DANIEL GREENFIELD: WEEKLY ROUNDUP PART ONE
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WALNUTS AND PEANUTS
What conclusions can we draw from the shellacking in NY-9?
1. The Reagan Democrats are back in a big way, while the media is trying to spin this as a single issue vote about gay marriage or Israel, and while those were certainly factors, it was very much a backlash about the whole Obama package.
2. The Jewish vote is in play. Not as much as people think, the Democrats don’t have to worry too much about losing the Upper West Side, but Brooklyn and Queens are in play.
This was widely ignored by people who like to toss off the 76 percent figure, but working class Jews in Brooklyn came out for Bush in 2004 and to a lesser degree for McCain in 2008. There’s a major gap between the limousine liberal and the poorer and more traditional Jews who kicked Weprin to the curb.
3. Ignoring the values voter is dangerous and stupid. The Coulter crowd have marginalized social conservatives are irrelevant and values voters need to be kicked to the curb, to make way for all the enthusiastic fans of killing social security.
But many conservative leaning Catholic and Jewish voters are actually values voters who are more concerned about moral values, than about the latest Cato talking points. Abandoning moral values dumps an entire category of voters who often come out for Democrats but swing over in tough elections when they like what they hear.
My friend Lisa Graas has been arguing for a three-legged social conservatism for some time now, of “fiscal conservatism, social conservatism and a strong national defense.” And that formula may alienate some big Republican donors, but it works.
Compare NY-9 to NY-26. In NY-9, social issues helped Republicans take a Democratic district. In NY-26, Democrats took a Republican district by focusing on Medicare. Ignore values voters at your own peril.
4. Dem arrogance was a major factor here. Obama’s steamroller on Israel and Cuomo’s steamroller on gay rights pissed off enough centrist voters to make them want to send a message. The left’s talking point was that if you just move forward, everyone else will follow. NY-9 is a warning that this isn’t going to work.
Clinton at least pretended to be a centrist, Obama has been a DailyKos dream and the party is paying the price. When the far left hijacked the Democratic party and brought down the Democratic Leadership Council and took down Hillary Clinton– they assumed there would be no reckoning. But the reckoning came in 2010 and 2011. 2012 may be the prize winner of the whole fair.
5. If you’re going to pander, then do it right. Democrats threw Weprin at NY-9 because it was just his turn. Being an Orthodox Jew was supposed to help. Unfortunately it actually hurt him.
Orthodox Jews in the district did not care too much about what Wiener did because he never claimed to be one of them. But Weprin claimed to be an Orthodox Jew and as an Orthodox Jew endorsed gay marriage. It’s a like a Catholic announcing that as a Catholic he thinks abortion is okay. It’s going to get a rise out of people who would usually ignore it. And that’s exactly what happened here.
Top that off with Weprin being from outside the district, a family politician who didn’t come up the hard way, and with a list of family feuds that got Dems like Koch ready to go after him, and it was all a disaster waiting to happen.
Weprin never expected to be in a high profile campaign. New York City has a bunch of congressmen that no one can name, who have legacy seats thanks to the Democratic party and can’t be challenged in them. He assumed he was going to be one of them, inheriting a sweetheart seat from Schumer and Wiener. But he lacked the political instincts and mettle of either man. He was visibly awkward, slow to reply and prone to gaffes.
6. If at first you don’t succeed, just cheat. The noises over NY-9 being eliminated in redistricting are growing louder. If the Democrats can’t hold the district, they might as well kill it.
NY-9 was the largest Jewish district in the country. Not because a lot of Jews live there, but because most districts with a large Jewish population have been gerrymandered into minority areas to create fixed seats for black and latino congressmen. Some of these gerrymandered seats are ridiculous cross-borough monstrosities, but they serve their purpose.
NY-9 does not have a Jewish majority, but enough of them went off the plantation that the Dems are going to try their damndest to lock down the district so that it can’t happen again. And that means carving it up into districts where potential Reagan Democrats will be so isolated that voting will be useless.
7. Bonus round, are Orthodox Jews slowly joining a larger religious centrist coalition of Catholic and Protestant values voters?
The governor’s race and NY-9 certainly raise the possibility. The gay marriage bill has startled some in communities which are often insular. The role played by Orthodox politicians like Weprin and Silver in passing it is seen as shameful. Silver will likely be taken down by the gentrification of his community from working class people to liberal yuppies, Weprin proved to be quite vulnerable.
8. Bonus round 2. The spin on Israel hasn’t worked. The question is what are the Democrats going to do about it. Sending out Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Steve Israel to keep reciting the same bubbe mayses won’t do it. The relationship has to actually be repaired and it’s up to the White House to dial down the hostility.
9. Exit. This is very much about Obama. Beyond Israel and gay marriage, there was the perception that voting for Turner would send a message to Obama on the economy and on a host of other issues. The voters are angry, and many of them don’t follow party line discipline. Even registered Dems.
NY-9 shouldn’t be cause for overconfidence. The same voters who slapped down Weprin have no special allegiance to the Republican party either. What they are is upset and eager to be heard.
