Hitting the Right Notes
By Eric Herschthal
The Jewish Week
There is no official poll on where Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney stands among Jewish Republican voters, but judging by his recent efforts to court the Jewish community — his latest, a speech last Thursday at a dinner for Yeshiva University's Sy Syms School of Business — it appears the former governor of Massachusetts is making significant headway.
At the school's 20th anniversary dinner, Romney received uproarious applause when he — unexpectedly — spent most of his time discussing his foreign policy initiatives. Organizers of the event said that they expected Romney, the former CEO of the private investment firm Bain Capital, to speak mostly about business.
However, Romney took swipes at former President Jimmy Carter for "fail[ing] to comprehend the extent of this threat," referring to "radical, violent Jihad." He defended Israel's security fence, saying that it "keeps peace in Israel" and "is helping prevent bloodshed and terror and violence." And he obliquely compared Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler saying that Ahmadinejad's "purpose is not only to deny the Holocaust; it is to deny Israel. He is doing what another evil man did before him: conditioning minds to acquiesce to the elimination of a people."
Romney has also quietly launched a new fundraising campaign aimed at conservative Jewish voters through the Web site Arutz-Sheva/Israel National News, in which Romney solicits support from Jews who strongly support Israel.
Political analysts say that Romney's push into the Jewish community shows that he recognizes not only the important political and financial role of the Jewish community, but also how much catching up he has to do.
"I think Giuliani and McCain" — the two leading Republican candidates — "have a leg up on Romney because they have a longer record," said Gilbert Kahn, a political science professor at Kean University in Union, N.J. He added, "Intuitively, I would be skeptical that [Romney] is making inroads. But having said that, there's a significant amount of money [coming] from the conservative Jewish community."
When contacted, the Romney campaign staff said they had no official lists of how much money their candidate had raised from Jewish sources, but they mentioned several high-profile Jewish supporters. They include: Mel Sembler, the former U.S. ambassador to Rome from 2001 to 2005 and owner of mall centers nationwide; Marvin Pomerantz, a businessman from Iowa who was recently named co-chair of Romney's Iowa primary campaign; and Charlie Spies, formerly the counselor to the Republican National Committee and now a Romney campaign adviser.
Ron Kaufman, the White House director to President George H.W. Bush and head of the Republican National Committee in Massachusetts, said "it's all anecdotal, but having been through a bit, [Romney]'s shown much better among Republican-voting Jews than [among] Republicans as a whole."
In an April 22 Pew research poll of the Republican candidates, Romney is fifth with an 8 percent, trailing Rudolph Giuliani (32 percent), Newt Gingrich with 9 percent, Fred Thompson with 10 percent and John McCain with 23 percent. But Romney made headlines last month when he topped all Republican candidates in first-quarter campaign fundraising, with $20.7 million. Giuliani was runner-up with $13.8 million.
Despite weaker poll showings, however, Kaufman said that unlike most voters, Jewish Republican voters tend to be more politically attentive and, so far, Romney has been hitting all the right notes.
Romney "has no foreign policy record to speak of," Kaufman said, but "since you have a group of voters who are active in the process, you can be aggressive and let them know where you stand." He added that Romney's "stances on the issues are correct. He's in the right place on the issues and he has a better understanding of what the problems facing the Middle East are than any candidate of either party."
Romney began attracting attention from Israel supporters when he addressed the Seventh Annual Herzliya Conference in Israel in January. He was the only Republican candidate to appear in person at the conference and it is where he first laid out a broad-based plan for how to deal with the Middle East. Among his points were the diplomatic and economic isolation of Iran, a corralling of Arab support for the nascent Iraqi government, forcing movements like Hamas and Hezbollah to recognize Israel's right to exist and forming an armed NATO-like alliance that props up moderate Muslim regimes.
At Romney's speech to the Yeshiva University business school, he also raised previously unmentioned foreign policy proposals on how to prevent a nuclear Iran, including creating an ambassador-at-large position aimed at preventing nuclear proliferation and making nuclear trafficking "a crime against humanity, on a par with genocide and war crimes."
Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said that while his organization does not endorse a specific candidate, he thinks "Mitt Romney, as we've seen, understands, grasps the concerns of Israel." He noted that Giuliani and McCain also do.
When asked if Romney's aggressive courting of the Jewish community perhaps resulted from his lacking previous credentials with them, Brooks said they did not. "I don't think he has to demonstrate his support of the Jewish community," he said. "I think he wants to."
Romney supporters have said that while he hasn't had the opportunity to prove himself on foreign policy grounds that would play well with the conservative Jewish community, he has nonetheless showed strong support of the local Jewish community while governor of Massachusetts. They point to his refusal to allow for police protection for former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami when he spoke in the Boston area last year.
According to Nancy Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, Romney consistently attended the Boston Jewish community's celebration of Israel's Independence Day and Holocaust remembrance events. "Whenever we called him to support Israel," Kaufman said, "he was always there."
To be sure, Israel is not the only issue that politically conservative Jews vote on. Jewish and non-Jewish Republicans alike have viewed Romney's religious beliefs — he is a Mormon — with ambivalence. According to a recent poll, only 29 percent of Americans are "ready" for a Mormon president. But insofar as Mormonism makes Romney a minority in the political landscape, at least a few Jewish Romney supporters have dismissed his religion as a non-issue.
Lee Cowen, a financial backer of Romney in Washington, D.C., told a local paper there, "The fact that he's a Mormon is positive for the Jewish community. He's a minority religion like we are [and] we as Jews have sympathy for other groups [that have] suffered from persecution."
Kean University's Kahn disagreed, saying that Jews still "tend to be a little off put by Mormons."
But approaching large Jewish audiences like the one last Thursday night bode well for Romney, Kahn said, since his main Republican contenders — McCain and Giuliani — have proven clout with the Jewish community. "Giuliani and McCain can pass up on Herzliya or the YU dinner," he said.
