Zel Lurie: Articles & Notes

A minority of voters defeats the Democrats

written for the Jewish Journal, 12.1.2010 issue

On the first Tuesday of November, two out of five citizens of the United States went to their polling stations and cast a ballot. Three out of five eligible voters stayed home. Many have never registered.

The 40 percent who voted gave Obama a “shellacking,” as he has aptly put it. The lack of jobs was a major factor in the Democratic defeat.

The 2010 midterm elections were over ten million voters shy of the presidential elections two years ago which swept the first black man into the White House.

Who actually voted last month? Elderly white men, who told pollsters that they were conservative, led the pogrom against the Democrats.

Who stayed home? Obama’s base. Voters under thirty; single women, members of ethnic minorities and unions. All of them refused to vote for the incumbent Democratic congressman and the Republicans won by default. The number of votes for Congress fell by a dramatic 45 million from 2008.

Obama, who gave the young and their elders such hope two years ago, was slammed on the nose. He has wasted two years trying to compromise with the Republicans.

The Republicans refused to compromise. Their strategy was to get rid of Obama by saying no. So far it has worked.

They have won the House of Representatives. For the first time in six decades, the Democrats have fewer than 200 seats.

Does this victory give them a mandate to enact their program? Absolutely not. They will bite at the health reform law. They will try to make abortions more difficult. They will  cut taxes for the wealthy. They will once again try to privatize Social Security. They will fight laws to improve the environment. They will continue to fight Obama’s efforts to mitigate the economic crisis. But creating jobs and cutting the deficit will escape them.

President Clinton suffered a greater debacle in 1994. He lost both houses of Congress to the Republicans. He fought on, wisely and well,  and won a second term in 1996. Obama will follow suit.

J Street came out on top

The results of the midterm elections are not entirely bleak. JStreetPAC, a separate organization from J Street, did rather well. They endorsed 55 incumbent Democrats, some of them committee chairmen, and contributed to their campaigns. Forty-five - or 82% - won.

One fourth of the Democratic caucus in the House will be endorsees of the young pro-Israel, pro-peace organization, which has supported President Obama in his dispute with Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Last week, J Street came out in front of Obama. They urged the President to take bolder action for peace.

The number of J Street supporters in Congress will increase in the next election. Right-wing Israeli governments will no longer rely on Congress to mitigate the Administration’s relentless opposition to Israel’s support of Jewish settlements. This happened time and again in every Administration from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama.

J Street and JStreetPAC are hardly two years old. They will hold their second national convention in Washington in February.

JStreetPAC did a remarkable fund-raising job. They raised $1.5 million of taxable dollars, more than any other pro-Israel PAC.

But their success was not unmitigated. Two Senatorial candidates, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, were the two largest recipients of Street funds. Both lost by slim margins.

On the other hand there was the decisive victory of the third largest  receiver of the PAC’s funds, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky in Chicago. Her opponent who was also Jewish, attacked J Street directly. He demanded that she return JStreetPAC’s money. She trounced him 2 to 1.

My Congressman, Ron Klein, who replaced a Republican in 2006, suffered defeat by a Tea Party supporter, Allen West. Klein was not endorsed by JStreetPAC. He supported Netanyahu in his fight with Obama.

West was far out hawkish on Israel. He opposed a two-state solution, which Netanyahu’s government officially supports. Does his victory mean that the majority of voters in my district oppose the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine?

Of course not.