Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

Is Sarah Palin the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012? Yes, suggests US News & World Report’s Paul Bedard, at least if she loses this round. Bedard writes:

Don’t laugh. Here’s how they say she can get there from here, should the polls stick and McCain lose in November. First, Palin spends more time in Washington, getting to know the lay of the land. Maybe she moves to take a leadership role in the Republican Governors Association or the National Governors Association, a perch that helped to launch Bill Clinton. Next, she travels internationally to world energy and military hot spots. In essence, she builds a more complete résumé that will make her an easier sell on the national stage. And, of course, she wins re-election in 2010. And along the way, she proves herself better than this year’s throwaways, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.

He claims the idea comes from inside the Republican Party:

Says a key Republican promoting the scenario: “As of today, Palin is the top contender. She clearly has the potential to be a winning top-of-the-ticket candidate: solid character, solid values, fire in the belly, etc. But four years is a long time. Neither Romney, Huckabee, or others have the complete package. If Palin spends a bit more time traveling overseas and domestically, broadening her horizons, and wins re-election in Alaska in 2010, she will be the nominee in 2012.”

Is he being spun?

Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton both announced today that, in fact, they oppose Iran’s evil intentions vis-a-vis Israel. The silly stunt Hillary pulled of cancelling her appearance at today’s anti-Ahmadinejad rally in New York because Sarah Palin had been invited too – and the Jewish planners’ subsequent disinvite to all politicians, including Palin – was disheartening to those of us who genuinely believe the regime in Teheran is dangerous.

What is to prevent the Iranians from concluding that American politicians’ bold rhetoric is subservient to – so perhaps only meant for? – local consumption. Is Iran an American politician’s tool to court Jewish voters, or a matter of genuine concern and strategy?

Wait, Sarah Palin was not a member of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, as The New York Times claimed last Tuesday? It was actually her husband?

Huh. Who’d've thunk it? The mighty New York Times thwarted in its quest for truth by, um, the fact that someone told ‘em so.

The Times’ Caucus blog explains:

The information in the Times article was based on a statement issued Monday night by Lynette Clark, the party’s chairwoman, who said that Ms. Palin joined the party in 1994 and in 1996 changed her registration to Republican. On Tuesday night, Ms. Clark said that her initial statement was incorrect and had been based on erroneous information provided by another member of the party whom she declined to identify.

They didn’t bother to check with Palin?

The Times retraction went out fast, already on Tuesday, but apparently it wasn’t prominent enough to be widely noticed. So thanks to Tom Gross for bringing it to our attention. Tom notes other clearly accidental media blunders about Sarah Palin:

No, Sarah Palin didn’t support Pat Buchanan in the 1999-2000 campaign; she was an official on the campaign of Republican presidential contender Steve Forbes.

No, her eldest son Track (who is deploying to Iraq this week) didn’t join the National Guard because he was a drug addict.

No, her daughters Willow and Piper aren’t named after witches on TV.

No, she’s not anti-Semitic. In fact, she has an Israeli flag in her office, and quietly turned up for services at a newly opened Wasilla synagogue to pay her respects.

No, she didn’t cut funding for unwed mothers, but increased it by 354 percent (and no, the Washington Post doesn’t appear to have corrected its story about this despite being asked to do so).

Then there’s this. We really don’t know what to make of this. As summarized by the Sydney Morning Herald:

The internet was aflame at the weekend after the liberal internet columnist Charley James accused the polarising Governor of Alaska of making a racist, sexist remark to friends while dining at a restaurant in Alaska just after Barack Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

“So Sambo beat the bitch,” she said, according to James, whose source was the waitress who served Mrs Palin. No one else has interviewed the waitress – known only as Lucille – to confirm it and none of the other diners have come forward.

But it was James’s exhibit A in an article that accused Mrs Palin of being “openly racist” and “vindictive and mean”.

The ADL put out a review on Friday of a new book that claims the Iraq War was generated by Jews working for Israel. This one is a doozy!

John Hostettler was a six-term Republican congressman from Indiana who lost his 2006 reelection bid. He’s a die-hard conservative without a whole lot of ideological complexity. He’s pro-gun, pro-life, anti-estate tax, even anti-federal student loans.

