Four more years
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President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama embrace Vice President Joe Biden and Jill Biden just after the election was called in their favor, at the Fairmont Chicago Millennium Park in Chicago, Nov. 6, 2012.
(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
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November 7, 2012
WASHINGTON -- The day after the election looks a lot like the day before for President Obama, particularly in areas that have attracted the attention of Jewish voters: Tussling with Republicans domestically on the economy and health care, and dancing gingerly with Israel around the issue of a nuclear Iran.
With Obama's victory over Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the Senate remaining in the hands of Democrats and the U.S. House of Representatives staying Republican, that means more of the same, said William Daroff, who directs the Washington office of the Jewish Federations of North America.
"What's amazing from a political point of view is that it's hundreds of millions dollars being spent and it's still the status quo," he said.
The advantage, Daroff said, is that the sides get back to work, and straight away.
"There's not going to be a delay in everyone feeling out their new roles and figuring out what color the rug in the Oval Office should be," he said.
Jewish federations and other Jewish social welfare organizations have said their immediate focus will be the “fiscal cliff” -- the effort to head off sequestration, the congressional mandate to slash the budget across the board at the start of 2013.
"The fiscal cliff and specifically sequestration is a major concern," Daroff said. "Our concern continues to be that as the nation and our political leaders continue to assess how to make cuts in spending that those cuts don't fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations that rely upon social service agencies that depend on our funding."
Cuts of about 8.5 percent would immediately affect the viability of housing for the elderly, according to officials at B'nai B'rith International, which runs a network of homes. Officials at Jewish federations say the cuts also would curb the meals and transportation for the elderly they provide with assistance from federal programs.
Obama and Congress would have had to deal with heading off sequestration in any case, but as a president with a veto-wielding mandate of four more years, he has the leverage to head off deep cuts to programs that his top officials have said remain essential, including food assistance to the poor and medical entitlements for the poor and elderly.
David Makovsky, a senior analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Obama's priorities would be domestic.
"While a victory in the second term tends to give you some political capital, capital is still finite," he said, citing George W. Bush's failure in 2005 to reform Social Security, despite his decisive 2004 triumph. "This suggests to me the president will keep his focus on the economy and health care," and not on major initiatives in the Middle East.
More broadly, four more years of “Obamacare” mean the health care reforms that Obama and a Democratic Congress passed in 2010 will be more difficult to repeal for future GOP administrations. By 2016, American voters will have habituated to mandates guaranteeing health insurance for all, including for pre-existing conditions and coverage of children by their parents until they reach the age of 26.
On these issues -- entitlement programs and federal assistance for the poor -- Obama and Senate Democrats have the backing of an array of Jewish groups led by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the community’s public policy umbrella.
Supreme Court
Additionally, Jewish advocacy organizations will look to Obama to appoint to the Supreme Court justices likely to uphold the protections favored by much of the Jewish community, including abortion rights, women’s equal pay guarantees and gay marriage gains in the states.
The exception will be the Orthodox groups, which generally align with conservative Christians on social issues.
The potential for domestic tension between some Jewish groups and the new Obama administration -- and its Democratic allies who continue to lead the Senate -- lies in Democrats’ plans to let lapse some of the tax cuts passed by the George W. Bush administration.
Senate Democrats in recent years have pressed organized Jewish groups to advocate for raising revenue through tax increases. Some groups have advocated for the increases, but the major social welfare policy umbrella, the Jewish Federations of North America, has resisted in part because tax hikes are controversial among a substantial portion of the federations’ donor base.
Daroff said that Jewish federations would continue to push for keeping the tax deduction rate for charitable giving at 35 percent and resist Obama administration proposals to cut it to 28 percent.
"We see from the response to Hurricane Sandy how vital charities are," he said. "To put stumbling blocks in the way of our ability to raise charitable funds is the absolutely wrong policy."
Unlike the looming sequestration, Obama’s most vexing first term foreign policy issue -- how to deal with Iran -- has gained some breathing room in recent weeks with the Obama administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arriving at an agreement that Iran will not be poised to manufacture a nuclear weapon until the spring at the earliest.
Without intimations by Israel that it might strike before then, Obama has a window to see if the tightened international and U.S. sanctions introduced during his administration will goad the Iranians into making their nuclear program more transparent. Iran’s government insists its nuclear program is peaceful but has resisted probative U.N. inspections.
Makovsky said he expected a quick return to talks with Iran, which could lead to bold new proposals, setting some of the bottom lines that have been eagerly sought by Israel. Makovsky said one scenario could be removing some sanctions in exchange for keeping Iranian uranium enrichment at 5 percent, down from the 20 percent level it currently achieves and well below the 93 percent that would make a weapon.
