McCain Pressing For Swing Voters

Heading to Israel with Lieberman in tow; Hagee embrace could sting him.

In battle for Jewish swing voters, Hagee endorsement of McCain could be crucial. Getty Images

by James D. Besser
Washington Correspondent

Sen. John McCain’s trip to Israel next week represents the opening shot of what will be an aggressive campaign to win over Jewish swing voters in November, observers say. Accompanying the GOP lawmaker will be his not-so-secret weapon in the Jewish political wars: Sen. Joe Lieberman, the onetime Democrat who has made McCain’s election a top priority.

The GOP drive for Jewish votes will be “very active,” said Matthew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a partisan group. “He’s a Republican who, because of his centrist standing with the party, has the ability to have significant crossover appeal for Jewish voters.”

McCain is seen as a strong supporter of Israel, but his allure for Jewish voters is far from assured. His conservative positions

on key domestic issues such as abortion, his ongoing support for the Iraq war and his growing flirtation with leaders of the religious right represent potential liabilities that Jewish Democrats say they will vigorously exploit.

In a sign of things to come, Jewish Democrats this week continued hammering McCain over statements by Pastor John Hagee, who recently endorsed his candidacy, that seem to blame the Jews for their own persecution over the centuries, as well as statements that have enraged Catholics, gays and others.

But Brooks said this week that Hagee’s expanding network of relations with pro-Israel leaders – and his invitation to deliver a keynote address at last year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference — inoculate Hagee from criticism, since he is an ardent and outspoken supporter of Israel.

“The fact [Hagee] has been kashered by AIPAC makes it very difficult to attack him,” he said.

2008 is shaping up as another test of Jewish political priorities, with the Republicans betting that Israel tops the list and the Democrats coming down on the domestic side of the equation.

While agreeing that McCain could do better than recent GOP nominees, most analysts say he faces an uphill battle to substantially expand the Jewish GOP take.

“I don’t see him topping Bush’s inroads with Jewish voters, and probably not doing as well,” said Alan Wolfe, director of Boston College’s Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. (Bush received 23 percent of the Jewish vote in 2004; the highest Jewish vote count for a Republican presidential candidate was Ronald Reagan’s 39 percent.)

A major reason why Wolfe believes McCain will have trouble with Jewish voters is “the Republican closeness to the Christian right. The alliance between leaders of Jewish organizations and leaders of the pro-Zionist Christian right has never percolated to Jewish voters.”

When he visits Israel next week, McCain will be greeted as an old friend.

While not a top leader on the issue of U.S.-Israeli relations, pro-Israel leaders say he has been a reliable supporter of their agenda throughout his 22-year Senate career.

“No one in this race has a more consistent record in support of Israel than Sen. McCain,” said Fred Zeidman, a longtime Jewish Republican leader and a top McCain fundraiser. “He has a proven record on Israel, and that resonates with our community.”

Zeidman said McCain’s hawkish stands on national security and the war on terrorism will also appeal to Jewish voters, as well as “his ability to reach across party lines and get things done. There is a lot of confidence in our community in his ability to reach consensus.”

Other Jewish Republicans say McCain’s long legislative track record on Israel-related issues stands in stark contrast to the relatively blank slate offered by Sen. Barack Obama, one of two remaining Democratic contenders and the much less extensive record of Sen. Hillary Clinton.

McCain’s top foreign policy adviser is Randy Scheunemann, a leading neo-conservative activist who was an adviser to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Earlier, as a top aide to former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kans.), Scheunemann played a key role in that lawmaker’s 1995 legislation requiring that the U.S. embassy be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

But other analysts say McCain’s hardline national security views include positions that are anathema to Jewish voters, starting with his steadfast support for the Iraq war, which a majority have opposed from the outset.

A bigger issue for the McCain campaign is his intensifying courtship of religious right leaders, including Hagee, an apocalypse-minded evangelical leader and founder of Christians United for Israel.

Groups like the Catholic League reacted furiously to Hagee’s endorsement, pointing out controversial statements in Hagee’s books about Bible prophecy, including suggestions that he considers the Church the “great whore” described in prophetic passages.

Despite his passionate support for Israel, Hagee has also made controversial statements about the Jews — including his assertion that Jews brought upon themselves centuries of persecution through their “disobedience and rebellion.”

Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg, who wrote a book about the religious right, this week said in his blog that Hagee seems to have “expressed uncommon sympathy for [Yitzchak] Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir” in one of his books, views that reinforce the view of many that Hagee’s support for Israel is tinged with extremism.

The furious reaction by some Catholic groups forced McCain to take a few steps back from Hagee last week — first saying that he “did not intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee’s views, which I obviously do not,” and then, under unrelenting pressure, more explicitly rejecting Hagee’s views on the Church.

“We’ve had a dignified campaign, and I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee’s, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics,” he said in a statement.

But critics point out that he did not spurn the endorsement or denounce Hagee as a bigot — as Barack Obama denounced Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

The Hagee controversy illustrates a central dilemma for McCain in winning Jewish votes.

“Many of us understand national security as a priority; McCain has a proven record on those issues,” said Ellen Cannon, a political scientist at Northeastern Illinois University who has worked with numerous Jewish organizations.

But many Jewish centrists will be “very concerned not merely about his growing relationship to aspects of the evangelical national security perspective, but to his seeking out the support of Hagee, who is clearly problematic in his understanding of world events, his hostility to other Christian faiths and Muslims,” she said.

Because of that, Cannon said, McCain will just “hold his own” with Jewish voters. He will make inroads with Jews in the West, Jews who are more hawkish, Jews on the religious right — but he will not do well with others, she said.

“Jewish leaders have managed in recent years to ignore a lot about the Evangelicals because they are so strong for Israel,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a California State University political scientist who studies Jewish politics. “Hagee is harder to do that with because he’s so explicit about what he thinks will happen to the Jews,” he said, referring to his End of Days beliefs.

When it comes to Hagee and other controversial Evangelical leaders, “McCain will find he can’t have it both ways — he can’t buy off the far right, and wink and nod to moderates,” Sonenshein said.

While the McCain campaign is aware that the Hagee connection will be a bone in the throat of many Jewish voters, “at the end of the day the Evangelicals are much more important than Jews to McCain,” Sonenshein said. “He needs their overwhelming, enthusiastic support.

He’s trying to figure out how to get both, but it’s difficult. And if he has to choose, it’s a no-brainer.”

McCain’s Jewish strategy will be simple, he said. “It will be all Israel, all Iran, all the time.” That, he said, will appeal to many community leaders.

But his conservative record in Congress on issues such as abortion rights, church-state separation and the environment and his promise to appoint only conservatives to the Supreme Court will be big minuses with Jewish voters, he said.

The shadow of the Hagee endorsement isn’t just a Jewish problem for the McCain campaign, said David Gushee, distinguished professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, an ordained minister and author of the new book “The Future Of Faith In American Politics.”

“My view is that Hagee is a net negative for him,” Gushee said. “Hagee represents an old-style fundamentalism that emphasizes this apocalyptic world view, dispensational theology and has other old elements, including this bashing of the Catholic Church.”

In reality, he said, the Evangelical world is about evenly divided between conservatives on one side and a center and left component on the other, with the conservative segment fading.

“I think McCain is in desperate need of some good counsel about how the Evangelical community is actually developing,” he said.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization