Obama Is Jewish? Oy.
Can we really trust voters?
The Associated Press conducted a poll on racial attitudes of votes this week that included a question on what voters believed to be Barack Obama’s religious affiliation. Eighteen percent of those surveyed thought that the president is Jewish.
This is bizarre.
Although the president, a member of the United Church of Christ, a Protestant denomination, has been accused of having a secular agenda or even being a closet Muslim by some on the lunatic fringe, no one has ever asserted that he is Jewish. An article earlier this year in the American Prospect suggested that Obama was “the first Jewish President,” but it was meant metaphorically, in the same sense as it was claimed that Bill Clinton was “the first Black President.” The best evidence that one can muster for Obama embracing Judaism is that he hosted the first Passover Seder in White House history and that he shares a first name with a biblical figure from the Book of Judges. In other words, there really isn’t any.
It’s fair to express some skepticism about the poll, but it was conducted on behalf of the AP with an appropriate sample size and contains no other seemingly aberrant results.
For all the debate back and forth about the impact of newspaper endorsement X or political gaffe Y, voters may just not be paying attention to anything that the political media obsess over. After all, if 18 percent of Americans think Barack Obama is Jewish, one can only imagine what they make of entitlement reform.
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