debate with Michael Levy of the National Jewish Democratic Council.
Unlike the false depictions of Obama as a radical Muslim that have spread through the Internet, Republican Party reminders of Obama’s past associations with alleged radicals “are not smears,” Silverman said.
The packed hall burst into sustained laughter.
Such derision has not inhibited the attacks. John Lehman, a Reagan administration Navy secretary, at this city’s Jewish community center last week cited the usual litany. He even tossed in Wright, even though McCain has banned the use of the pastor’s liberation theology as a cudgel.
“You’re known by the company you keep,” Lehman said several times.
He later defended his mention of Wright, who has described Israel as a colonial power and used the phrase “goddamn America” in a sermon about the continued struggle facing blacks.
“It’s an important issue,” Lehman told JTA. “I don’t see how someone could sit in a pew for 20 years and listen to that crap.”
The Youngstown audience wasn’t interested — it peppered Lehman and the Obama surrogate with questions about policy.
That doesn’t mean that some of the attacks are not substantive. In an interview with JTA during the primaries, Obama failed to say how he could not have been aware of Wright’s radical views on Israel over a 20-year relationship with his church.
“It doesn’t excuse the statements that were made, it’s just simply to indicate it’s not as if there was a statement like this coming up every Sunday when I was at church,” Obama said at the time, evading the question, which was how Obama responded to Wright’s radicalism on those occasions, however infrequently he may have encountered it.
A few weeks later, Wright’s public appearances grew intolerable, and the Obamas left the church and cut off the pastor.
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