BY CHRIS MEGERIAN Cox News Service
Illinois Senator Barack Obama appears to have less support from Jews than previous Democratic candidates.
WASHINGTON — Halie Soifer is building an army.
Assembled in her Delray Beach office are more than 20 people, mostly seniors and all Jewish, who have been drafted into the campaign to elect Barack Obama president.
Each of them is armed with a series of talking points and a pin with the candidate’s name in Hebrew. Then they are deployed to the condominiums and gated communities of Palm Beach County.
CRUCIAL VOTES
For Soifer, the campaign’s Jewish vote director in Florida, these are some of her most crucial foot soldiers.
Palm Beach County Jews are becoming a battleground demographic in a battleground state. That’s because Obama could have the least Jewish support of any Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter faced Ronald Reagan in 1980.
A national poll released Thursday by the American Jewish Committee has him leading McCain 57 to 30 percent among Jewish voters, with 13 percent undecided.
The numbers are evidence of how Jews have trended, if only slightly, to the political right in recent years.
Republicans have been gaining ground in the last few presidential elections. From 1992 to 2004, the percentage of Jews voting Republican doubled to 22 percent.
“With Obama polling at historic lows among Jewish voters, this kind of shift in a close election could have an important impact in the outcome of the race,” said Matthew Brooks, president of the Republican JewishCoalition.
OBAMA’S ‘PROBLEM’
Obama has been accused of having a “Jewish problem” ever since polls showed greater Jewishsupport for Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., in the primary battle. Conservative critics say his willingness to meet with Iranian President Ahmadinejad, an idea the RJC calls “naive and dangerous,” is evidence of his lax support for Israel. It’s an image he’s sought to dispel, repeatedly stating his opposition to a nuclear armed Iran.
On Sept. 8, his campaign announced the launch of six Obama Jewish Community Leadership Committees in Florida to directly engage voters on a grass-roots level.
Kenneth Wald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who studies Jewish voting behavior, said Jewish voters have simply been unfamiliar with Obama, some knowing little more than he has an Arabic middle name, Hussein. “There is a question [whether] someone of that background will be someone that Jews will feel comfortable with,” Wald said.
Source: Miami Herald Sunday, 28 Sep 2008