I know we are being told he has a slim advantage in the polls, but....
"Obama’s vital Jewish backing slips in Florida" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe Staff, August 20, 2012
Facing a stagnant economy and Republican attacks on his Middle East policy, President Obama appears to be losing some support among Jewish voters in the critical swing state of Florida, according to Jewish political activists and demographers.
Most estimates range from 3 percent to low double digits, but any slippage for Obama will be magnified by the traditionally outsized turnout of this core Democratic constituency. Jews constitute only 3 percent of the state’s population but cast their ballots in such large numbers that they can account for 7 or 8 percent of the total vote.
“A small shift in the Jewish vote can make a difference,” said Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami professor who is director of the Jewish Demography Project there. In recent polls, Obama led Mitt Romney in Florida overall by an average of only 1.4 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics.
Why not? They already control the electoral process anyway.
The economy remains the top concern of Jewish voters, according to surveys, but Obama’s opposition to Israeli settlements, his contentious relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his reluctance to rattle the saber against Iran are worrying some Jewish supporters.
Related:
“But there is still a tremendous amount of cooperation, and you could even say that in the day-to-day level of military operations the cooperation is often stronger”
Tired of the s*** fooley agenda-pushing yet?
A new wild card is the effect in Florida that Romney’s vice presidential choice, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, will have. He has been a leading proponent of privatizing Medicare.
A Gallup poll released last month showed 68 percent support for Obama among Jewish voters nationwide, a sharp drop from his 78 percent showing against Senator John S. McCain four years ago. In March, a poll by the American Jewish Committee pegged the president’s support in a race against Romney at 61 percent.
It's over for Obama.
“There are some people who are concerned about whether Obama really has his heart in Israel,” Sheskin said. “There are people who are afraid that Obama will put undue pressure on Israel in his second term.”
Romney spoke to those concerns when he visited Israel last month.
“We cannot stand silent as those who seek to undermine Israel voice their criticisms,” Romney said in a speech in Jerusalem. “And we certainly should not join in that criticism. Diplomatic distance in public between our nations emboldens Israel’s adversaries.”
A Romney television ad released earlier this month is more direct.
“As president, Barack Obama has never visited Israel and refuses to recognize Jerusalem as its capital,” the ad says. “Mitt Romney will be a different kind of president — a strong leader who stands by our allies.”
Related: Romney Would Go to the Wall For Israel
Btw, what kind of friend spies on you and then dances over an atrocity?
Democrats counter that no presidents except Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter visited Israel in their first terms. In addition, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told CNN recently that Obama’s support for Israeli security has been “more than anything that I can remember in the past.”
So either way Israel has their man.
A spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party said the criticism will not be effective.
“We’ve seen these types of attacks before, and they’re not breaking through,” said David Bergstein, the party spokesman. “As a Jew myself, when I see these partisan attacks coming, they’re clearly misleading.”
Bergstein said the party has launched a grass-roots counterattack, often through Jews talking to Jews. “We’re aggressively making sure that voters in Florida know the truth,” he said.
Republicans, however, said they are winning many converts.
“The 78 percent that Barack Obama got in the Jewish community four years ago is off the table,” said Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party. “Barack Obama will get a majority of the Jewish vote, but he won’t get two-thirds.”
Dinerstein, the first Jew to lead the county GOP, predicted that Obama would win 60 to 65 percent of that vote. As a result, he said, “when you take 10, 15 points of the Jewish vote and flip them, the state’s gone, believe me.”
I do.
Alan Bergstein, 79, who performs Republican outreach to the Jewish community in Boca Raton, Fla., said that “little by little, the Jews are moving into Romney’s camp.”
However, he added, many of them will not publicly discuss their shift. If they did, Bergstein said, “they’d get thrown out of the card game and into the pool.”
Any significant erosion of Obama’s support among the 639,000 Jews who live in Florida would have an outsize impact because their turnout could be near or more than 90 percent, Sheskin said.
I'm tired of Jews having an outsized impact on AmeriKan politics.
And any shift in Florida, as political analysts quickly point out, can be golden. In 2000, the state — and the presidency — were decided by a bitterly disputed margin of 537 votes that propelled George W. Bush to victory over Al Gore.
If the MSM is going to uncritically accept a rigged election why even bother?
Sheskin, who stressed that polling numbers in the summer do not provide an apple-to-apple comparison with the final 2008 result, predicted that the Jewish drop-off would be only 3 or 4 percentage points.
But even if a shift is fairly small, the reliability of the Jewish vote seems less ironclad. For example, the cofounder of a pro-Obama super-PAC estimated that 15 percent of Jewish voters who backed Obama in 2008 are reconsidering their support.
Between that and the voting roll purges Romney will be a winner.
“We have had to spend much more time than we did in ’08, talking to people whom I would call the base of the Democratic Party, to get them reengaged,” said Mik Moore, cofounder of the super PAC Jewish Council for Education and Research.
