Gut reactions
The long tail of my kishkes meme: Here’s the OU’s Nathan Diament writing at RealClearPolitics.com:
Recent polling indicates that Barack Obama has less support among American Jews than previous Democratic presidential nominees. This is not merely because an unprecedented campaign has been waged by viral emails and incendiary articles falsely portraying Obama as harboring secret biases for the Palestinian cause and taking advice from persons openly hostile to Israel’s interests. It is because Obama is seeking to succeed a pair of American presidents who each remain extremely popular in Israel and among her supporters for one basic reason – Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, each in their own way, conveyed a gut level kinship with the Jewish state. Obama has yet to convey convincingly that he is similarly committed to Israel in his kishkes.
Or as I wrote in February:
Maybe they’ve grown spoiled, but you hear in the pro-Israel, anti-Obama rhetoric the notion that Obama’s spotless Senate voting record on Israel and meat-and-potatoes speeches to AIPAC are not quite enough. “Window dressing,” as someone dismissively described it to me. A certain kind of pro-Israel voter wants to know that candidates feel for Israel in their guts – their kishkes – and not just in their heads.
JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 