To recap: one of Obama’s advisors, Gen. McPeak, once made a claim in an old interview about resistance to change in U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine coming in part from “New York and Miami,” which almost everyone sought to make into an invidious “anti-Semitic” statement.  Today comes news that the McCain camp has won the support of a major Jewish donor from south Florida, who had previously been a major contributor to Democratic campaigns, because of Obama’s alleged weakness on Israel.

As The Hill explains:

Jewish support is especially important in Florida, a crucial swing state where Obama trails McCain in recent polls. Jewish voters make up about 5 percent of the electorate in that state. Florida’s Jewish community is also a lucrative source of political fundraising. [bold mine-DL]

Jewish Democrats are concerned about Obama’s stance toward Israel, and many big donors from this group supported Clinton. McCain has moved aggressively in recent days to win their allegiance since Clinton dropped her White House bid.    

 
“Her dropping out was huge in terms of potential for crossover voting and crossover support,” said Cantor.
Jewish Democrats are concerned about Obama for several reasons. While stumping in Iowa last year, Obama told Democratic activists, “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.”
 

Some Jewish voters interpreted the statement as a sign that Obama would be overly sympathetic to the Palestinian side in future peace negotiations with Israel. And some are concerned about a senior Obama adviser’s comments regarding the influence of American Jews on foreign policy. Merrill “Tony” McPeak, the former Air Force chief of staff, told the Portland Oregonian newspaper in 2003 that the political influence of the Jewish community had hampered efforts to negotiate peace in the Middle East [bold mine-DL].

So here we have a case of a prominent south Florida donor breaking with the Democrats because of concerns about Obama’s support for Israel, and these concerns are based at least partly on the claims by McPeak that Jewish voters in south Florida serve as an impediment in making significant changes to U.S. policy towards Israel and Palestine.  So we are seeing a candidate losing some important backing in south Florida because of merely perceived insufficient support for Israel, and that perception is driven in no small part by the fact that one of the candidate’s advisors said that there is no change in policy because politicians are afraid of being punished by Jewish voters in south Florida for deviating from the status quo on Israel.  The very thing McPeak was describing is happening for all to see, and people are even attributing part of it to the fact that McPeak once noted this phenomenon five years ago.  Obviously, McPeak is crazy.

The irony of all this is that Obama proposes to change absolutely nothing about U.S. policy towards Israel and Palestine, yet he is still being treated as if he would because some people in his orbit have been impolitic enough to explain part of the reason why nothing changes very much.  Even though Obama’s position on Israel is essentially indistinguishable from that of Clinton, McCain or the Bush administration, he is suffering the political cost of the mere perception that his position is somehow different.  If that doesn’t drive home the validity of McPeak’s observations from 2003, I’m not sure what could.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats’ nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America’s image abroad — an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush’s invocation of a post-9/11 “crusade,” Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors — than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years. ~Thomas Friedman

No exaggeration is needed.  Very little is better than nothing.  In other words, instead of doing absolutely nothing to improve America’s image and much to damage it, Obama’s nomination has had a modestly positive effect for the time being. 

You have to enjoy how Friedman threw in the (bipartisan) opposition to the Dubai ports deal, as if the average Egyptian could be bothered with whether some company from the UAE was permitted to oversee various American ports.  If it does bother some of them, perhaps we could put it to the Egyptians this way–do you want the British running the Canal again?  Of course they don’t, and if it counts as “xenophobic” to insist on being able to secure your ports and waterways then almost every nation on earth is going to be found guilty.

Presumably, when Obama was at 41% in Rasmussen tracking poll, this was also deeply meaningful.  Or maybe not, since things have now swung back the other way.  The general election is likely to be very close, and I think we can expect seesawing national polls for the next several months.  If Obama loses ground over the summer, it does not mean that he is doomed, and if McCan takes the lead it is not at all certain that he can actually win.  What is certain is that it should never have been this close.  So it is interesting to see how much importance Obama boosters are putting on the risibly small “bump” that Obama has received from effectively securing the nomination.  They must be a little concerned that their candidate keeps running behind the generic Democratic ballot (at least when not counting leaners) and cannot seem to expand beyond the boundaries of the old Gore-Kerry coalitions despite incredibly favourable circumstances.

Update: John Cole questions my claim about Obama boosters, so I should provide some linksthatshowthe kind of thing I mean.  Yes, this post was mostly a response to Sullivan and to some of my more Obamaniac commenters, and so I should have specified that I was really referring in this case to one particular Obama booster.  So let’s leave aside the business about Obama boosters.  In any case, isn’t it surprising (and, from an anti-GOP perspective, depressing) that in this most Democratic of years the Democratic nominee has reached 50% for just the first time in national polls against the representative of a deeply loathed party?