Another Iranian give, he said, would be to export the stockpiles of enriched uranium already on hand.
"I would predict there will be much more of a focus on bottom lines, there will be some sort of an American offer -- after consultations with Israel," Makovsky said.
Personnel changes
Two personnel changes in the coming months in both Israel and the United States will help shape how the two nations interact.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has long-standing relationships with much of the Israeli leadership, has said she is certain to quit, and there is much speculation about her successor.
Three names have been touted -- Tom Donilon, the national security adviser; Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations; and U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Of the three, only Donilon has warm relations with his Israeli interlocutors. Rice has steadfastly defended Israel against formal condemnation at the United Nations, but Israeli and pro-Israel officials have been galled by the tough language she has used to describe Israeli settlement expansion.
Kerry raised some eyebrows with his sharp language about Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip following the 2009 war with Hamas. And some conservatives questioned his insistent outreach to the Assad regime in Syria prior to the protests that set off the regime's bloody oppression and the country's resulting civil war.
The other personnel change is in Israel and will be closely watched by the Obama administration. Elections there are scheduled for January, and Netanyahu and his new right-leaning alliance with Avigdor Lieberman, currently the foreign minister, may be facing a serious centrist challenge.
Exit poll: Obama garners 69 percent of Jewish vote
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- President Obama won 69 percent of the Jewish vote, according to an exit poll.
The poll, posted on CNN's website, was commensurate with projections in preelection polls by Gallup and the American Jewish Committee, among others, that Obama would win 65 percent to 70 percent of the Jewish vote.
Democrats and Republicans blitzed Jewish voters in swing states, particularly Ohio and Florida, ahead of the election.
Jews constituted 2 percent of the overall CNN response group, but the network did not reveal the total number of people polled, making it impossible to assess a margin of error.
Republicans noted the discrepancy between Tuesday's numbers and the 78 percent Obama garnered in 2008 exit polls.
Democrats, citing a more recent broader study of the 2008 results, now say that Obama earned 74 percent of the Jewish vote in that election and suggested that Tuesday's showing was within the margin of error.
On social media, Jews of both parties argued over whether Tuesday's results showed a substantial drop in Jewish support for Obama.
J Street and the Republican Jewish Coalition planned to release separate exit polls on Wednesday morning.
Comments
RABBI DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG
November 08, 2012
Those of us who oppose Obama’s policies will continue to oppose them actively and vociferously. In this effort, we will have members of the House of Representatives and, to some extent, the Senate, all of whom, as opposed to Obama, will have to face re-election and, thus, cannot afford to dismiss us.
Hibernation? Not when the existence of the security of the United States and Israel is at stake. RABBI DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG
RABBI DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG
November 14, 2012
This week, at a time when one million people in Israel are targeted for hundreds of aerial attacks launched by the Gaza regime , a new Israel Advocacy Task Force has been spawned. IATF,
The Israel Advocacy Task Force will address issues of the day that Israel has to cope with on a daily basis.
Let’s begin with Arab education.
Contrary to the widely publicized notion that the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA intended to incorporate Holocaust education in their schools, there has never been a plan for a Holocaust curriculum in any UNRWA or Palestinian Authority school.
Michael Kingsley-Nyinah, director of the executive office of UNRWA said clearly: “I am writing to clarify that there is no ‘Holocaust curriculum’ as such in UNRWA schools and there are no plans to introduce one.”
There is, however, one aspect of the new Palestinian Authority educational system in that does deal to the Holocaust.
In all Palestinian Authority schools, students learn from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s PHD, which he wrote 28 years ago at Moscow University entitled “The Other Side: The Secret Relations between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement.”
Abbas’s thesis: the Zionist movement initiated murder of the Jews in Europe.
The time has come to ask that everyone who funds the Palestinian Authority educational system - beginning with the US Congress – condition money to the PA on the immediate cancellation of their “holocaust curriculum”
With the genesis of the new session of US Congress in January, The Israel Advocacy Task Force will escort experts on Palestinian Authority and UNRWA education to make presentations for staffers the Middle East Subcommittee of the US House Foreign Relations committee, in tandem with the Center for Near East Policy Research in Jerusalem, www.IsraelBehindTheNews,com, ;directed by investigative journalist and community organizer David Bedein.
To that end, The Israel Advocacy Task Force is seeking sponsors to cover the cost to hire and escort the experts.
Meanwhile, the time has come for everyone who reads this memo to contact people of influence to demand that the PA and UNRWA cease and desist from the greatest lie perpetrated against the survivors of the Nazi Horrors…applying the principle that a lie repeated often enough will become believable.
RABBI DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG, FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN