Reports from “The Wasilla Project”

Reporting from inside the Palin Zone…. From “The Wasilla Project“:

"Missed me yesterday?"

 

What “Jewish Problem”

Another wingnut, media-enabled lie shot down for those who believe in facts.

Greenwald:

Salon’s Mike Madden and Walter Shapiro undertook a very difficult task today:  mining through the virtually endless possibilities in order to identify “The punditocracy’s Seven Biggest Blunders of the 2008 election.”  As I wrote earlier this year in The National Interest: “the record of the American pundit class with regard to the 2008 presidential election can be summarized in one word: wrong.”  So I don’t envy Madden and Shapiro’s job of having to choose the top seven from that lengthy list.

The seven “blunders” they describe are certainly large and embarrassing, but there is a new one worth adding to the list:  namely, Obama has a “Jewish problem,” and Republicans are thus likely to attract a much higher percentage of the Jewish vote than even before.  That theory was propounded all over the place, including by then-Weekly-Standardblogger and now McCain campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb, whoclaimed earlier this year:  

Obama has a Jewish problem, whether or not it’s merely guilt by association is irrelevant. Politics is about perception, and the perception is that Obama’s one step removed from the Nation of Islam.

Around the same time, Politico’s Ben Smith was announcing ”Obama’s Jewish Problem.”  U.S. News & World Report detailed what it called “the uneasy evolution of Obama’s relationship with a wide swath of the nation’s Jewish voters.”   

The myth widely persisted – from The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald to the lowest and dreariest precincts of the right-wing blogosphere – despite its being definitively debunked by a handful of journalists, such as The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, who, citing clear evidence, flatly declared back in March that “there is no evidence that Barack Obama has a ‘Jewish’ problem,” and ABC News’ generally excellent Jan Crawford Greenberg, who documented that these claims were based on unreliable, isolated anecdotes which “don’t reflect reality” and thus predicted “that Jews — more than any identifiable demographic group other than African-Americans — would turn out to support Barack Obama in November.”  In May, Salon’s Madden alsoexpressed serious doubts about the reliability of those growing claims after reviewing the relevant polling data.

From Gallup’s release today entitled Obama Winning over the Jewish Vote:  

Jewish voters nationwide have grown increasingly comfortable with voting for Barack Obama for president since the Illinois senator secured the Democratic nomination in June. They now favor Obama over John McCain by more than 3 to 1, 74% to 22%. . .

The current proportion of U.S. Jews backing Obama isidentical to the level of support the Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards received in the 2004 presidential election (74%) . . . . Bottom Line:  The Obama/Biden ticket is poised to perform about on par with other recent Democratic presidential tickets when it comes to support from American Jewish voters.

Ira Foreman of the National Jewish Democratic Council said this today:

More than any year in the past, Republican operatives have crowed about the increasing proportion of the Jewish vote going to Republicans this year. In fact, for every election since at least 1972 we’ve heard ‘sky is falling’ predictions concerning the Democratic proportion of the vote. However, it looks like this is going to be one more year when political pundits, some in the media, Jewish Republicans, and other partisans were wrong in their over the top forecasts.

Right-wing polemicists like Goldfarb’s boss, Bill Kristol, love to parade around as though they are the arbiters of all things ”pro-Jewish” and “anti-Israel” and the like — hence their decrees that Obama would have trouble attracting Jewish votes.  But polling data conclusively demonstrates that the vast majority of American Jews reject the right-wing and neoconservative worldview — it is a fringe group among Jews generally. 

Obama’s “Jewish problem” was, as it turns out, yet another baseless myth advanced by the Right and their cooperative media amplifiers.  The handful of journalists who actually bothered to consider the empirical evidence — rather than mindlessly repeating what campaign operatives were telling them or drawing wildly unwarranted, melodramatic conclusions from selected anecdotes — were able to see that all along.

 

UPDATE:  A new Quinnipiac poll of Florida today finds Obama with a 5-point lead (49-44) and specifically that Obama leads “77-20 percent among Jews.”  Given that Florida was the place where Obama’s “Jewish problem” would supposedly be most pronounced, that is additional compelling evidence burying that myth.

One interesting side note is that there have been several speculative indications that Jewish voters strongly dislike Sarah Palin (Newsweekeven asked this week:  ”Will Palin cost the GOP Jewish Voters?”) .  Though these assertions are not all that different in kind than the early, similar speculation regarding Obama’s ”Jewish problem,” even the Podhoretz Family’s Commentary Magazine today acknowledged that “Sarah Palin was not well received in the Jewish community.”  