Romney and his Republican supporters “are pouring a lot of money into advertising, and that advertising has the potential to be effective,” Moore said. “They have been so narrow in their pitch, so focused on issues such as Israel.”
To counter that drumbeat, Democrats have countered with push-back from Jewish officials such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a South Florida congresswoman and chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee; and a visit from Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff. Vice President Joe Biden also has visited South Florida to defend the administration’s stance on Israel.
However, even leaders of liberal Jewish congregations are sensing a shift.
“In my congregation, there’s still lots of support for Obama,” said Rabbi Barry Silver, who leads a reform synagogue in Lake Worth, Fla., just south of West Palm Beach. “However, since the last election, I have noticed Obama’s support slipping across all denominational lines.”
Part of that erosion is because of the economy, Silver said, but part is also because of Israel. In the rabbi’s view, that concern has been exploited and inflamed by Romney and the Republicans.
“Obama’s position on Israel has been misrepresented by conservatives who are trying to distort the truth,” said Silver, who organized a debate titled “Obama and Israel: Friend or Foe” that turned raucous at his synagogue in May.
“I was disappointed with the behavior of some of the people on both sides,” Silver said. However, he added, “the right-wingers were more vocal and intolerant of anyone that they perceived as not sufficiently pro-Israel.”
Despite uneasiness about Obama’s relations with Israel, Silver and other observers predicted, Jews will back Obama in overwhelming numbers because of his positions on social issues such as health care.
“There’s just a huge cultural disconnect between the base of the Republican Party and the typical Jewish voter,” Moore said. “There is some receptiveness to what they’re pushing, but they can’t close the deal.”
--more--"
Related: How Mitt Romney Will Steal Florida
Maybe Medicare can save Obama:
"Medicare arguments key for both parties" by Michael Kranish | Globe Staff, August 30, 2012
TAMPA — As of last week, Romney had an eight-point lead among seniors, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, and his campaign is trying to build that into a larger margin that could prove the difference on Election Day.
Perhaps nowhere has the debate about Medicare echoed more loudly than here in Florida....
What the four agreed upon was their government-provided health care plans should not be interrupted, and it is on that point that the political parties are trying to shape the discussion.
While the senior vote has been trending Republican, younger voters are more Democratic — but they typically do not vote in the same proportion as seniors, further magnifying the importance of the votes of older Americans.
“The two generations have flipped,” said Susan MacManus, a professor of government at the University of South Florida in Tampa who studies voting trends. “For years it was the older voters who were solidly Democratic. Now it is the youngest.”
Romney’s campaign not only has emphasized that those 55 and older will not be affected by his plan, but also has asserted that Obama has raided Medicare by cutting $716 billion and transferring those funds to “Obamacare.” In fact, Ryan’s budget plan earlier this year included the same cut, complicating Romney’s message, but the campaign says Romney’s view is the operative one, and it has become a key line of Republican attack.
“The only person who has cut Medicare in this race is Barack Obama,” said Romney spokesman Ryan Williams.
Democrats said the president’s plan does not directly cut an individual’s benefits, but instead trims payments to insurance companies and hospitals and imposes antifraud measures.
But the Republican strategy of portraying Obama as the one who is cutting Medicare has proved effective in the past, with the GOP picking up seats in the 2010 midterm election in part by making a similar argument.
Seniors “were scared to death by Republicans,” said Edward Coyle, chief executive of the Alliance for Retired Americans, a 4.1 million-member group founded by labor unions. He said the Democrats’ poor showing in 2010 was due partly to Republican attacks on Obama’s health care plan, including suggestions that “death panels” would determine whether older people received treatment for their illnesses, a charge that Obama rejected.
Wasserman Shultz said Democrats plan to do much more during this election to explain the benefits of Obama’s health care plan.
She said, for example, that the Obama plan includes a provision that already saves many seniors up to $3,000 annually in prescription drug costs, as well as thousands of dollars worth of health screenings. She said Democrats also plan to explain that even if the Romney-Ryan Medicare plan doesn’t take effect for 10 years, it would affect many younger seniors whom she said would eventually be hurt by changes in the program.
“We are aggressively messaging to seniors how gravely they would be affected” if Republicans repeal the Obama plan, said Wasserman Schultz, a US representative whose southern Florida district includes many retirement communities. As for Romney’s Medicare plan, she said, “the seniors I represent, they are not OK with saying ‘it doesn’t affect me and I don’t care about the seniors 10 years from now.’”
Romney, in his book “No Apology,” made clear he believes providing such benefits as free health screenings and unlimited care can prove too costly for the government. “Very few grandparents who I know would ever consider ordering an extraordinarily expensive medical treatment and putting it on their granddaughter’s charge card — at a high rate of interest — but that is exactly what we are doing and it has to stop.”
While Democrats acknowledge they are still trailing among seniors, they point to polls that show concerns about the Republican Medicare plan. For example, a Quinnipiac University poll conducted for The New York Times and CBS in Florida last week found that 50 percent of those responding think Obama would do a better job on Medicare, compared to 42 percent for Romney.
