Hillary and Israel, a 3-month romance: Richard Baehr
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=16855
Hillary Clinton has vaulted to a solid lead in the presidential race following a Democratic Party convention where all the party heavies — President Barack Obama, husband and former President Bill Clinton, first lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and others applauded her greatness, her caring nature, her resolve, her readiness for the nation’s highest office and her achievement in smashing the “glass ceiling” to become the first woman to be nominated by a major U.S. party. Throw in her Republican opponent Donald Trump’s continuously shooting himself in the foot, and Hillary’s convention poll bounce becomes even greater. A host of fresh surveys from the last few days have given the former secretary of state a lead of between 3 and 9 points.
Never one to take elections for granted, Hillary and her team are making a strong effort to attract “never Trumpers,” encompassing many prominent members of the conservative movement, including its pro-Israel pundit class — from The Weekly Standard, the National Review, Commentary and other publications. On Tuesday, a Republican congressman from New York announced that he plans to vote for Clinton; several Republicans supporting Clinton spoke at the Democratic convention. When Republicans held their convention in Cleveland a week earlier, the Republican Governor of the state, John Kasich, stayed away. Ted Cruz, the Texas Senator who accumulated the second largest number of delegates at the Republican convention, refused to endorse Trump. The entire Bush family, including two former Republican Presidents, were 1,000 miles away and are clearly not planning to join the Trump team.
With the Republican Party in seeming disarray, and many Senate and House candidates keeping their distance from Trump, fearing the fallout of a disastrous defeat at the top of the ticket, the opportunity for Clinton to make inroads among Republican voters is significant. Over the last 20 years, the fortunes of Democrats in national elections have improved, as their vote share has increased among minority voters and college-educated suburban voters, particularly women. This year, Donald Trump is running very strong with white voters without a college degree (a 40-point margin in some surveys), but dramatically underperforming among whites with a college degree. This latter category is where the Clinton effort is focused. These suburban voters include a significant number of Jewish voters, most of them Democrats but a decent share of Republicans as well, in metro areas such as Philadelphia and Cleveland, and the three South Florida counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. These three states — Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida — are essential for Trump to have any chance of winning an electoral college majority.
The Clintons have long drunk from the well of liberal Jewish campaign financing, particularly in New York and California, and have won big shares of the Jewish vote in their campaigns. This year, Clinton faced a Jewish opponent for the Democratic nomination, the socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Like many Jews on the Left, Sanders was not part of the general pro-Israel consensus in Congress, and at the debate held in Brooklyn, he challenged Clinton to be more evenhanded and supportive of Palestinian rights. He also took the obligatory swipe at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, drawing enthusiastic cheers from the young audience in attendance, many of them his new left social justice warriors for whom bashing Israel seems to be a very exciting emotional release.
As a sop to Sanders supporters, Clinton admitted five Sanders appointees to the Democratic platform drafting committee, including Muslim Minneapolis Congressman Keith Ellison; founder and president of the Arab American Institute, a group obsessed with Israel’s “crimes,” James Zogby; and Cornell West, an “academic,” and harsh critic of Israel. On the other hand, Clinton and then-DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz appointed 10 of the 15 committee members, and on Israel policy prevented the platform from moving left and becoming more critical of Israel. On other issues, the Clinton majority on the committee was far more open to being pushed to the left to satisfy the Sanders partisans.
Clinton clearly sees an opportunity to win margins among Jewish voters not seen since her husband ran for office. Bill Clinton won among Jewish voters by 69% in 1992, and 62% in 1996. In recent presidential contests, the Jewish vote for the Republican candidate has crept up to 30%, and the Democratic candidate’s margin narrowed to 39% in 2012 (Obama/Romney).
Bill Clinton was generally seen as very supportive of Israel, despite issues with Netanyahu in his first cycle as prime minister. Clinton was very close to slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and also worked with former prime minister Ehud Barak at Camp David. Hillary Clinton needed to make nice to pro-Israel voters as a senator from New York but she has never been seen in quite the same way as her husband. Her refusal to criticize Suha Arafat after she slandered the State of Israel was one factor in this, but more troubling, and more recent, has been her continued association and reliance on Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton hack (along the lines of James Carville, Lanny Davis and Terry McAuliffe) as secretary of state. Blumenthal’s son, Max, is considered one of the most vicious Israel critics around, to the extent that many on the Left who routinely have problems with the Jewish state considered his book out of bounds and over the top anti-Semitic garbage. Nonetheless, Sidney Blumenthal regularly sent emails to Hillary when she was secretary of state, with articles by Max, all of course soaked in the same anti-Israel venom. Hillary seemed happy to receive these missives, and circulated them among some of her staff. She even commented on some of the articles, offering praise.
Imagine if a President Bush had passed on to his staff emails from a long-time adviser to the family with articles by David Duke offering advice on race relations. This likely would have led to impeachment proceedings. But somehow the Blumenthals and Hillary get a pass.
Any time Trump says something stupid, or foolishly attacks someone, the mainstream media fills with wall-to wall headlines. But when a sitting secretary of state offers praise to an Israel hater, the story barely even registers. Of course, the major newspapers and broadcast media are hardly neutral in the current campaign, and are loathe to offer up anything that might damage the candidate they think needs to win.
Clinton will likely try to subtly separate herself from Obama in the next three months, at least when it comes to Israel. She might signal that Israel might get a better deal from her than from President Obama with regard to the renegotiation underway for Israel’s foreign aid. Obama wants to require all the allocated money to be spent in the U.S. and to cut off supplemental spending supported by Congress for missile defense or other purposes. In other words, Obama wants to weaken Israel’s defense industry and remove Congress from the equation, putting all the power in the president’s hands.
Just as Obama worked to weaken pro-Israel influence in Congress by greenlighting J Street, and castrating AIPAC (especially on the Iran deal), the policy on the defense assistance doubles down on the effort to change the political calculus on Israel in Congress.
A fair number of pro-Israel voters, among them a high percentage of Jewish Republicans, are reasonably sophisticated about these policy nuances. Clinton will be happy to make Israel one of the loves of her life the next 100 days, since there may be an electoral reward for the effort.
Comments are closed.
