|
|
October 29, 2004/Cheshvan 14 5765, Vol. 57, No. 9
Candidates eye Israel
RON KAMPEAS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON - Like two surly dinner guests who won't let an argument go, President George Bush and Sen. John Kerry won't get off topic when they take their case to American Jews: It's all Israel all the time.
The prospect of swaying likely voters in a handful of battleground states has brought unprecedented attention to Jewish voters this election season, yet the discussion overwhelmingly has focused on Israel, an issue that no longer pushes Jewish buttons the way it once did.
In increasingly bitter exchanges, each campaign's surrogates and advertise-ments paint the opposing candidate as coddling terrorists, if not imperiling Israel's very existence.
David Harris, the American Jewish Committee's executive director, said the parties still perceive Israel as a potent issue among Jews, even as polls by the AJCommittee and others show the Jewish state declining in importance among Jewish voters.
Harris said the strategy is to nudge Jewish voters back into believing Israel is in danger - thereby returning the issue to top priority status.
"Jewish voters want to be satisfied the candidate understands the importance of the U.S.-Israel issue and will work to strengthen it," Harris said. "If the adversary can puncture a hole in that belief, it may cause some voters to rethink their original positions."
In its final sweep in the days before Election Day on Nov. 2, each side was attempting just such a jab.
"I will make Israel safer than George W. Bush is because I will stand up to those countries that are still supporting Hamas and Hezbollah," Kerry, Democratic senator from Massachusetts, said in Florida on Oct. 24.
At the same time, his campaign distributed an appeal from legal personality Alan Dershowitz that called Bush's Middle East policies "disastrous" for Israel.
For its part, Bush's campaign distributed a Washington Post column by Charles Krauthammer suggesting that Kerry's plan to assert control in Iraq is to "sacrifice Israel" to Arab and European nations. The notion got further reinforcement by The New York Times columnist William Safire on Oct. 25 when he asked Jewish voters who tend to vote Democratic to "give a little added weight" to Israel's security and vote for Bush.
Richard Cohen used his own Washington Post column on Oct. 26 to hit back: "No doubt, George Bush is a true friend of Israel. But so was Bill Clinton and so would be John Kerry," he wrote.
"The issue is not who cares more for Israel, but who can be effective in reducing the violence and bring about a peaceful solution. So far that's not George Bush."
Such high-profile appeals - from the candidates and their surrogates, made in the country's prime op-ed real estate - underscored the weight each side accords the Jewish vote.
That was also evident in this week's final push in Florida culminating a monthlong sweep of Jewish communities in swing states.
Republicans were running their Democratic Jewish trophy, former New York Mayor Ed Koch, through a grueling tour of synagogues and Jewish Community Centers in the southern part of the state Oct. 26-27.
The Kerry campaign was bringing former President Clinton, Dershowitz, Kerry's Jewish brother, Cameron, TV comic Larry David and an array of congressmen into Fort Lauderdale and Miami on the same days.
Additionally, each side made one of its top foreign policy officials available to an American Israel Public Affairs Committee summit in Hollywood, Fla.
|
|