The same poll found that 62 percent of responding Floridians believe that Medicare should continue as it is, while only 28 percent said it should be changed. That seems to provide a fertile opening for Democrats to campaign against the Republican plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system.
But the poll also found that 48 percent of respondents could support at least minor reductions to Medicare to reduce the deficit, and another 11 percent said there could be major reductions. Only 35 percent said there should be no reductions. That could provide an opening for Republicans to make their argument that reform is needed and to reassure seniors that they won’t be affected by the changes.
“That’s the messaging that has gone out” from the Romney campaign, said David Paleologos, who has also studied the issue in his role as Suffolk University polling director. “The onus is on the Obama campaign to prove otherwise.”
Aside from the debate over health insurance, there are broader reasons for the shift among seniors to the Republican Party in recent years, according to MacManus, the University of South Florida professor. She said the “older old,” those in their early 70s and above, born during the time of the Great Depression, tend to be more Democratic, but they are dying off.
The “younger old,” she said, are more likely to be Republican. They have been part of a household in which both parents worked, and are more likely to be significantly invested in the stock market and less likely to be dependent upon government programs, she said.
--more--"
Say goodbye to Florida, Obama.
"Sitting in the senior center, at what she called the “politics table,” Yolan Carter, 85, pointed to a passage in a book she was reading about the Great Depression. Even then, she said, economists warned about the long-term difficulty of maintaining entitlement programs.
They are NOT entitlement programs! We PAID INTO THEM!
“These programs are unsustainable as the years go by,” said Carter, a retired sciences librarian at Harvard University. “It’s like a pyramid. Where does it end?”
I would like to know when the Amerikan media distortions end, as I see they are just like the banking system.
Btw, the empire is also unsustainable.
The problem, she said, is the cost of government: “I don’t have a money tree in my backyard, and it’s got to come from somewhere.”
No, but the private banking cartel has a printing press.
--more--"
Heck, while we are in New Hampshire:
"Romney, Obama to visit tossup N.H. today" by Brian C. Mooney | Globe Staff, September 07, 2012
Dueling visits to New Hampshire by President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney on Friday, the first day after the national conventions, signify the importance of the state and its scant four electoral votes in November.
The Granite State bears little resemblance demographically to the nation, but its singular political culture has made it a coveted tossup state.
New Hampshire exercises an outsized claim on both parties’ strategies precisely because of its unpredictability, able to deliver either side a razor thin victory in the final hours, as it did for George W. Bush in 2000.
There a lot of Jews in New Hampshire?
If Al Gore, winner of the national popular vote, had carried New Hampshire, instead of losing it by around 1 percentage point to Bush, he would have been president. Florida would not have mattered.
And if the election hadn't been stolen and the AmeriKan media investigated....
In some of the 2012 electoral college scenarios to reach the magic number of 270, New Hampshire is critical to victory for either party if the race stays as tight as it has been in recent polling.
The candidates, by making it their first post-convention stop, are validating the importance of the state, whose major claim to political fame traditionally flows from its first-in-the-nation primary....
At this point, Republicans seem more motivated....
Make it red then.
--more--"
Heading back to Florida:
"In Florida, Obama puts Medicare at top of voters’ concerns" September 09, 2012
SEMINOLE, Fla. — At his first stop, in Virginia Beach, Mitt Romney led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, using it as a jumping-off point to criticize President Obama and the Democrats for initially passing a convention platform that did not mention God....
The stop in Virginia Beach and an appearance at the start of the Sprint Cup Series NASCAR race in Richmond is intended to help him shore up his lead among white working-class voters.
Although the president trails Romney in this crucial demographic, some polls still show Romney underperforming among those voters. Romney’s choice of Ryan as his running mate was also expected to help him win over working-class whites and the Republican conservative base....
Where else they gonna go?
For Romney, the son of a Detroit auto executive turned governor of Michigan, such courting of working-class voters may be a challenge. He is Harvard educated (both the business and law schools) and has an estimated net worth of more than $200 million.
During a visit to the Daytona 500 this year, Romney ran into some trouble when he said that while he did not follow the sport as closely as some ardent fans did, he had ‘‘some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.’’ His opponents used the comment to portray him as wealthy and out of touch with the concerns of average voters.
Obama has made repeated campaign stops in Virginia, particularly courting black voters around the Richmond area to try to drive up their turnout. He has also focused on liberal-leaning areas of Northern Virginia.
In addition to the on-the-ground campaigning this weekend, the Sunday morning talk shows were on the candidates’ agendas. Romney was to make his first appearance of the campaign season on ‘‘Meet the Press’’ on NBC, and Obama and Ryan were scheduled to appear on ‘‘Face the Nation’’ on CBS.
I used to watch those shows and be more excited than the Super Bowl (every Sunday was a Super Sunday), but that was soooo long ago now.
Could I really once have been that person that took the press propaganda so seriously?
--more--"
