Obama, Huckabee move into spotlight

NATION

DECISION 2008

Obama, Huckabee move into spotlight

COMPILED FROM JTA AND STAFF REPORTS

With the results of the Iowa Caucuses, as well as the New Hampshire primary this week, the country is closely watching the campaigns of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

Obama for the Democrats and Huckabee won their parties' respective caucuses in Iowa last week with unexpected victories.

Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, in particular has unnerved some with his intense social conservatism and his frequent invocations of Christianity.

Some observers believe the Republican Jewish Coalition was reacting to Huckabee's surge in the polls with its statement last month urging candidates "to uphold the long-held American tradition of religious tolerance and respect for religious diversity."

"While expressing the importance of one's personal faith is perfectly understandable, I hope the candidates will be mindful of not imposing their religious beliefs on others. Questions involving theology have no place on the campaign trail," said RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks, in the statement.

While the bulk of the Jewish vote is expected to go to the Democratic nominee, Jewish Democrats acknowledge that Obama may be a slightly harder sell than Hillary Clinton and may be more vulnerable to Republican attack.

"Obama is not as well known across the entire Jewish community as Hillary," said Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. "In that sense, our work getting out his record will be more extensive. However, at the end of the day, I'm confident that if he's the nominee he will do extremely well among American Jews."

A closer look at Obama

Throughout his career, Sen. Obama has reached out for Jewish support.

In his first run for the Illinois state Senate in 1996, he sought the backing of Alan Solow, a top Chicago lawyer and Jewish communal leader. Eight years later, running for the U.S. Senate — long before he became the shoo-in, when he was running in a Democratic field packed with a dozen candidates, including some Jews — one of his first meetings was with Robert Schrayer, a top Jewish philanthropist in Chicago. When he launched his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in late 2006, he named as his fund-raising chief Alan Solomont, the Boston Jewish philanthropist who helped shepherd Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to the Democratic candidacy in 2004.

And he chose a March gathering of the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to deliver his presidential candidacy's first foreign policy speech. "Some of my earliest and most ardent supporters came from the Jewish community in Chicago," Obama told JTA in 2004, after his keynote speech galvanized the Democratic convention in Boston.

Three years later, addressing the National Jewish Democratic Council's candidate's forum, he made the same point when he was asked about his ties with Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in Chicago. "My support within in the Jewish community has been much more significant than my support within the Muslim community," Obama said at the April forum, adding that "I welcome and seek the support of the Muslim and Arab communities."

His Jewish followers are fervent, distributing "Obama '08" yarmulkes early in his campaign. The relationships Obama has built in the community have helped avoid murmurings about his otherwise notable divergences from pro-Israel orthodoxies.

In his AIPAC speech, for example, Obama favored diplomacy as a means of confronting Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program.

AIPAC does not oppose diplomacy in engaging Iran, but dislikes it as an emphasis, believing that talks could buy the Iranian regime bomb-making time. But his words did not stop the Chicago hotel ballroom packed with 800 AIPAC members from cheering on Obama.

Obama has faced some persistent myths because of his multicultural background — his mother is originally from a small town in Kansas, and his father is from a small village in Kenya. Obama was born in Hawaii, and lived for a few years in Indonesia, according to an official biography released by his campaign.

Obama's middle name "Hussein" has also helped cause various rumors — that he was raised a Muslim, and that he attended a madrassa, a Muslim school, among others. Obama responded to those claims in a statement released by his Senate staff.

"Senator Obama was raised in a secular household in Indonesia by his stepfather and mother. Obama's stepfather worked for a U.S. oil company, and sent his stepson to two years of Catholic school, as well as two years of public school...To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Furthermore, the Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a madrassa," said the statement, released in January 2007.

Obama is on a first-name basis with two of the top Jewish religious lobbyists in Washington—Rabbi David Saperstein of the Reform movement and Nathan Diament, who represents the Orthodox Union.

That connection, however, is not enough to supplant Clinton among Jewish voters. In a recent American Jewish Committee poll, Obama's favorable rating was 38 percent, while Clinton's was 53 percent.

Clinton also is being backed by most of the Jewish congressional delegation. Her years as first lady and senator have made her a more familiar presence among Jews. Public policy groups are likelier to favor her uncompromising approach to pushing universal health care, as opposed to Obama's appeal to build consensus on the issue.

A closer look at Huckabee

For many American Jews, the thought of a staunchly pro-life, ordained Baptist minister as president is a major cause for alarm. Especially one like Mike Huckabee, who has called on Americans to "take this nation back for Christ," signed a newspaper advertisement stating that wives should submit to their husbands and stated that he does not believe in evolution.

Huckabee in recent weeks has been facing increased scrutiny over his use of religion on the campaign trail, including one commercial describing the candidate as a "Christian leader" and another in which a cross hovers behind him as he wishes viewers a Merry Christmas.

Even as critics have sought to paint Huckabee as religiously intolerant, the former Arkansas governor and many pundits have portrayed him as the embodiment of a new breed of evangelical Christian voter — one who sees not only a religious imperative to stake out conservative positions on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but also in some instances to take more liberal stands on race, taxes, poverty, immigration and the environment.

And Huckabee has found Jewish supporters.

Huckabee was a barely-known former governor of Arkansas when he attended an October house party on his behalf at the home of Jason Bedrick, New Hampshire's first Orthodox Jewish state representative.

"He is truly a uniter and not a divider," Bedrick recently told JTA. "This is a guy who is very positive, very uplifting," he said.

To boot, the New Hampshire lawmaker added, Huckabee is pro-Israel: He has visited the Jewish state nine times, and told the crowd at the Bedrick house party that he favored the establishment of a Palestinian state — in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

He has employed populist rhetoric in slamming the establishment of his own party, challenged its general embrace of free trade and recently criticized the Bush administration's "arrogant" approach to international diplomacy.

The combination of Huckabee's rapid rise, his religiosity and his willingness to buck conservative political orthodoxy has some observers describing him as a refreshing development with the ability to transcend the bitterly partisan atmosphere in Washington.

Others see him as a threat—whether it be liberals worried about the separation of church and state, or Republicans afraid that a Huckabee victory could break up the decades-long alliance between economic and religious conservatives that has produced significant GOP victories.

Some Jewish Democrats already have attempted to capitalize on potential anxiety over Huckabee's mixing of religion and politics.

During the summer, after Huckabee began to show signs of progress, the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, Ira Forman, said voters "should be concerned whenever an extreme candidate gets a whiff of the presidency."

Several observers and Jewish communal leaders from Arkansas, however, reject such efforts to paint Huckabee as a dangerous extremist.

"Jews have nothing to fear from Huckabee," said Jerry Tanenbaum, a resident of Hot Springs, Ark., and a supporter of the Union for Reform Judaism. "I never found him in Arkansas to be particularly invasive with his religion on other people's rights."

Tanenbaum, who says he would never vote for Huckabee, described the GOP candidate as being "fairly temperate in the way he handles things" and said that as governor, he "tried to keep politics and religion separate to the best of his ability."

Posted Jan. 9, 2008