They’re angry about being ignored, about a government that is constantly doing things but isn’t doing anything to fix the economy and about an elite that rams through its own agendas with no regard for them.
These are swing voters and they are a snapshot of an electorate that is fed up and wants politicians to toss aside their blackberries and pay attention to them, instead of to their cronies.
They’re America and they are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
HAVE NO FEAR HENRY WAXMAN IS HERE
Are you a national liberal party with some bigoted tendencies that needs Jewish spokesmen to blame Jewish greed for your loss in NY9? Have no fear, Henry Waxman is here.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), a prominent Jewish congressman, said the Jewish vote is a concern for his party.
“I think Jewish voters will be Democratic and be for Obama in 2012, especially if you get a Republican candidate like [Texas] Gov. [Rick] Perry,” he said. “But there’s no question the Jewish community is much more bipartisan than it has been in previous years. There are Jews who are trending toward the Republican Party, some of it because of their misunderstanding of Obama’s policies in the Middle East, and some of it, quite frankly, for economic reasons. They feel they want to protect their wealth, which is why a lot of well-off voters vote for Republicans.”
There’s one problem with old Henry’s Greedy Jews theory– the party has kept Jewish support on the Upper East Side more than it has in Brooklyn. It’s lower and middle-class Jews who turned on Weprin.
Waxman’s smear is right up there with claiming that black voters just defected because they wanted more watermelon and fried chicken– but of course Waxman is Jewish which gives him a media pass to make allegations like that.
It’s also a reminder that the Democratic party is quite Antisemitic and that it uses trolls like Waxman (literally a troll, go take at a gander at a photo of him) to make its bigoted statements for it. And finally that yes, Jews can’t be antisemites.
The term ‘self-hating’ is thrown around a lot, but it’s often a misnomer and it’s simpler and clearer to call them what they are. It’s possible to be bigoted against a group while on some level being a member of the group. There are plenty of Christians who hate Christianity. There are Americans who hate America. There are Jews who hate Jews. They don’t hate themselves, they just despise the group that they are part of.
FAILURE TO JIHAD
The Union of Jewish Students is to launch a “radical, progressive” campaign, encouraging students to speak up for the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians.
Jewish students arriving at universities in the next fortnight will be asked to pledge their support to “two states for two peoples”, hand out Israeli and Palestinian flags, and support “freedom, justice and equality” for all.
There is a belief within UJS that standard advocacy efforts “do not cut it any more” because “students are not stupid”. Students will be encouraged to back the “liberation” of Israelis from Palestinian terror, and Palestinians through the formation of a new state.
Campaigns director Dan Sheldon said UJS had decided on the new direction because “hasbara is not working”. He said: “We have done our research. Old campaigns regarding Israel have not worked, so we are trying a bold approach.”
Surrender is certainly a bold new approach. Really bold. Downright Chamberlainesque. But how do you win a war of ideas, when you have already accepted the position of the other side and are just bargaining for terms?
The Palestinian flag is the flag of a terrorist organization. How does one liberate Israelis from terror through a state? The UJS is doubtfully stupid, more likely anti-Israel students have simply taken it over, just as has happened to a number of Hillels in the states.
In my Front Page article this week, I discussed some of the history of the explosion of Muslim hate on campus.
Hatem “Hate’em” Bazian headed the Muslim Student Association at Berkeley, but there were practical limitations to what a Muslim group could accomplish on campus. Students for Justice in Palestine, which he co-founded, shed the explicit Islamic colors of the MSA and added one more degree of separation between the Muslim Brotherhood and what appeared to be a secular social justice movement whose agenda just happened to align with that of the Brotherhood.
Peel an onion and the layer underneath is usually Brotherhood.
The start of Students for Justice in Palestine activities in 2000-2003 coincided with a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents on campus and an increase in incidents in California– the epicenter of its activity. Since then the pattern of incidents has resulted in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights launching an investigation into the University of California.
The rising wave of hate culminated in the SJP’s launch of the first divestment campaign at an American university… on Holocaust Remembrance Day. During 2011’s Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust, they achieved another milestone by getting the Berkeley Student Senate to pass a resolution boycotting companies that do business with Israel.
One can only imagine what’s coming in 2012. And then there are the American “Little Bin Ladens” who do their work for them
Take the Jewel of Medina, a novel romanticizing Mohammed’s sexual abuse of a nine year old girl, canceled after Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Middle-Eastern studies sent an email to Random House calling the book a “declaration of war” and warning them that publishing it would expose its employees to terrorist attacks. Random House complied out of concern for “the safety and security of the Random House building and employees.”
Denise Spellberg’s book Jihad was an example of the outsourcing of terrorist threats and hit lists to the Western enablers of Islamic terrorism. Who needs Osama bin Laden or one of his successors to film a video six months too late, when a University of Texas professor can fire off an email easing the workload of busy terrorists.
Ward Churchill called those who were murdered on September 11, “little Eichmanns”, a term later picked up by radical leftist, Chris Hedges. But Denise Spellberg and her ilk are “little Bin Ladens.” And there are plenty of “little Bin Ladens” hard at work.
See the rest of the outsourced Jihad in my other FPM article– The Little Bin Ladens
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