Can Obama Pull The Jewish Vote?

Will it be possible for Barack Obama to
pull the Jewish vote and at the same
time not upset the Muslims? Check out
the article below and you decide.


Barack Obama certainly has work to do in bringing Jews, a bedrock Democratic constituency, over to his side before November. In Pennsylvania, the last primary state with a good-sized Jewish population--they accounted for one in twelve Democratic voters there--Obama lost Jews to Hillary Clinton 62-percent to 38-percent. It's a vulnerability Obama has long recognized. He's made a habit of meeting with Jewish activists to address their concerns, rooted largely in his stated support for talking to Iran, past sympathetic statements toward the Palestinians, and the fact that he's not Hillary Clinton, who has neither of those first two problems.

Now, Obama has given an interview to The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg to talk Jews and Israel. The second half of the interview captures Obama's Israel/Middle East positions, and has the Illinois senator challenging some of the Jewish state's policies even while attempting to establish credibility as a reliable backer. What God-o-Meter finds more intriguing, however, is the first half, in which Obama speaks cogently and in detail about what the Jews and Israel mean to him as a person:

[W]hen I think about the Zionist idea, I think about how my feelings about Israel were shaped as a young man -- as a child, in fact. I had a camp counselor when I was in sixth grade who was Jewish-American but who had spent time in Israel, and during the course of this two-week camp he shared with me the idea of returning to a homeland and what that meant for people who had suffered from the Holocaust, and he talked about the idea of preserving a culture when a people had been uprooted with the view of eventually returning home. There was something so powerful and compelling for me, maybe because I was a kid who never entirely felt like he was rooted. That was part of my upbringing, to be traveling and always having a sense of values and culture but wanting a place. So that is my first memory of thinking about Israel.

And then that mixed with a great affinity for the idea of social justice that was embodied in the early Zionist movement and the kibbutz, and the notion that not only do you find a place but you also have this opportunity to start over and to repair the breaches of the past. I found this very appealing.

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