July 24, 2008
“Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”
That’s the famous last line of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s also a fitting first line for what seems like a new chapter in the presidential race. Call it “Obama and McCain: Now It Gets Real.”
When it came to debating the issues that galvanize Jews, the last 16 months have felt a little like the world’s worst shareholders’ meeting. There were important issues to be discussed, but the proceedings were consistently hijacked by cranks with rumors and conspiracy theories.
The majority of us sincerely wanted to know where the hopefuls stood on the peace process, Iranian nukes, and the Iraq war. Sober topics. But the tone of the debate was too often hysterical, as if Obama (and let’s face it, we’re talking about Obama) were not a mainstream politician with the usual combination of good and bad ideas, advisers, and influences, but rather a character out of some sort of anti-Semitic allegory. Obama was labeled a Chomskyite Leftist, a Black Anti-Semite, a Secret Muslim, and a Closet Hamas-nik. He somehow escaped being labeled a Holocaust Denier (although his critics came close when he referred incorrectly to the death camp his great-uncle helped liberate in World War II).
That stuff is still out there, and will be so long as people have access to a keyboard and the Internet. But a new wave of Obama scrutiny is moving past the rumors and hysteria to focus on the ideas and the policies.
Exhibit A is an article by Yossi Klein Halevi in The New Republic. Written as a letter to Obama from an “anxious Israeli,” the essay suggests Israelis weren’t fazed by the “whispering campaign” against Obama. “Even Rev. Wright didn’t cause much of a stir,” writes Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Shalem Center in Jerusalem, “maybe because we’re used to being embarrassed by our own religious leaders.”
Nor does he doubt Obama’s expressions of friendship, his “passionate endorsement of Israel’s cause at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington.”
Rather, Klein Halevi says, Israelis like him worry that a President Obama “might act too hastily in trying to solve the Palestinian problem, and not hastily enough in trying to solve the Iranian problem.”
Klein Halevi reminds Obama about Israeli insecurity and seeks assurances that “under no circumstances would an Obama administration allow the Iranian regime to go nuclear — that if sanctions and diplomacy fail, the U.S. will either attack or else support us if we do.”
Again, that is a question I would love to hear Obama — and McCain — answer in a debate, not whether they wear a flag pin in their lapels. And it’s a debate that can be taken up without donning a helmet made out of aluminum foil — in part, because it stops being about Obama, and his friends, and his middle name, and focuses on the subject at hand: Israel, its security, and what a politician, any politician, intends to do about it.
Klein Halevi also shows that one can harbor doubts about Obama — for example, over the faith he puts in diplomacy — while still engaging him and his supporters in a serious and fluid conversation. The “letter” is addressed to Obama, after all, and not to a closed circuit of dittoheads who have already made up their minds about him.
Nathan Diament, public policy director for the Orthodox Union, also shows Obama enough courtesy to offer him a little free advice. The OU has been at odds with Obama over Jerusalem and often differs with Democrats on family values and church-state issues. But in his essay for RealClearPolitics.com (see page 16), Diament is strictly bipartisan. He also dismisses the “viral e-mails 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.” What Israelis and their supporters want to know is that Obama shares the same “gut level kinship with the Jewish state” of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Klein Halevi’s essay is addressed to Obama’s head; Diament’s is addressed, quite literally, to his kishkes. (And as perhaps the first person to mention Obama and kishkes in the same sentence, I will take a little authorial pride in the conjunction.) But note that Diament doesn’t say Obama lacks the kishkes — only that American Jews are asking for proof that he has them.
Finally, there’s Hillel Halkin, writing in The New York Sun. Halkin is another writer of the Israeli center right — although more right than center these days. And he too avows that “Mr. Obama never was and is not the anti-Israel figure that some right-wing Jewish circles nastily attempted to portray him as.” What Halkin fears is that an Obama presidency will “mean a return to the Clinton years,” which to Halkin means an “even-handed” approach that would leave Israel unable to defend its “vital interests.” He too seeks clarity from Obama on whether or not he would countenance a nuclear Iran.
Halkin’s claims about the Clinton legacy, like Klein Halevi’s about the dangers of diplomacy, are highly debatable — but that’s the point. You can’t argue with a paranoid e-mail, any more than you can reason with a head cold. But in the new wave of Obama anxiety, at least there is something to debate. And that’s a start.
