October 30, 2008
In this, the last issue before Election Day, the NJJN provides representative opinions on the presidential campaign from essays appearing in the Jewish media. Links to the full articles appear below.
McCAIN
Lifting the burden
To help families contend with rising costs, John McCain has proposals that would both keep more money in taxpayers’ pockets and lower their costs. He proposes to double the dependent tax exemption from $3,500 to $7,000 per child — leaving parents with more of the money they’ve earned to spend on their family’s needs. His health-care plan would reduce the tax burdens of all but the very highest income earners, and leave the average middle-class family with an additional $1,200 in the bank at tax time, while also helping to bring down premium costs through increased competition.
McCain would also phase out the alternative minimum tax, which increasingly threatens middle-class families. And by eliminating restrictions on offshore drilling and other barriers to oil and natural gas production, and encouraging the development of alternative energy sources, he would help to reduce the price of gas, and with it the cost of food, clothing, and other essentials that have suffered badly from rising transportation costs.
His homeowner rescue plan, meanwhile, would help those who — despite their best honest efforts — have found themselves on the verge of foreclosure in the current crisis. He would have the government use a portion of the recently appropriated bailout funds to help homeowners who qualify to replace their adjustable-rate mortgages with 30-year fixed-rate loans that are federally guaranteed.
As he offers help to families dealing with rising costs and falling home values, McCain would also energetically seek to encourage economic growth, to put the economy back on the path to prosperity. More than any particular assistance program, a general pro-growth economic policy is the crucial component in getting America out of the crisis we now confront. McCain’s approach is a well-proven formula: Keep taxes low on employment, investment, economic activity, and personal income, and prevent the government from wasting the hard-earned money of taxpayers.
Yuval Levin, the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served as associate director of the White House Domestic Policy Council from 2004 to 2006. This is excerpted from an article in the Forward. Read the full article here.
Nothing to fear
Iran will likely be the first U.S. adversary to test Barack Obama. And Obama will have no idea what to do. While Obama has stated repeatedly that a nuclear-armed Iran is a “game-changer,” Obama’s own rule book for international relations has no relevance for dealing with Iran’s game.
Obama views international relations as a creature of American will. If America is nice to others, they will be nice to America. But the fact of the matter is that regimes like Iran hate the United States regardless of how it behaves. The only question with strategic relevance for Washington is whether the Iranians also fear the United States. And Obama has given them no reason to fear him. To the contrary, he has given them reason to believe that under his leadership, the mullahs can defeat America.
America stands to elect its new president in times of nearly unprecedented dangers. Iran is on the threshold of nuclear weapons. Thanks to the Bush administration, North Korea now feels free to vastly expand its nuclear proliferation activities. Oil-rich states like Venezuela, Russia, and Iran recognize that with global oil prices decreasing, now is the time to strike before they are impoverished. And the international economic turmoil will cause Western nations to recoil from international confrontations and so embolden rogue states to attack their interests.
Caroline Glick writes a column for The Jerusalem Post, from which this article was excerpted. Read the full article here.
Now more than ever
Every day the forces of Islamist extremism are plotting terrorist attacks against us and our allies — from the deserts of Iraq to the mountains of Afghanistan, from Gaza to the cities of America. That is why, from the moment the next president steps into the Oval Office, he will face life-and-death decisions in this war. We need a president who is ready to be commander in chief on day one.
Sen. McCain understands that Israel is our natural ally. He understands that we have a critical responsibility, now more than ever, to stand with Israel against the terrorists and tyrants who threaten its existence, and our own.
Sen. McCain has always been a steadfast, principled, and unwavering supporter of Israel. He understands, as he put it just a few weeks before 9/11, that “America’s unequivocal support for Israel — not evenhandedness, not moral equivalence, not winking at Palestinian violence — is the best guarantor of peace in the Middle East.”
Joe Lieberman is an independent and former Democrat representing Connecticut in the Senate. A longer version of this article appeared in The New York Jewish Week. Read the full article here.
OBAMA
A clean break
America needs a clean break from the policies of the last eight years, which only Barack Obama and Joe Biden can provide. These domestic problems confront all Americans. But we American Jews have traditionally been at the forefront of encouraging the nation to address them. Our religion is not a partisan political tool. But there is a reason that American Jews have traditionally, overwhelmingly voted Democratic for over 70 years, in both congressional and presidential elections. The policies championed by the Democratic Party and by Sens. Obama and Biden are reflective of the Jewish prophetic tradition which emphasizes “Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue,” and the imperative to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and let the oppressed go free. Indeed, these are exemplified in Sen. Obama’s life and his beliefs. He has risen from a single-family mother on food stamps to become a champion for job training, education reform, and health care for all Americans, and has spoken eloquently of restoring a “sense of justice in our economic lives and in our social lives.”
The Bush tax cuts will expire in 2010. They blew a hole in the Clinton administration surpluses, and were heavily skewed to the richest Americans. John McCain now wants to extend them in total. In contrast, Sen. Obama wants to focus his tax cuts on the middle class, who got only crumbs from the Bush cuts.
Stuart E. Eizenstat was chief domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter and deputy secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration. Read the full article here.
Carrots and sticks
I was with Obama in Israel and in Europe, and I saw how he focused on the urgency of the Iranian threat. I saw how he used his discussions in Israel to remind the European leaders that Israelis are justified in seeing Iran with nuclear weapons as an existential threat — and that for Israel’s sake and our own we must put far more pressure on Iran if we are to stop it from going nuclear.
Obama understands that weak sticks and weak carrots — the current policy — can’t work. We need strong sticks to concentrate the Iranian mind on what they stand to lose, and we need strong carrots, conveyed directly, to show the Iranians they have something to gain by giving up their nuclear weapon pursuit. And, if in the end diplomacy fails, the fact that we engaged directly and Iran was unwilling to alter its behavior creates a very different context for tougher options.
Engaging without illusions might be one way to describe how diplomacy would be conducted in an Obama administration. Just like with Iran, he would engage on Arab-Israeli peace. Not because he knows it will produce peace, but because he again understands the consequences of disengagement. Who gained when the Bush administration walked away from peacemaking for more than six years and then in its last years pursued it incompetently? Hamas, because like all radical Islamists, they gain when there is hopelessness and frustration. Who lost? Those in the Arab and Palestinian world who favor a two-state solution but need the possibility of peace to make their case and to have the political space to build their authority.
Dennis Ross served as President Bill Clinton’s Middle East negotiator and President George H.W. Bush’s head of policy planning in the State Department. He gives advice to the Obama presidential campaign. Read the full article here.
Take it from Ed
This time around, Ed Koch is supporting Obama. In 2004, Koch believed that George W. Bush was going to be better for Israel than John Kerry. Koch told a Jewish audience in Florida that this year, the Democratic and Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates “are all in support of the security of Israel; that is no longer on the table. Take it from me, I know. I know Israel would be protected by an Obama-Biden administration.”
Ed Koch is absolutely right, of course. Obama has a consistent record of strong, unwavering support for Israel. In June of this year, Sen. Obama told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that “Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is nonnegotiable.” In a similar vein, Obama has been unambiguous in his opposition to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “I will do everything in my power,” he said in his AIPAC speech, “to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Obama also has longstanding ties to the Jewish community and shares the values of the overwhelming majority of American Jews.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a lawyer in New York City, is the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. Read the full article here.
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