Would it be hyperbole to say that it might be definitive proof of the existence of a God if it turns out that it is Bill Kristol’s hand-picked candidate – of all things — that ends up costing the GOP a substantial number of Jewish votes in key battleground states?  At the very least, such an outcome will give new meaning to the term ”sweet justice.”

 

UPDATE II:  Speaking of extreme (and unacknowledged) pundit failures, here’s Commentary’s Schmuel Rosner yesterday, writing about Obama and the Jewish vote:  

While getting the majority of Jewish votes, it looks as ifObama will not nab quite as large a percentage as previous Democratic candidates have.

But here’s the very same Rosner today – a mere one day later — writing about today’s new Gallup findings:

This was bound to happen: American Jews coming around to support Barack Obama in numbers greater than seen in earlier polls.  A new Gallup poll gives the Democratic candidate a 74-22 lead - similar to the advantage his Democratic predecessors have enjoyed

To recap:  Rosner, yesterday:  Obama will get less Jewish support than Democratic candidates normally get.  Rosner, today, after Gallup’s findings were released:   Obama is getting the normal Jewish vote, and I knew that would happen; it “was bound to happen”!  With such transparent efforts to conceal his own flagrant errors, Rosner will be ready any day now to move to The Weekly Standard (h/t sysprog).

Today’s Project

Just do it!

Query: Is this Woman for Real? Can She Really Believe What She’s Saying?

Wingnuts are capable of the most incredible things.

War Room:

You may remember from last week the story of the California Republican group getting some unwanted attention for including in its newsletter animage of Barack Obama on a food stamp, surrounded by fried chicken, watermelon and other racist stereotypes. Well, the president of the group has now resigned.

Diane Fedele apologized last week “to anyone who was offended” by the cartoon, but said there was no racist intent involved in its distribution, telling a local newspaper, “I never connected. It was just food to me. It didn’t mean anything else.” In a letter she sent Wednesday of this week to her group’s members, she apologized again, saying she’d shown “poor judgment and lack of insight and sensitivity.”

But she again said there was no racist intent, and defended the message, the Associated Press reports. “The point, that has been lost in the subsequent discussion over images, was that Obama will ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’ and that we ALL would be buying food with his ‘Obama Welfare Dollars.’ An ideological statement, not a racial one,” Fedele wrote.

Fedele was the president of Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated. State Republican Party officials have distanced themselves from the group, saying it’s not directly responsible to the party, and a spokesman condemned the use of the cartoon.

One other interesting tidbit from the AP’s report on this: It appears that the image is actually originally the product of a Democrat, Tim Kastelein, who says he intended it to poke fun at conservative pundits afraid of Obama.

First Brother; They’re All Crazy….

Raw Story:

Early this week, Sen. John McCain’s brother Joe, while in Alexandria, VA, called 911 because he was irritated with traffic. When the operator asked him if he was reallycalling the emergency line to complain about highway conditions, Joe McCain responded, “F–k you” and hung up. 

Palin and Beloved Leader

And the full clip is here.

Blast from the Past

From a couple of election cycles ago, more or less….

Dear Red States… 

We’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and 
we’re taking the other Blue States with us. 

In case you aren’t aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon,Washington, 
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We 
believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially 
to the people of the new country of New California. 

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. 
We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get Elliot 
Spitzer. You get Ken Lay. 

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood. 
We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. 
We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss. 
We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs. You 
get Alabama. 
We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states 
pay their fair share. 

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the 
Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a 
bunch of single moms. 

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and 
anti-war, and we’re going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at 
once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have 
kids they’re apparently willing to send to their deaths for no 
purpose, and they don’t care if you don’t show pictures of their 
children’s caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and 
hope that the WMDs turn up, but we’re not willing to spend our 
resources in Bush’s Quagmire. 

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent 
of the country’s fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple 
and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation’s fresh fruit, 95 percent of 
America’s quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 
90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most 
of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and 
condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Harvard, Yale, 
Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT. 

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 
percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care 
costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the 
tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern 
Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, 
Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. 

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you. 

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was 
actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred 
unless we’re discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say 
that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved 
in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy b*****ds believe you are people 
with higher morals then we lefties. 

By the way, we’re taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt 
weed they grow in Mexico. 

Peace out, 
Blue States

Link.

Mac vs. P.C.: The True Battle (WARNING! This is GROSS!)

Security Risk!

Way to go, Bushies! Always putting America first!

The United States has outsourced the manufacturing of its electronic passports to overseas companies — including one in Thailand that was victimized by Chinese espionage — raising concerns that cost savings are being put ahead of national security, an investigation by The Washington Times has found. [more]

Eyy, More Supporters for Obama

Remember, though, it’s not over yet. Herbert Hoover can still be re-elected….