Editor's Note
March 28, 2008
Obama’s Teshuvah
Neil Rubin
Editor
Some seven months before the November presidential election, the battle lines over the ever-important Jewish vote –– critical in turnout and fundraising — are being drawn.
Jewish Republicans already assume that Sen. Hillary Clinton will not be the Democrat. Former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer recently told the Baltimore’s Republican Jewish Coalition chapter that presumptive GOP nominee Sen. John McCain will face Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
“He can be uplifting and he speaks wonderfully different than most politicians, but he offers false hope ... When it comes to Israel, Barack Obama is a blank slate and an empty slate, a mystery to me,” Mr. Fleischer told 200 people at the Pikesville Hilton while questioning Mr. Obama’s experience and lambasting his alleged naiveté in world affairs.
Specifically at issue now is Mr. Obama’s professing he was unaware until recently of the outrageous anti-American comments of his long-time pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. One’s “Jewdar” also honed in on Rev. Wright’s anti-Israel diatribes and embraces of Rev. Louis Farrakhan and Libyan strongman Muammar Khadaffi.
As a result, Mr. Obama has been forced to plop racial relations into his campaign’s forefront and strove to sooth his party’s Jewish base.
In the latter, he has taken the right actions –– meeting Jewish groups, declaring specific pro-Israel support, and publicly denouncing the comments of Revs. Farrakhan and Wright.
Still, doubts linger for many Jews and will for some time.
Those who would never vote for Mr. Obama anyway will not relinquish such potent ammo. For them, Mr. Obama’s having taken two decades to denounce such hatred reveals either disturbing ignorance or true cowardice, neither a welcome attribute of the next president.
But what about the bulk of American Jews, the self-described moderate Democrats or Independents? Truth be told, the issue is a difficult one for them. But some of them have found what they hope is a thorn in Mr. McCain’s heel –– the endorsement of the GOP-er by Rev. John Hagee, a leading Christian Zionist.
Here, Jews are ambivalent. Rev. Hagee is widely praised by many for a rousing speech at last year’s AIPAC conference. He also has disparaged homosexuals, Moslems and the Catholic Church (“the great whore of Revelations”). After mounting criticism, Mr. McCain, according to the JTA Wire Service, recently condemned the anti-Catholic remarks.
Is there a difference between the status of the two Christian leaders? Well, as “a prominent Jewish Democrat” last week told the New York Jewish Week: “Wright is a scary black guy arguing that America is bad. Hagee is a nutty-sounding white guy who thinks Armageddon is just around the corner, which is hard to take seriously if you’re not a believer.”
The real question for me is this: Can Jews ever accept Mr. Obama’s professed lack of knowledge of Rev. Wright’s offenses?
In our tradition, true teshuvah — “repentance” or “a turning” –– comes in not just admitting mistakes and seeking out those you have wronged, but in again facing a similar situation, this time making the right choice.
Mr. Obama has of late fulfilled that mandate. Is that enough to gain one’s vote when sophistication on dealing with nuclear proliferation, anti-Jewish/ anti-western hatred cultivated in madrassas and reparing this administration’s miserable application of its policies (many, such as the spread of democracy, with which I agree) is needed?
Regardless, Mr. Obama’s once Teflon-like public image now has a chip. That’s good. He is real and he is flawed –– just like Sens. Clinton and McCain.
None of this means that our guard should be dropped. Rev. Wright’s record should continue to be probed, as should Mr. Obama’s. If there are more questions, they must be asked. If Mr. Obama cannot take the heat, he certainly cannot be entrusted with the keys to the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal.
If they want, Jewish voters and others will find reasons to not support Mr. Obama, particularly on the experience question. That’s a fair argument. Blaming him for not addressing his pastor’s arguments no longer is.