WASHINGTON – For some Jewish voters, the strangeness of Barack Obama was like a recurring dream: unsettling and then settling in, and then, suddenly, revelatory.
Ari Wallach described breaking through to elderly Jews in Florida who had resisted voting for the son of the man from Kenya, the tall black man with the middle name “Hussein.”
“It wasn’t only his policy on Israel and Iran, on health care,” said Wallach, whose Jewsvote.org led the “Great Shlep,” an effort to prod young adults to get their Jewish grandparents in Florida to vote for Obama.
“His biography feels so Jewish, it feels like an Ellis Island archetype. People felt more comfortable when I talked about where he came from, it resonated so deeply.”
For months, polls showed Obama languishing at about 60% of the Jewish vote, a critical chunk short of the 75% or so Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) garnered in 2004.
But exit polls from the Tuesday election showed Obama matching those results, garnering about 78% of the Jewish vote against 22% for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), his Republican rival, leaving him just one percentage point below Al Gore’s 79% eight years ago when Gore had the first Jewish vice presidential nominee of a major party joining him on the ticket.
Wallach credited the campaign’s late-campaign blitz of Jewish communities, joined by groups like his own, for converting the candidate from stranger to standard bearer for a Jewish ethos.
“It resonated much more than I thought it was going through in these parts of the Jewish community,” he said.
It was an uphill battle, starting with rumors that Obama was a hidden Muslim, that he wasn’t a genuine, born American. The subterranean campaign soon burst through semi-legitimate and then legitimate forums; Obama was not a Muslim, these conservatives and Republicans said, but he might have been raised a Muslim.
The Republican Jewish Coalition ran ads coupling critiques on Obama’s dovish policies with jabs at his former pastor who embraced Third World liberation theology, at associates at the University of Chicago and during his early political career who had radical pasts, at advisers who had once delivered sharp critiques of Israel and the pro-Israel community.
The negative campaign glossed over Obama’s deep ties in the Chicago Jewish community and how he has picked a pro-Israel foreign policy team.
Matt Brooks, the RJC’s executive director, said the ads raised legitimate questions about Obama’s judgment, and had an effect: Obama was outpolling Kerry among Jews by only about 2%, he said, whereas he was doing much better than Kerry had among other constituencies, including Catholics, blacks and Hispanics.
“This is a huge political tsunami that has hit Republicans across the board,” Brooks said, referring to the economic crisis that helped precipitate Obama’s blowout win on Tuesday.
“It’s a testament to McCain that we’ve done as strongly as we have to hold onto our support,” he said, noting that Obama’s Jewish results lagged slightly behind showings for Al Gore in 2000, and for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.
“I’m ecstatic by the outcome and the confidence the Jewish community showed Obama in the teeth of some of the nastiest campaigning I’ve ever seen,” said Ira Forman, the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council.
“People got a chance in the last three months to see Barack Obama and the idea that they should be afraid or frightened didn’t wash.”
Key to the effort were waves of Jewish surrogates—chief among them US Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.)—who blanketed Jewish communities in swing states in the campaign’s final weeks.
Wexler had been on board with the Obama campaign from the outset.
A number of other surrogates who had been loyal to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) added weight to the campaign once she conceded the primaries race over the summer.
“I’ve never seen a presidential campaign so well-organized in the Jewish community,” Forman said, referring to the Obama outreach effort.
It remains to be seen whether the concerns Brooks and the RJC pushed forward will eventuate. In his acceptance speech, Obama coupled diplomatic outreach with a tough take-all-comers posture.
“A new dawn of American leadership is at hand,” he said. “To those who would tear the world down, we will defeat you; to those who seek peace and security, we support you.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the director of J-Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobby, said.
“Surrogates and right-wing political operatives in our community stopped at nothing in their efforts to sway Jewish voters against Obama. With exit polls showing Barack Obama’s share of the Jewish vote equal to 2004 levels, it is absolutely clear that their efforts failed.”
Some Democrats said McCain, once popular among Jews because of his willingness to reach across the aisle, hurt himself in the community by choosing the deeply conservative and relatively inexperienced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.
An American Jewish Committee poll commissioned in September found that 54% of American Jews disapproved of the Palin pick, compared to just 15% who disapproved of Obama’s decision to tap Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.).
But Obama’s appeal to Jews might have been most deeply rooted in shared values, said Mik Moore, Wallach’s partner in JewsVote.org.
“Folks just wanted to be with us, with the more progressive candidate; it’s where their heart is,” he said.
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