Thursday, August 17, 2006

Joe the Jew

Joe is not playing. While the victorious Ned Lamont skirted off to Maine on the heels of his upset of incumbent Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic Senate primary, Lieberman has shown the nation -- and prominent Democrats who've turned their back on him -- that he's not going away. First we heard Lieberman's bold claim in the days following his defeat: the implementation of his opponent's position on Iraq would "be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England...It will strengthen them, and they will strike again."

Now comes yet more proof that the man who was seen cheek-to-cheek with the President after the last State of the Union is just as hardnosed as his hawkish friendships with men like Donald Rumsfeld would suggest. Here's the new Jewish angle to Joe's take-no-prisoners approach to holding his seat. Talkingpointsmemo posted this ad from the Republican Jewish Coalition, which has appeared in Jewish weeklies from St. Louis and D.C.:

It sounds as if Ned Lamont has actually been saying the "right" things about Israel, so you might wonder how much traction the Lieberman campaign can get from this. But since polls consistently show that Republicans are more staunchly supportive of Israel than Democrats, Lieberman and his supporters, who only need to pick off a certain portion of the Republican electorate for the "Independent Democrat" to win, are perhaps not unwisely pandering.

2 comments:

Amos said...

I get the sense that most American Jews are against the Iraq War. They don't see opposition to the war in Iraq as related to their support for Israel.

Noah K said...

I agree. Which is why I think -- not to sound too much like David Brooks here -- that the Democratic Party should do everything it can to distance itself from a figure like Cindy Sheehan. Sheehan has provided the Dems with an opportunity to wrest the mantle of the troops from Republicans, but, as the comment quoted on that flier show, she also represents an element on the American left that wants to conflate support for the Iraq War with support for Israel. Precisely because most American Jews -- and many other Americans -- don't draw that same connection, she's dangerous.