The ADL writes:

Hostettler gets to the red meat of his thesis when he focuses on the neoconservatives, relying on names such as Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Shulsky, to convey the specter of a covert cabal that has intrigued to encourage the United States to go to war for the benefit of Israel.

This claim is getting old, but it doesn’t seem to be getting any weaker. Yes, many senior Republicans are Jews. So are many senior Democrats. It isn’t being Jewish that made them invade Iraq, it’s being Republican hawks that did it. Was Douglas Feith more or less important than Donald Rumsfeld? Than Dick Cheney?

As John Bolton once told us when we asked if he considered himself a neocon, “no, I’m a conservative. Neocons are liberals who were mugged by reality. I’ve never been a liberal.” Or as Rumsfeld is reputed to have said in response to this conspiracy theory, “Do they think we all just got off the apple cart?” It was these non-Jewish non-neocon Republican hawks who went to Iraq.

As the ADL notes:

For someone who was a six-term congressman, he seems to have a grievous lack of understanding of the messy and argumentative way policy – foreign or domestic — actually gets made.

American Jews, we should note, have opposed the war more than the average Democrat, more than the average American Catholic, even more than atheists and African-Americans. Republican Jews, too, opposed the war more than the average Republican. Here’s a news report of Jewish opinion on the war put out by Gallup in early 2007. The key points are quoted here:

Asked if “the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq,” 77 percent of American Jews said it had, while only 21% believed the deployment was not a mistake. This figure is in marked contrast to the American average, where only 52% indicated opposition to the war and 46% indicated support.

The Jewish opposition to the war, according to Gallup figures, is not new, and preceded most Americans turning against the war. In the first two years of the war (2003 and 2004), when 52% of Americans supported the war, 61% of Jews opposed it. Even before the beginning of hostilities in 2002 and early 2003, US Jews supported the war by just 49% to 48%. Americans generally supported it by 57% to 37%.

The Gallup figures also show that Jewish opposition to the war is not explainable by the high Democratic Party affiliation among Jews. Even within the Democratic Party, Jewish opposition to the war was greater than that expressed by non-Jewish Democrats. In polls taken from 2005 to 2007, 89% of Jewish Democrats opposed the war and just 8% supported it, while non-Jewish Democrats opposed the war by 78% to 20%. …

The Gallup Organization itself noted that “these data show that the average American Jew – even those who are Republicans and may support the Bush administration on other matters – opposes the war.”

McCain did choose a woman, as we were told he would, but not the one we thought was the front-running contender. Sarah Palin, we believed, was too inexperienced, too new, too provincial. After a few years in small-town Alaskan politics, she catapulted to the governor’s mansion in 2006, where she’s served no more than two years before McCain chose her for his VP this week. If it’s at all possible, she’s even less experienced than Obama.

Then there’s the personal story: mother of five, the youngest child, Trig, with Down’s Syndrome, the oldest son, Track, serving in a US Army infantry brigade that will deploy to Iraq in a month.

Her degree is from the University of Idaho, as opposed to the East Coast credentials of the opposition. She likes hunting and fishing.

At left, Palin looking like any hometown girl on her way to the gym. But she’s not. This picture is of a governor visiting her state’s National Guardsmen in Kuwait. Human touch, anyone?

This comes down the grapevine. A good friend, well-connected in Washington, tells us this week that McCain’s VP announcement on Friday is almost certainly going to be a woman, and signs are pointing to former HP CEO Carly Fiorina. Not everyone will be happy about this development – reactions were mixed in April and May when her name was floated – but it’s an interesting idea: a woman, an economist, taken from outside politics to shore up McCain’s economic credentials and, well, to be a woman.

As our friend noted, “Joe Biden got 9,000 votes in the primaries. Hillary Clinton got 18,000,000. Lots of people, lots of women, are wondering why Biden got picked as the VP.”

If McCain fields a serious female running mate, an outsider who neither attracts nor angers the conservative wing of his party, his chances suddenly look extremely good come November.