For
weeks, the Jewish community of Chicago’s North and Northwest suburbs
had been looking forward to hearing their candidates for the US House
and Senate debate one another in a “Candidates Forum” about Israel, the
Middle East, and related security matters. While the community
tends to vote Democratic, it elected Republican Mark Kirk to represent
it in Congress five times and, before that, Kirk’s mentor, the GOP’s
John Porter, eleven. So neither side should take their votes for
granted. It appears, however, that one does.
Two
weeks before the forum, Democrat Alexi Giannoulias who is running
against Kirk for the US Senate seat once held by Barack Obama, abruptly
pulled out citing “prior commitments.” The next day, Democrat Dan
Seals, who opposes Republican Bob Dold for the House seat Kirk is
vacating, announced that he, too, was withdrawing his commitment to
attend. His reason was that without Giannoulias, the forum would be
skewed in favor of the Republicans.
Neither
man’s excuse rang true with the voters—and with good reason. The
Giannoulias campaign’s story kept changing. It had confirmed their
man’s availability back in March, and re-confirmed it more recently,
according to forum organizers. When confronted with that fact,
campaign manager David Spielfogel then claimed they never accepted the
invitation and moreover that the hosting group, Protect Our Heritage PAC
is partisan. Yet, the candidates’ appearance at the event had been
heavily advertised for months and the Giannoulias campaign never once
complained about it. According to Rabbi Victor Weissberg, the host
for the event and a highly esteemed clergyman in the community, the
Giannoulias campaign then told him they would attend only if he complied
with several demeaning and ultimately impossible conditions. By
the way, to be clear, these forums have been held for the past 25 years,
and this is the first time a candidate has objected to them.
The
Seals campaign explained their man’s abrupt pull-out by saying that
without Giannoulias, the situation was heavily slanted in the
Republicans’ favor and “had become inherently unfair and uniquely
weighted against Dan.” That assertion gave many Jewish voters a
good laugh. Even in a year when more Jews are expected to vote
Republican than they have in decades, the community remains heavily
Democratic. Current polls, for instance, show that Jewish support
for Democrats has fallen this year—from three out of four to two out of
three. In 2008, about 72 percent of Jewish voters cast their votes
for Obama. Said Peggy Shapiro, one of the event organizers, “a
majority of Jewish voters are still Democrats….And in fact Jewish voters
voted for Seals last time.” Yet, neither Kirk nor any other
Republican candidate used that as an excuse to avoid this or any other
forum.
Speculation
in the Jewish community is that the real reason the Dems pulled out
were fear, arrogance, and strategy. As one member of the Jewish
community noted to me, “If you were Giannoulias, would you want to
debate Kirk,” who is widely acknowledged as one of Congress’s most
knowledgeable and incisive members on foreign policy matters—and one of
Israel’s best friends in Washington? Quite a number of people in
the audience echoed that sentiment and also applied it to Dan
Seals. “Seals really doesn’t know anything,” one man at the forum
told me. “He spent 40 obligatory days in Israel before the last
election and never even left the Jerusalem area.” Dold, on the
other hand, spoke eloquently about his family’s long involvement with refusemik Lev
Schrieber and other matters that clearly moved the largely
Democrat-voting audience. Democratic strategists long have taken
Jewish votes for granted, and for good reason. The overwhelming
Obama vote was the rule rather than the exception. As former Bush
White House staffer Jay Lefkowitz wrote in Commentary Magazine, “American
Jews do not merely favor Democrats; they are the second most reliable
bloc of Democratic voters in the country, exceeded only by
African-Americans. One has to go all the way back to the election of
Warren Harding in 1920 to find a Republican who gained more than 40
percent of the Jewish vote.” And as more than one strategist told
me, “C’mon this is Illinois—one of the bluest states in the
union.” The perception among many Democrat candidates in Illinois
is that enough people will cast knee-jerk votes for a Democrat so long
as he or she does not throw their incompetence in the voters’ faces—and
Rod Blagojovich’s re-election in 2006 puts even that qualifier in
jeopardy.
During
the 2008 Presidential campaign, I attended a debate between the
Republican Jewish Coalition’s Richard Baehr and the National Jewish
Democratic Committee’s Ira Forman at a synagogue not far from the venue
of this year’s forum. During the debate, Baehr raised several
issues about then Senator Obama’s association with people like Rashid
Khalidi and Bill Ayers and questioned how they might affect Obama’s
actions toward Israel. These questions were becoming a real problem
for the Obama campaign, and his advocates were working overtime trying
to quiet them. Forman, like most of his Democrat colleagues, seemed
to take offense at the very suggestion and emphatically said that Obama
“would be as strongly pro-Israel as George Bush—more even.” The
largely Democrat crowd took him at his word, and now express a good deal
of buyer’s remorse for their Obama votes.
Both
candidates made it clear that they would strongly oppose those policies
and fight any pressure on Israel to make concessions for an ineffective
and agreement. They also believe that Israel’s security and our
own are intimately tied. Kirk told the audience of a post-9/11
Congressional task force on US aviation safety. Kirk asked the
Israelis for some help, and they sent an entire team of their top
security experts who gave input and information that is critical to the
safety of “every American who flies” today. As one of the Israeli’s
told Kirk, “for $3 billion where could you get such a deal.” Kirk
also noted defiantly that “the political foundation of our alliance with
Israel is not with the White House. It is with Congress”; and that
the next Senator cannot simply be a pro-Israel vote, but leader, and
that Congress’s “number one supporter of Israel… will be Senator Mark
Kirk from the State of Illinois. Dold called Obama’s policies
“dangerous for the United States, dangerous for Israel” to a rousing
ovation. He also talked about his recent trip to the Arizona
border area where local officials directed him to look at the trash on
the ground: “’Take a look at the candy wrappers.’ I
did. They were all in Arabic….The United States had to protect its
border.”
The
Democrats’ absence left the field wide open, and Kirk and Dold took
advantage of it to introduce themselves to voter who would otherwise
automatically vote Democrat. As one area couple told me, “We’re
here to listen.” And listen they and others did. Most people knew
Mark Kirk and his pro-Israel record, but few knew Dold that
well. And according to a Dold staffer, the response went beyond the
ovations. “We ran out of lawn signs,” he said, “so many people
were taking them as they left.” Moreover, the Dems’ abrupt and
disingenuous sounding pull-out angered quite a few Jewish voters who
took their action as “a slap in the face,” according to more than
one. The fact that 15 area synagogues and clergy co-sponsored the
event, considering it crucial for Jewish voters, further exacerbated ill
feelings. Even Rabbi Weissberg, who scrupulously maintains a
non-partisan atmosphere, told the crowd not to judge Giannoulias and
Seals, but not to “look for them in Profiles in Courage Part Two.”
Posted on 08/25/2010 11:18 AM by Richard L. Benkin