The new argument against Obama from some on the right is that he is supposedly interested in cutting “defense spending.”  The non-interventionist would respond that we spend very little on actual defense, but I suspect the joke would be lost on anyone who thinks that Obama wants to slash the Pentagon’s budget.  Here is Obama’s view of what the military budget should be in the future:

We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines. Bolstering these forces is about more than meeting quotas. We must recruit the very best and invest in their capacity to succeed. That means providing our servicemen and servicewomen with first-rate equipment, armor, incentives, and training — including in foreign languages and other critical skills. Each major defense program should be reevaluated in light of current needs, gaps in the field, and likely future threat scenarios. Our military will have to rebuild some capabilities and transform others. At the same time, we need to commit sufficient funding to enable the National Guard to regain a state of readiness.

This would necessarily involve large increases above current spending levels.  His campaign website restates all of these points almost verbatim. 

I take Klein’s point that Obama’s record is thin and it is difficult to know for certain whether Obama would follow through on these proposals, but very clearly his stated, official position is to expand military spending and domestic spending significantly.  If you think that federal spending on both is excessive, as I do, this is a demonstrably worse position than any other candidate’s, and I suspect many Obama voters would agree that expanding the size of the military is not a top priority for them.  Obama presumably doesn’t think there needs to be a trade-off between exploding the budget with new domestic initiatives and doing the same with new military funding, since he intends on raising the rates of several different taxes and levying a new one every now and then. 

As Obama has been moving into the general election, he has not needed to move towards the “center” on foreign policy because he was largely already there last year.  Remarkably, for someone who claims that he will challenge the “mindset” that led to the war in Iraq and wants to “turn the page” on the practices of the administration, Obama offers quite a lot of continuity with this administration.  Why his critics would want to emphasise the possibility of his stark differences with Mr. Bush, when this will only make him more popular, is truly beyond me.  Once revealed as offering little in the way of the “change” that he preaches in the area of policy that has most damaged the administration’s reputation, Obama’s appeal ought to collapse like a house of cards.          

P.S.  I do have to agree with Klein, however, that his dodging of the questions about Jim Johnson’s dodgy loans is pathetic.  Whatever one thinks about the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis, having those who are possibly ethically challenged be the ones responsible for vetting the list of possible VP selections is not really consistent with the high-minded, open and transparent government-reform shtick.  Updated: Johnson, who doesn’t “work” for Obama, just resigned from the VP selection process.  What was an irrelevant “game” yesterday has become a serious problem today that warrants his departure.

Reihan has a smart article in The Spectator on social change in the U.S., and he gets extra points for making a clever trans-Atlantic electoral reference:

On 13 May, the Democrats had their own Crewe and Nantwich in Mississippi, where Democrat Travis Childers soundly defeated Republican Greg Davis.

While it is very clever, the comparison isn’t exact, since MS-01 was filled with registered Democrats who previously reliably voted for Republicans, party affiliations were not listed on the ballot and Childers had strong local connections that won him strong rural and small town support.  Crewe and Nantwich was more startling and more significant, because it represented a wholesale repudiation of Labour in a parliamentary by-election that confirmed the local election blowout victory the Tories had just had.  Flukey Democratic wins in Southern states are not necessarily unheard of–think of Doug Nick Lampson’s odd success in TX-22 two years ago–but Tory wins in by-elections are.  (In fairness, Reihan goes on to note the differences between our special elections and British by-elections.)

However, I have to take issue with Reihan’s description of LA-06 as a “conservative bastion” for reasons I have given before.  The demographics of the district shifted significantly between 2004 and 2008 because of Katrina refugees, and this was masked in electoral results in 2006 by the fact that the Democrats did not recruit a candidate with Cazayoux’s profile.  Indeed, they failed to recruit anyone.  Baker was unopposed in 2006 in a year when his traditional margin of victory would have likely been reduced noticeably.  Republicans were blindsided in Louisiana because they were still operating as if the Baton Rouge area was the same as it was four years earlier. 

Actually, in a way the Republican failure in LA-06 dramatically demonstrates the point Reihan is making: the GOP is basically oblivious to ongoing social change, including such basics as the political effects of demographic change.  This is one reason why they are continually refighting the last electoral war (or sometimes they are fighting two or three wars ago), because they seem fixated on how things were when the GOP and the President were still reasonably popular and they are not responding at all to the rapid changes that some of their own policies have (unwisely) unleashed.  Republicans continue to talk about “rebranding,” but what they have failed to see is that their traditional “market” has all but collapsed.

