Hava negilah, come let us rejoice…if Barack Obama makes it to the White House he
will have a Jew running the show.
V’nismchah.
Kine-ahora
it should only be true, as my old
Bubba used to say,
Oy vey
that nice Jewish boy, the handsome Congressman from Chicago,
Rham Emanuel, will become the chief of staff if Barack Obama makes
it to the White House.
It will be a
mitzvah.
It may also be a
gefilte fish-y story.
According to
AP writers David Espo and Ben Fuller,
Obama's campaign has approached Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel about
possibly serving as White
House chief of staff, officials said Thursday as the marathon
presidential race entered its final,
messugge stretch to the
end of the longest presidential contest in American history.
The Democrats
who described the Obama campaign's approach to Emanuel spoke on
condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to be quoted
by name. An aide to Congressman Emanuel, Sarah Feinberg, said in an
e-mail that he "has not been contacted to take a job in an
administration that does not yet exist. Everyone is focused on
Election Day, as they should be.”
Emanuel is a
veteran of President Bill Clinton's White House where he served as
Director of Finance during the campaign and went on to become a
senior advisor to the administration. He later helped Mayor Richard
M. Daily get elected, and has made a Moses like ascent up the House
leadership ladder since his election to Congress. He was chairman of
the Democratic campaign committee two years ago when the party won a
majority for the first time in more than a decade, and he cemented
in Biblical stone his reputation as an impressive fundraiser. He is
considered one strong-willed political strategist -- no
shmegegge this one.
Emanuel had
supported his old friend Hillary Clinton in her unsuccessful bid for
the White House, but he switched his allegiance to his other friend
and fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama once Clinton lost her bid for the
Democratic Party’s nomination. What a
mensch.
But it isn’t
because Rahm Emanuel is a “good boy” that this story broke. And it
wasn’t any “leak” that the information made it to the desk of
writers Espo and Fuller.
The Obama
campaign is leak proof, probably the most measured campaign in the
history of presidential politics. In fact, this is one of the rare
times that the Obama Campaign has so obviously used the press to
push a story.
But with four
days to go until election day, and with the polls tightening in
battleground states, most notably Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida
where the Jewish vote could prove crucial, and with the McCain
campaign and the right-wing press pushing the association of former
spokesman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization Rashid Khalidi
with Barack Obama, the Obama campaign is clearly nervous.
Havah n ran' nah,
as the race for the White House comes to its final vote, Obama is
uru, uru achim, uru achim b'lev sameiach uru
achim b'lev sameiach with worry
and ought to be.
Barack Obama has a big lead among Jewish voters, according to a
survey by the American Jewish Committee. But his 57% support, to 30%
for John McCain and 13% undecided, is “a bit lower than one would
expect,” a group exec told Voice of America News. At this time in
2004, John Kerry had 69% of the vote, which grew to 76% by Election
Day.
Now,
therefore, is not the time that the Obama Campaign needed a story
that had originally run in the April 10, 2008 edition of the Los
Angeles Times to resurface, this time gaining the attention it
didn’t garner when it first broke.
The story, “Allies of Palestinians See a Friend in Barack Obama,” reports the goings on
at a farewell party for Obama friend and Palestinian
sympathizer/Arab Nationalist, Rashid Khalid, where Barack Obama said
that the consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.
. . . it's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to
come, we continue that conversation -- a conversation that is
necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table," but
around this entire world."
And that’s not all. Apparently there is more damaging information of
what happened at that party that could prove devastating to Barack
Obama’s hopes for moving into the White House with the support of
the Jewish population of the battleground states. But we might not
learn the exact details of what happened at that party until after the election because despite pleas from the
McCain camp and others, the LA Times refuses to release the tape
that was the source for the article saying it is beholden to a deal
with the source that said they couldn’t release the tape.
Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped Fox News from going to town on the
story and the usual cast of outraged characters voicing their
outrage. Taca, what
is a possible future president of the United States of America doing
breaking challah and
making toasts with
Manischewitz wine with a pro-Palestinian?
Oy vey is mer!
Obama’s inside polls must be showing the Khalidi story is having an
effect on Obama’s Jewish support. Why else would he be floating the
story about his offer to Jewish congressman Rahm Emanuel to be his
Chief of Staff, which ordinarily would appear presumptuous since
Barack Obama hasn’t been elected yet, not to mention that it is
former Senator Tom Daschle, key campaigner for Barack Obama who
until now has been considered the top candidate for the job.
Adding to the suspicion that Obama’s inside poll numbers suggest
some negative movement in the Jewish vote is the fact that this
morning’s Sun Sentinel,
the paper of record in the highly-Jewish populated South Florida has
a guest commentary by Senator Hillary Clinton. “Senator Obama shares
my views that the next president must say to the world that
America’s resolve is unyielding: The United States stands with
Israel,” Hillary Clinton states emphatically in the piece.
From your mouth, Hillary, to President Obama’s ears.
Nu?