undercurrents

Like Mark Bittman, I’ve been trying to find a balance between being online and being, um, fully engaged in my everyday life, so I haven’t been scrutinizing the media. But out of long habit, I still read the dead-tree New York Times every day, and I am sensitive to its coverage on most issues.

I don’t feel much like blogging today, but I’d be falling down on the job if I didn’t make note of this as I notice it. Barack Obama suddenly appears to have a “Jewish problem,” if this article, which appeared on the front page yesterday (under the headline “Obama Walks a Difficult Path as He Courts Jewish Voters”), is any indication—and you know I think it is or I wouldn’t be talking about it.

Then there was this suggestion, in a different Times article yesterday, that Obama had been less than forthright about his efforts over the last month to court Jewish voters:

Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief of The Chicago Sun-Times, voiced a more basic lament: that the candidate’s aides omitted seemingly newsworthy gatherings from his publicly released schedule. As an example, she cited the lack of previous notice about a meeting he had with about 100 Jewish leaders in a Cleveland suburb last Sunday.

“The main issue is not whether he comes back here and shmoozes,” Ms. Sweet said of Mr. Obama, her hand tracing the middle and rear of the cabin. “First, tell me what you’re doing. Then we can argue if I can have access.”

Asked about Ms. Sweet’s concerns, Mr. Axelrod said that a transcript and video of the meeting had been released to her and others. “Occasionally, people in politics have private meetings,” he said.

Mr Axelrod seems just a wee bit disingenuous, not to mention defensive. In fact, Obama has been speaking not only to American Jews but to the Israeli press. And so has his foreign policy adviser Samantha Power.

On February 11, the op-ed columnist Roger Cohen, in a piece supporting Obama, precisely laid out the threads of an alleged smear campaign against a candidate whose “Jewish credentials are under scrunity“:

The attacks, mainly anonymous e-mails, have woven together various threads — his middle name ”Hussein;” schooling in Muslim Indonesia; his Chicago pastor’s embrace of the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan; and his calls for dialogue with Iran — to portray Obama as the Muslim Manchurian candidate.

In retrospect, this looks to me like a list of Jewish-themed attacks that the Obama campaign expected that Obama would have to fight off. Indeed, the campaign is now forced to spend a lot of time on these issues.

I for one am not too concerned about whether Obama “feels Israel in his kishkes.” (I think Obama doesn’t have kishkes; he is pure reptile.) I’m not even going to spend too much time thinking about why Obama felt so comfortable, in his “private” meeting with some Jews in Cleveland, mouthing off against Likud (perhaps because this decidedly not-post-partisan “forward-leaning” language appeals to some of his young supporters, and because his Jewish crew is representative of Jews in the “progressive” community but not Jews in the wider—and more diverse, and older—”liberal” community … including people once known as liberal hawks. But what do I know?).

Instead, I am going to blame this problem squarely on the shoulders of Barack Obama, who, as I said at the time, made a series of errors in judgment in his answers about the Louis Farrakhan question during his debate last Tuesday.

Farrakhan is not merely a drive-by hater. His three-decade-long career is infused with a vicious, conspiratorial, poisonous Jew-hatred.

While Obama is having a bad few days, Soft-Focus Hillary is getting some good press.

Those are the undercurrents as of 1:00 p.m.

But we’re on Feiler Faster time. Anyone willing to predict anything about Tuesday’s upcoming primaries is a fool.