Buried within the Mary Grabar column that everyoneis ridiculing for its opening paragraph are the interesting and important claims made by Claes Ryn.  Unfortunately, the heart of Grabar’s argument has been lost on these critics because of the inclusion of the irrelevant remarks about the presidential election.  Grabar writes:

Claes G. Ryn, in the Fall 2007 50th anniversary issue of Modern Age, accurately attributes the decline of intellectual conservatism to an abandonment of tradition, philosophical foundations, and artistic expressions, for a focus on political pragmatism, manifested in a fondness for economics and business. Professor Ryn writes, “in trying to effect a renewal of American and Western society, winning and exercising political power cannot take the place of the patient and demanding intellectual and artistic efforts that, in time, might change the mind and the imagination of a people.”

What is unfortunate about Dr. Grabar’s column is that she seems to have missed that her own initial framing of the culture wars in terms of presidential politics and bizarre visions of Obama’s legions looting and pillaging in the quads partakes of the same preoccupation with politics that has contributed to the decline that she is lamenting in this paragraph.  Further, I would add that Dr. Grabar is not doing any favours for intellectual conservatism or the edification of students by making the academy seem so forbidding to conservatives that only a fool would want to embark on an academic career rather than take up the more practical and lucrative “fondness for economics and business.”  Certainly no one will come away from this column with the idea that conservatives should make any attempt to challenge the trends that she describes; she makes it plain that it is a fool’s errand.  Meanwhile, by connecting the state of educational institutions to an Obama victory in November, she reinforces the soul- and mind-killing obsession with party politics that has been as much the ruin of intellectual conservatism as the preference for economics and business.  With her first paragraph she undermines the rest of her message, which is one that conservatives desperately need to hear more often.

As I have said before, one of the structural reasons why the academy has drifted left for decades is that the lifestyle of academics is not especially conducive to stable, settled family life, so that what you might call the ‘natural’ conservatism that comes from family life does not enter the scene until well after the academics are more or less fully formed in their attitudes and prejudices.  Likewise, the academy does not tend to attract those who need to support a family, especially a large one, because the financial burdens of paying for graduate school and paltry income early on in teaching careers along with the frequent demand for mobility are incompatible with supporting a family.  Once the leftward drift begins, it steadily reinforces itself as those liable to pull these institutions back to the right, so to speak, go into other lines of work where their values are rewarded rather than constantly put under scrutiny and question.  The work of imagination is in some respects more demanding, because it entails not only defending received traditions but also reproducing and building on them.  That is more laborious and time-consuming than the transitory party and movement boosterism, but its effects will also be more enduring and not as reversible.  As I argue in a forthcoming column, conservatives need to remember that it is supposed to be their central insight that culture can change politics, which makes one wonder why conservatives (myself included) spend so much of their time on politics rather than engaging in the creative and imaginative work of fashioning the culture they want for their posterity.

The enormous disappointment-generating machine that is the Obama campaign has been working overtime lately.  The latest to feel its effects is Uri Avnery:

The transparent fawning of Obama on the Israel lobby stands out more than similar efforts by the other candidates.

Why? Because his dizzying success in the primaries was entirely due to his promise to bring about a change, to put an end to the rotten practices of Washington and to replace the old cynics with a young, brave person who does not compromise his principles.

And lo and behold, the very first thing he does after securing the nomination of his party is to compromise his principles.

If it’s any consolation to Mr. Avnery, there was nothing in the AIPAC speech that compromised Obama’s principles, since this speech was almost identical to the one he gave last year and is entirely consistent with every major statement and action he has made concerning Israel.  Contrary to the hopes of his admirers and the accusations of his critics, when it comes to Israel and most of America’s Near East policy he is utterly conventional.  Avnery is right that opposing the war was a move that would not win any favour with “pro-Israel” forces, but it was much easier to take such a stand during a Democratic Senate primary in one of the most Democratic and antiwar states in America than it is during a presidential election.  The thing that should worry Obamaites about the AIPAC speech isn’t just the embarrassing pandering, but that as someone in national office Obama will not go against such a major lobby during the election, which suggests that he may never do so.  More worrying for his fans has to be the possibility that Obama gave the speech he did because he genuinely believes everything he said, and that his opposition to the war in Iraq was essentially a fluke and not at all representative of how he understands the U.S. role in the Near East and the world.  Of course, it is entirely consistent to be more or less conventionally “pro-Israel” and antiwar concerning Iraq, since almost everyone acknowledges that the war has been very bad for Israel and has empowered Iran in ways that have been detrimental to Israel, but politically it is a strange position to be in because the supporters of hawkish Israeli policies and hawkish American policies tend to align with one another.  Obama is an odd man out in this respect, since he is quite happy to support Israeli hawkishness, even to the point of unequivocally backing their counterproductive and failed war in Lebanon (he might have called it a “rash and dumb war we can believe in”), while demonstrating more prudence when it comes to the American use of force in the region.  His admirers will still say that half a loaf is better than none, but the plaintive cry of Mr. Avnery in this column is representative of a lot of Obama’s admirers who are discovering day by day that there is not much about U.S. foreign policy that Obama will change.  The thing is that he never promised he would change U.S. foreign policy in large ways–this was something that his admirers imputed to him because they assumed that it had to be true. 

