GOP uses Moran to woo Jewish voters and contributors

When Trent Lott lamented about Strom Thurmond losing the 1948 presidential race, running on a segregationist platform, the Republican Party saw its outreach efforts to African American voters fall apart almost overnight. The GOP’s attempts didn’t appear to be working anyway, but having your Senate Majority Leader announce that the U.S. would have been better off with Thurmond as president in 1948 pretty much sealed the deal.

Now, Republican leaders are moving on to another minority group to which it has historically been hostile, or at least indifferent. According to an article in today’s Washington Post, the GOP believes in can begin wooing Jewish American votes and contributions, using Rep. Jim Moran’s (D-Va.) recent comments that Jews are the driving force behind the war in Iraq as a selling point.

To be sure, Moran is an idiot. He may be a Democrat, but he’s losing friends quickly. As the Post article noted, “six Jewish Democrats in the House, including Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.) and Sander M. Levin (Mich.), yesterday called on Moran to retire in 2004, and if he runs again, ‘we cannot and will not support his candidacy.'” Sounds good to me. There’s already talk of a strong primary challenge to Moran in ’04 from a Virginia state senator.

Available evidence suggests, however, that the Republicans’ outreach appears to be motivated by partisan ambition, not genuine ideological agreement with the Jewish community. As one GOP strategist told the Post, “There are only a few key pillars left holding up the Democratic coalition, especially financial pillars, and if we can fracture one of them, they [Democrats] are going to go into 2004 in big trouble.”

That’s true, but the quote makes it sound like the GOP isn’t interested in sincere dialog with a community it has historically ignored, rather it appears that Republicans are manipulating one stupid comment from one stupid Democrat for political exploitation.

Will these efforts pay off? Maybe, but Bush may be the wrong candidate to help the GOP bring Jews into the Republican fold. It was Bush, after all, who told reporters on more than one occasion that he thinks only believers in Jesus go to heaven. At Bush’s inauguration, it was an evangelical minister who was invited to offer an invocation “in Jesus’ name,” which didn’t exactly inspire religious minorities in attendance.

Bush’s favorite domestic policy initiative — his infamous “faith-based” initiative — has drawn fire from multiple Jewish groups for allowing publicly funded religious discrimination against Jews and other religious minorities. Indeed, Bush’s favorite faith-based charity, Teen Challenge, the one he has urged public funding for, is the same group who believes it is part of their mission to “complete” Jews, a fundamentalist Christian idea that Jews are not “complete” unless they accept Jesus.

Speaking of the faith-based initiative, the same Republicans who are now urging Jews to vote with the GOP are the same lawmakers who asked Bishop J. Delano Ellis to help lead a congressional committee on faith-based funding, despite the fact that Ellis delivered a sermon in 1995 in which he said Jews were “carnal, selfish…dirty and lowdown and wicked.” Ellis’ sermon also said Jews had mistreated others through the years and “God allowed Hitler to rise up and make you all suffer.”

So are Jewish voters prepared to overlook these facts and embrace the GOP? I kind of doubt it.