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I was talking to my neighbor, a four-term Republican state-representative in the Florida House, about politics last week and broached the possibility of a McCain-Lieberman ticket for the GOP in '08. This decades-long participant in state politics came back with a story. He said the proportion of Jewish Republicans to Jewish Democrats in Florida is roughly 40/60. He had a lot of long-time Jewish supporters, but in 2000 while campaigning, he was assured of strong support by his Jewish friends, but when he brought up "my good friend George Bush and his running-mate, his Jewish friends were silent. He then jump-switched to telling me that he had told our neighbor, the Repub Party chief for Palm Beach County, that Clay Shaw was going to lose. The reason: ethnic pride often spurs Republican Jews to vote for a Jewish Democrat. He avers that the Florida vote in 2000 was so close because of this phenomenon.
Now Newsmax is beginning to feel the vibes that long-time political observers feel is a sure-fire winner in '08. A McCain-Lieberman ticket would likely spur the same phenomenon in the opposite direction, and cinch some Northern states where the Jewish vote is normally much more Democratic than in wealthy Republican Florida. Whether the ethnic pride would work on Dems is debatable, but remember that the so-called "Reagan Democrats" were usually Irish Catholics who recognized Reagan, though Protestant, as one of theor own spiritually and psychologically.
A lot of things can happen in the next twenty months between now and presidential elections. If the Saudis do allow oil prices to decline because increasing production might take the wind out of Iranian sails, the US economy would continue to prosper and all the class-warfare politics the Dems propound would fall on deaf ears. Americans are too sophisticated for European-style politics of envy, and too realistic to allow Islamic extremists overseas to expand their influence with victim politics and demographic population-boom politics.
If McCain's health remains steady, the Dems would be hard-pressed to find any ticket that could withstand the broad appeal of McCain-Lieberman as a centrist ticket forcing the Dems to the left.
Another Kerry or Gore-type Dem might even produce a Republican landslide.
2 comments :
Okay, but Jews are, what, 3% of the electorate?
Steve, Those three-maybe four percent are located in Florida, Illinois, California, New York which are big population states and in a close race their actual vote is important.
Their high level of funding for candidates through AIPAC and other organizations makes them more important. In the '80 campaign for John Anderson, Jews contributed way over 50% of the campaign money, I was told by the finance chief [I was Middle East advisor til I got the boot for policy infractions!]
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