Update: More lamentations about Obama’s AIPAC speech here, here, here, here and here.  Meanwhile, the Post is quite satisfied.

Andrew Ferguson leads you on a tour of Hyde Park, which is supposed to persuade you of…well, I’m not quite sure what, but I suppose it must be an attempt to make you think that Hyde Park is a frightening and alien landscape.  I won’t pretend that Hyde Park isn’t quite unusual in some ways, since it is an area tied to a major research university in the middle of the South Side, but as a place of exceptionally far-out left wingery it is frankly nothing compared to Berkeley or the People’s Republic of Madison.  Obviously, because of the demographics of the South Side and the culture of at least some parts of the University Hyde Park is quite far to the left politically, while the neighbourhood’s churches range from the predictably liberal Protestant to the charismatic evangelical.  Support for Obama is ubiquitous here, as you would expect, and many students have been serving as campaign workers for him.  But it isn’t as if he overshadows everything here, either.  My limited connection to Obama’s presence in the neighbourhood was once over four years ago when I was stopped on the street by a man with a petition to get Obama on the ballot when he was running for Senate, but as a New Mexico voter I coudn’t sign it.  Aside from the typical yard signs and buttons, you might otherwise not know that you’re living in the heart of Obama country if you happened to be visiting. 

There is also something about Hyde Park that Ferguson misrepresents when he says:

Only in the last few months did the neighborhood get a reliable, clean, and well-stocked grocery store.

This is misleading, since it treats the arrival of Treasure Island as an all together new development, when it serves as the replacement for the Co-Op that finally closed down earlier this year.  His following description of the Co-Op is likewise misleading, and it suggests that he never actually visited it when it was still open and fully functioning.  He refers to its “empty shelves and accumulated gunk [that] attested to its Soviet-like disdain for market forces.”  Ooh, Soviet-like!  That’s scary!  True enough, the Co-Op operated at a consistent loss and was finally forced into bankruptcy, but before its demise became known its shelves weren’t empty and I cannot recall seeing any “gunk” accumulated there.  If you go to the Treasure Island today, you will find a store that looks almost identical in every respect to the one it replaced (though their wine selection is at present worse).   

Ferguson also invokes Brookline as a symbol of Dukakis’ alienation from the rest of the country, which is strange, since I’ve been to Brookline and found it quite normal as well, at least as suburbs go.  They have a Greek Orthodox seminary in Brookline, which I found to be an impressive institution during my brief visit there last year.  Perhaps it’s a measure of how long I’ve been here, but as “rootless” as modern Hyde Park may be, or as recent as its current character may be, it is more of a neighbourhood than most of the other places I’ve been in Chicagoland. 

Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul. ~Mark Morford (who is apparently not kidding)

Of course, the moment you read that bit about these “spiritually advanced people,” you should start keeping a lookout for the nearest Scientologist offering to use his Tech to help you advance.   

I was ahead of the curve in noticing something related to this Obama-worship:  

This is someone who says, “Obviously, you are all terribly wrong, but I am such a good guy that I am going to indulge you in your false notions out of compassion for your suffering.”  The Messiah references have been all wrong–this is Obama as bodhisattva.  “You cling to your delusions, but I am here to teach you a path of liberation from all such attachments.” 

If he has these magical powers, perhaps the Obama campaign could arrange to have the city of San Francisco sealed inside its own pocket of the space-time continuum until the election is over.

There has been a slight uptick in Obama’s national polling since he has “clinched” the nomination and it is showing up in a number of different tracking polls, but what is so striking about this uptick is how modest and small it is.  Yes, things can change, but isn’t a more or less immediate improvement the definition of receiving a “bump” from something?  If Obama’s numbers go up two or three weeks from now, this will not be a “bump” from locking up the nomination, but from something else.  Obama has been in his position as presumptive nominee for almost a week since the last primary, and yet the weekend polling seems to have shown very little movement.  Some boosters used to boast of the possibility of a ten point gain after the nomination was wrapped up, and in most polls he has gained perhaps two or three.  For the first time ever, if leaners are included, he has reached 50% in the Rasmussen tracking poll this week, and this is a mark McCain has gone over a number of times.  Count me as one underwhelmed by the rallying ’round Obama.