The greatest proponents for a pro Israel policy are the evangelical Christians and the Jews, in that order. It is a given that the evangelicals will have little influence in an Obama administration. The Jewish leverage is at risk if they do not support Obama and he wins. Many would question how much influence they would have if they supported him and he did win.

Carter wrote off his Jewish support early in his campaign. In this old article from Jason Maoz , Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem, he spoke of the politics and Carter’s disdain for the Jewish voters.

Excerpts:

Speechwriter Bob Shrum quit the Carter campaign after just a few weeks, disgusted with what he described as Carter’s penchant for fudging the truth. He also related that Carter, convinced the Jewish vote in the Democratic primaries would go to Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, had instructed his staff not to issue any more statements on the Middle East.

“Jackson has all the Jews anyway,” Shrum quoted Carter as saying. “We get the Christians.”

Relations between Carter and Israel were tense from the outset of the Carter presidency. Carter’s hostility was evident to Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan, who in his memoir Breakthrough described a July 1977 White House meeting between Carter and Israeli officials. “You are more stubborn than the Arabs, and you put obstacles on the path to peace,’’ an angry Carter scolded Dayan and his colleagues.

“Our talk,” Dayan wrote, “lasted more than an hour and was most unpleasant. President Carter … launched charge after charge against Israel.”

Former New York mayor Ed Koch, in his 1984 bestseller Mayor, recounted a conversation he had shortly before the 1980 election with Cyrus Vance, who’d recently resigned as Carter’s secretary of state. Koch told Vance that many Jews would not be voting for Carter because they feared “that if he is reelected he will sell them out.”

“Vance,” recalled Koch, “nodded and said, ‘He will.’ ”

In Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn revealed that during a March 1980 meeting with his senior political advisers, Carter, discussing his fading reelection prospects and his sinking approval rating in the Jewish community, snapped, “If I get back in, I’m going to [expletive] the Jews.”

Carter – such was the country’s good fortune – did not get back in. But as evidenced by his years of pro-Palestinian advocacy, reams of anti-Israel op-ed articles, and the release last week of his latest book/screed, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, he’s been trying to [expletive] the Jews ever since.

HKO comments- There is no assurance that Obama will be another Jimmy Carter, but given the number of advisors who hold similar views to Carter it not hard to understand Jewish reluctance if it occurs.

It is also worth noting that Carter got overwhelming support from the Jews for his first term , but substantially fewer Jewish votes for the attempt at his second. In 1976 Carter got 71% of the Jewish vote. In 1980 he got 45%; Reagan received 39% and Independent Party John Anderson got 14%. Go here for a history of Jewish voting patterns. Carter got the worst Jewish support of any Democratic nominee since the Depression.

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