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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/64081/full/64081/republicans-and-democrats-pitch-to-floridas-jews/ <br /><br /> <b>Republicans — and Democrats — pitch to Florida’s Jews</b> <br /> Thursday, January 26, 2012 | by ron kampeas <br /><br /><p>Barack Obama won’t show up on the vote tallies after polls close in Florida’s Republican primary on Tuesday, Jan. 31, but the president’s supporters already are waging a fight for the Sunshine State, with a particular focus on its substantial Jewish community.</p> <p>Democrats are rolling out a campaign to rival any of the GOP candidates.</p> <p>Democratic officials said volunteers in Florida already had made nearly 600,000 phone calls to supporters and conducted thousands of training sessions, many of them focusing on the Jewish community, 10 months before the general election. The Obama campaign has opened nine offices in the state.</p> <p>“Florida is the most significant battleground state,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who chairs the Democratic National Committee. “We’re taking nothing for granted. We’re in the process of using these primaries as an organizing tool.”</p> <div class="capDivLeft" style="width: 360px;"><img alt="Newt Gingrich speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla. in September. photo/gage skidmore via creative commons " class="left" height="265" src="/images/uploads/w_photos_2012/zvu01_27_12/USjtafloridaNewt.jpg" title="Newt Gingrich speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla. in September. photo/gage skidmore via creative commons " width="360" /> <div class="caption">Newt Gingrich speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla. in September. photo/gage skidmore via creative commons</div> </div> Wasserman Schultz said Jewish surrogates were targeting communities across the state, defending Obama’s Israel record as well as emphasizing differences on health care and social issues, such as abortion. <p>The rollout was planned months ago, well before Newt Gingrich’s upset win in the South Carolina primary buried the notion of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, as the GOP’s impervious front-runner. Recent polls in Florida show Gingrich pulling ahead of Romney by 7 to 9 percentage points; just a week earlier Romney had enjoyed double-digit leads in the state’s polls.</p> <p>Florida is a testing ground because it is the first large and diverse state in the primary lineup, said Nancy Ratzan, a former president of the National Council of Jewish Women who is now active in the Democratic Party.</p> <p>“Florida is more reflective of what they’re going to find in other parts of the country,” she said.</p> <p>Romney and Gingrich head into Florida with few holds barred, each striving to identify the other as a member of the “elites” reviled by the Republican base.</p> <p>A Romney ad released Jan. 23 accused Gingrich of making money off the financial crisis by taking funds from a government-backed mortgage company. It said the former House speaker and Georgia congressman was a Washington “insider.”</p> <p>Gingrich has depicted Romney as uncaring, drawing on his career as a venture capitalist. He also has seized on Romney’s recently released tax returns, which show investments in the same government-backed mortgage company that paid Gingrich for consulting fees.</p> <p>Noam Neusner, a former domestic policy adviser to President George W. Bush, said that Gingrich had upended the race with his South Carolina victory and the race was now wide open.</p> <p>Neusner, who has not endorsed a candidate, noted that Romney had won the “Jewish donors” primary, drawing the largest assemblage of Jewish supporters. But he noted that Gingrich was a known quantity among Jewish conservatives going back to his days as House speaker from 1995 to 1998.</p> <p>Neusner acknowledged that “there’s a greater comfort level with a certain constancy of personality in Romney.”</p> <p>“Gingrich is admired” for his intellect, he said, “but there’s greater enthusiasm that Romney could do better in the general” election.</p> <p>Both presidential hopefuls, as well as fellow candidate Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, have made Obama’s relationship with Israel a key target of their foreign policy campaigning.</p> <p>“We’re very comfortable saying that so long as Barack Obama or Ron Paul are not the president, Israel will be a much safer place,” said Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the West Palm Beach Republican Party, who has not endorsed a candidate.</p> <p>Dinerstein said Republican Jews were too small a constituency to expect to be courted intensely in the primary, which is open only to registered Republicans. But that will change ahead of the general election, he said, when he expects the eventual Republican candidate to draw Jewish independents and centrist Democrats because of Obama’s Israel record.</p> <p>“President Obama has no chance of getting 78 percent of the vote,” he said, a reference to the level of Jewish support Obama garnered in the 2008 elections, according to exit polling.</p> <p>The importance of Florida’s Jewish vote is one area where there is bipartisan agreement.</p> <p>The Republican National Committee has identified Florida as a swing state with a substantial Jewish population where Jewish votes could make the difference, according to an activist who saw an RNC memo late last year. The memo listed 450,000 Jewish voters in the state, which seems to comport with figures from Jewish groups that estimate the state’s overall Jewish population at 640,000. Other such states listed in the memo were Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Nevada, according to the activist.</p> <p>Democrats are emphasizing domestic issues in their approach to Jewish voters, as well as Obama’s Israel record. Wasserman Schultz said that Republican plans to privatize parts of Medicare threatened a key safety net for the elderly.</p> <p>Romney is planning Jewish events, a campaign official said. The campaign official also said that John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations who is a favorite of many hawkish Jewish conservatives, will campaign in the state for Romney ahead of the primary.</p> <p>Queries to Gingrich’s campaign went unanswered as of early this week. Reports say he has gone into Florida without funds or organization comparable to those at Romney’s disposal.</p> <p>Sheldon Adelson, the pro-Israel casino magnate who has long been close to the former House speaker, helped boost his prospects in South Carolina with a $5 million infusion to an independent pro-Gingrich group, Winning America’s Future. And on Jan. 23 it was reported that the billionaire’s wife, Miriam, was donating another $5 million to the group.</p>

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