… and right into Palm Beach County. Yep, Huggy Bear’s coming to America’s Glans™ tomorrow for a very specific purpose: capturing votes and money from the area’s wealthy Jewish population.
The fund-raiser for McCain at the Ocean Ridge home of Lothar and Carlyn Mayer was put together as a way of “thanking and acknowledging Sen. McCain’s longtime relationship with and support for Israel,” said one of the event’s hosts, Jeffrey Feingold, a Delray Beach periodontist active in state and national Jewish outreach for the GOP.
Republican strategists, and even some local Democratic activists, say McCain has the potential to attract more Jewish votes than President Bush won in 2004. Polls suggest Bush got between 22 percent and 25 percent of the Jewish vote.
Optimistic Republicans point to McCain’s long pro-Israel record in the U.S. Senate, as well as his support from figures such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2000.
From my vantage point as a Dirty Fucking Gentile (DFG), it seems that many Jewish voters in south Florida are making their decisions, or at least being encouraged to make their decisions, pretty much on a single issue: Israel. And that’s just too bad — especially when their champion is a douchebag like Lieberman.
Another concern by many is that Jewish support in Florida is far stronger for Hillary Clinton than for Barack Obama — I say “concern” because to me it still seems probable that Obama will be the nominee. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Delray Beach) is doing his best to overcome that, though.
Sheila Rothman, a Democratic precinct captain who lives in a largely Jewish area west of Boynton Beach, said Obama would “definitely have a problem” in her precinct because many of her neighbors are uneasy about his longtime pastor and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Wright, who recently retired as head of Trinity United Church of Christ that Obama attends in Chicago, made anti-Israel pronouncements from the pulpit and last year in the church bulletin reprinted an essay by a leader of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that advocates Israel’s destruction.
Obama, a 20-year member of the church, has condemned Wright’s views on Israel and called printing the Hamas essay “outrageously wrong.”
U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, an early and ardent Obama endorser who is Jewish, said voters should look beyond Wright.
“I’m voting for Barack Obama. I’m not voting for Rev. Wright,” Wexler said. “Most Americans are well beyond attributing to an individual the ideology of a particular church.”
In Wexler’s heavily Jewish congressional district, 70 percent of Democrats voted for Clinton in the Jan. 29 primary. Only 19 percent chose Obama.
Wexler says many Florida voters simply don’t know enough about Obama, who along with other Democrats refused to campaign in Florida because its primary was held too early, violating party rules.
“I’m quite confident that, when the Jewish community in Florida gets to know Barack Obama, when they see him in South Florida, when he talks about his steadfast support for Israel … Barack Obama will be a very attractive candidate to Jewish people in Florida,” Wexler said.
The outcome of the election in this area likely will depend on how well Obama and his supporters can reinforce the fact that Rev. Wright is not the candidate, nor do his views represent those of Obama.
But in the meantime, we’ve got to deal with tomorrow’s visit from the Dessicated, Goiter-Ridden Near-Corpse. As if it weren’t bad enough to live in the same county as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter …
