Being a politically conservative Jew makes one a minority among one’s people, to be sure. But I don’t think even my liberal coreligionists are quite so radically liberal as today’s Democratic party seems to imagine. This exchange (noted by the Washington Free Beacon) between Debbie Wasserman Schultz and interviewer Lee Lazerson of Jewish Life Television is very telling about the limits of what today’s Democratic party is able to say on its own behalf to a relatively important and (maddeningly) loyal constituency:
LEE LAZERSON: Has the president done anything wrong with respect to the Jewish vote?
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: No. On the contrary, the president has an incredible record of support and advocacy on the issues, domestically, that Jews care about–fighting, for example, to make sure that women have the right to make their own reproductive choices; fighting to pass the Affordable Care Act, to make sure that being a woman is not a pre-existing condition, and that insurance companies can’t drop us or deny us coverage, making sure that we have access to affordable birth control without a deductible or a co-pay, while Mitt Romney and the Republicans fought to take us back to a time when we couldn’t make our own reproductive choices, when you didn’t have access to birth control. And we’re re-fighting the same cultural and social battles with the Republicans because they’re controlled by the extremists in the Tea Party. So President Obama’s earned the support of the Jewish community.
Politicians used to insult Jewish voters by implying that all they cared about was Israel. Surely this is much worse.