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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 9/15/11

Obama Team Blaming Jewish Vote for Loss of Weiner House Seat Dems Held for 88 Years

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note: title wording was changed from "the jews" to "Jewish vote"

It looks like Obama's political leadership team  is going to try to spin the loss of Anthony Weiner's  NY District 9 seat  on Tuesday as a local anomaly primarily due to a large Jewish population. 

Amazing, the different takes on the Democrats' loss of a District they'd held for almost a century (since the 1920s,) where the Democrats have a three to one registration advantage.  

Some publications say it's because the Republican winner, 70 year old Bob Turner made the election about Obama. 

Some publications, like the Washington Post,   add a bit more nuance and suggest that the reason was because of a local issue-- Obama's support of Israel returning to 1967 borders-- which is opposed by Orthodox Jews-- who compose a larger portion of this district than almost any other. 

Also, Weprin, when he was a representative in the New York State house, voted for gay marriage, another contentious issue. The Jewish week reported , that Weprin's vote for Gay Marriage "led some Flatbush Orthodox rabbis, in an unusually strident letter last week, to issue a prohibition not only against voting for Weprin but against donating time or money to his campaign."

Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn (flickr image  By Locace)

The Washington Post reports that DCCC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz shrugged off the loss, attributing it to a unique local situation. The article reports,

She said that Orthodox Jews, whose approval rating of Obama stands at just 13 percent, were far outnumbered in other districts with large numbers of Jewish voters and that this result will not be replicated elsewhere. "There isn't any comparison between districts like mine and New York Nine," she said.

At Dailykos, sidnora reports  how Wiener's district was a very conservative Democratic district, that Weprin was a really bad candidate and Turner was a very effective candidate, in terms of ability to communicate and raise enthusiasm.  He gets ultra local, remarking,

Weprin was given the nomination by the Queens County Democratic party Chairman, Joe Crowley , because Crowley wanted to make sure that when the 9th gets disappeared in the upcoming redistricting, the "orphaned" incumbent wouldn't be strong enough to challenge any of the more established incumbents in the adjoining districts. That's no way to win a race you really want to win, and it should also provoke a discussion about how nominees for special elections are chosen in NYC. So, if you want to blame anyone for this loss, blame Joe Crowley. He outsmarted himself.


At his New York Times FiveThirtyEight blog, Nate Silver's article, For Democrats, It's 2010 All Over Again , adds another perspective. 

He discusses the issue of the PVI, which he explains, " One crude way to forecast the results you might expect to see out of a House race is through its Partisan Voting Index , or P.V.I., a measure of how the district voted relative to others in the past two presidential elections."

That shows that for the most part, Republicans have been picking up elections with percentages above and beyond what the Partisan Voting Index would have predicted. 

Here's my take. 

This should be a wake-up call to Obama supporters. President Barack Obama has now been shown to have reverse coat-tails, that his candidacy will make things worse for candidates. Look at Weiner's district. Even with a three to one advantage in registrations, the Democrat lost.  Obama will be what Stuart Rothenberg,  editor of the Rothenberg Political Report described as "an Albatross around Weprin's neck" around all Democratic candidates necks. They will win IN SPITE OF Obama, not with his help. 

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

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He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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