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Thursday January 31, 2008

If the polls are right, it will be Clinton’s night

by ron kampeas
jta

Seven years of hard work cultivating the Jewish leadership in New York and nationally paid off for Sen. Hillary Clinton — at least in the polls.

In an American Jewish Committee poll late last year, she scored top approval ratings in the field of presidential candidates among Jewish Americans. Her approval rating among Jewish Democrats was 70 percent. Among all Jews it was

53 percent. And in the most recent California Field Poll, Clinton had a 12-point lead over Sen. Barack Obama in the state.

But now she is hoping to see some real returns on these numbers as she engages in a tough battle for the Democratic nomination.

As first lady, Clinton’s pro-Israel record at times seemed flat, even superficial, against the breadth and depth her husband brought to the issue.

Whereas Bill Clinton could name the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City, opine on Zionist history and deliver a persuasive “shalom chaver” at Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral, Hillary Clinton’s repertoire was limited to introducing an Israeli early childhood education program to Arkansas.

As late as December 1998, during the couple’s visit to Israel, the first lady’s affiliation with Hebrew University’s Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters, known as HIPPY, was the centerpiece of her leg of the visit.

It didn’t help her profile among Jews that the Clinton administration used her as a stalking horse to advocate for a Palestinian state. Then in 1999, on the eve of her first bid for the Senate, she embraced Suha Arafat after the Palestinian leader’s wife accused Israel of deliberately poisoning Palestinian children. Clinton said later she hadn’t been paying close attention to the simultaneous translation.

It soon became clear, however, that she was willing to listen. Some of the positions were all about horse-trading. President Clinton’s final pardons included four residents of the Chassidic enclave in New Square, N.Y., who had been convicted of defrauding the government. She received overwhelming support from the town during the senatorial election.

Once elected to the Senate, Clinton reached out to Jewish organizational leaders and soon became a staple of the Jewish circuit. Hardly a Washington event run by a national Jewish group does not include an address by Clinton.

On many issues, particularly in the domestic arena, little gap exists between Clinton and the predominantly liberal Jewish organizational community. As first lady, Clinton had an established record promoting universal health care, and as senator she worked hard to stop Bush administration rollbacks on the Medicare program, a position which is almost universally favored by a Jewish population aging more rapidly than other Americans.

In other areas Clinton exhibited a subtle grasp of issues that concern the community, strongly backing discretionary Homeland Security funds to help protect nonprofits from terrorist attack. The bulk of those funds have gone to Jewish institutions.

She also has adopted as her own a campaign to press Arab governments to remove incitement against Jews and Israel from their textbooks.

Clinton took a hit last fall from her party’s base when she voted in favor of a nonbinding amendment that recommended sanctions against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Bush eventually ordered the sanctions, favored by the pro-Israel lobby as a means of pressing Iran to give up its suspected nuclear weapons program.

That drew criticism from her competitors, who said the vote would embolden the Bush administration into waging war against Iran. She stood her ground.

“Iran is seeking nuclear weapons,” she said in an October 2007 MSNBC sponsored debate.

“And the Iranian Revolution- ary Guard is in the forefront of that, as they are in the sponsorship of terrorism.”

She added, “I prefer vigorous diplomacy, and I happen to think economic sanctions are part of vigorous diplomacy.”

It was straight from the pro-Israel playbook, and it illustrates what has attracted not only Jewish voter support but, perhaps even more substantively, Jewish fundraiser support.

Two of her major backers in this campaign supported polar opposites among the Democrats in 2004: Lonnie Kaplan of New Jersey went for Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and his tough foreign policy, and Steve Grossman opted for ex-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who is fiercely antiwar.

At a National Jewish Democratic Council candidates’ forum last spring, Grossman and Kaplan, both former presidents of AIPAC, sat next to each other and conferred occasionally on their favored candidate: Hillary Clinton.

The primary issue: Dissecting the election for Jewish voters

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