You never know who you hurt with your words

A new poll shows that Joe Lieberman has a much bigger "Problem with Jews" than Barack Obama.

This news was going to lead me into a discussion about the problem that is Joe Lieberman and the damage he has caused within the party, and particularly with elderly Jewish voters in South Florida. But Glenn, who hammers Holy Joe today on his ongoing Hagee ties, and the Daily Show (below), with it's brilliant piece last night on retirement community South Florida Jews, have addressed most of the issue for me.



That being said, we've still got a big problem out there, and it is typified in large part by Joe Lieberman. The point of having Joe out there is not to convince the entire Jewish community to vote for John McCain. It's just to convince enough of them to not vote for Barack Obama.

On top of that, there's still the issue that older Jewish women continue to have an impassioned, if not irrational, attachment to (or obsession with) Hillary Clinton. We see it in the Daily Show clip, with the absurd visual of Lisa, the "younger looking" Jewish woman ("beautiful diction" - oy), protesting that if Obama didn't make Hillary Clinton his VP choice, she was going to sit out the election. The story half kids us, letting us in on the joke that some of the commentary is manipulated to make it funnier, to make the participants appear a bit ridiculous. But, of course, that's part of what makes the truths so biting. Lisa's comments, while perhaps partially out of context (although I suspect not much), reflect a much deeper reality.

I had dinner on Saturday night with relatives visiting from a few hours south, including my aunt, a fundamentally good person, a baby boomer Jewish woman, who will be voting for Barack Obama -- who nevertheless asked me whether I really, truly thought Obama was qualified to be president, and that how in her mostly older Jewish comminity in South Florida, the women had been excitedly discussing Hillary Clinton up until Senator Obama locked up the nomination, and now none of them discuss or shows a shred of interest in Barack Obama.

And I couldn't help thinking, after hearing this discussion and seeing the Daily Show clip, that Joe Lieberman has in part done this to us, that he is both a symptom and a cause of a problematic worldview. The issue is not one of substantive positions, on whether aging mostly-female transplanted Northeastern Jews believe that Barack Obama really is bad for Israel and John McCain will be the saviour of the Middle East. We're dealing with aging liberals here, remember. Instead, we're still stuck trying to get past the turn of the century, the transition from Clinton/Gore (and, in some minds, Lieberman) to Bush/Cheney, and the farce that was the 2000 election.

Let me see if I can make the point a bit better.

For one thing, there's an attitide of entitlement, manifested in a refusal to accept the results of a hard-fought primary election season, and an insistence that the rules be changed to conform to one side's desired outcome. In essence, the basic norms of acceptable behavior in a democratic republic governed by rules have given way to a revolutionary selfishness. Regardless of the will of the party's voters as a whole, some still believe that their preferred candidate still has some legitimate claim to the nomination.

It is the same mindset that led to Joe Lieberman shunning the results of the Connecticut Democratic primary for his Senate seat two years ago. By reelecting Joe Lieberman as an "Independent Democrat" (with a coalition of a majority of Republicans and a minority of misled Democrats who took Lieberman at his word that he would remain loyal to the Democratic Party, that he favored a withdrawal from Iraq, and that he would fight hard to put a Democrat in the White House) over Democratic nominee Ned Lamont, Connecticut voters enabled the mindset that Joe's behavior was legitimate and fair, despite common sense dictating otherwise. Of course, the reality is that Senator Lieberman has, since the election, smarting from the Democratic Party's rejection of him in Connecticut and in the presidental primaries of 2004, continued to try to punish the Democratic party for following the will of the Democratic voters.

Bolstered (unconsciously, I'm sure) by what happened with Joe Lieberman's reelection to the Senate, Hillary Clinton's campaign showed the same stubborn selfishness, cynically refusing to accept defeat and harping about the supposed disenfranchisement of Florida and Michigan voters. In her supporters' minds, Hillary was (and remains) entitled to the Democratic nomination and Barack Obama better recognize that by making her his Vice President, or else Obama will be made to suffer at the hands of hundreds of thousands of residents at Century Village and Kings Point and the myriad other Jewish retirement communities in South Florida.

Worse, these communities seem to have misunderstood the lesson of 2000 and hanging chads. Feeling cheated out of their votes in 2000 (which votes, I'll be honest, were cast for Al Gore -- or Pat Buchanan, but that's another story -- but made passionate by his choice of a Jewish running mate), many people seem to have stubbornly internalized that disenfranchisement. Instead of focusing on the fact that as a result of the failure of their vote to be counted for the intended candidate, the other candidate won the presidency, the focus instead seems to be that the voters themselves are important--more important than the actual result of the election and the impact on the country--and their voices must be heard. And if it takes defeating the Democrat Barack Obama (who, let's be honest again, does have Hussein as a middle name, nudge nudge) and putting John McCain into the White House to do that, so be it. Because it worked so well for the Naderites, right?

Of course, it doesn't help that Joe Lieberman is spending more time with the retired South Florida Jewish community than in Washington D.C. or his home state of Connecticut, stirring the flames.

Basically, it's a temper tantrum. It wouldn't be acceptable from our children, but what do we do about it when it comes from our grandparents?