It's My Party (13 page)

There is something odd about Medved’s being so conservative. There is something even odder about his eliciting so much of
a response from evangelical Christians. Michael Medved is an Orthodox Jew. “Have a good weekend,” Medved said, wrapping up
the Friday show on which I sat in. “And have a fulfilling Sabbath, whenever you celebrate the Sabbath.”

* * *

Jews are overwhelmingly Democratic. During the New Deal, they regularly cast about 85 percent of their votes for President
Franklin Roosevelt. In more recent years, Jews cast roughly 80 percent of their votes for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and
for Senator Hubert Humphrey when he ran for president against Richard Nixon in 1968. In both 1992 and 1996, Jews cast about
78 percent of their votes for President Clinton. Only African-Americans cast larger percentages of their votes for Democrats,
and even then only by a few points.

It is easy enough to understand why Jews first became Democrats. Although the Jewish presence in America dates from colonial
times—one synagogue in Rhode Island has been in use since 1763—by far the largest influx of Jews arrived in America between
roughly 1880 and 1924, during the great wave of immigration that brought millions to this country from Eastern and Southern
Europe. Like the Italians, Slavs, and others with whom they arrived, Jews were slow to become politically active—it took a
while for immigrants who landed on Ellis Island to get the idea that this country belonged to them just as much as to the
descendants of immigrants who landed on Plymouth Rock—and it was not until the 1930s that they got into the habit of voting.
Still poor, they naturally gave their allegiance to the Democratic Party, the party of the little man.

The party of the little man. This requires a word of explanation. When the GOP was founded, it was the party of the little
man itself. At least it thought so. As we have seen, it drew much of its support from one sort of little men, rural folk in
the North, and it championed those who were, so to speak, the littlest men of all, the slaves. Yet after the Civil War the
Republican Party began a long and close association with big business. It elicited the support of the men who were industrializing
the nation—titans such as the railroad magnate Leland Stanford, benefactor of Stanford University, who served as the Republican
governor of California and as a Republican member of the Senate. The Republican Party imposed tariffs on manufactured goods,
helping to sustain the profits of these new industrialists while forcing ordinary Americans to pay more for products of all
kinds. When Mrs. Astor held her famous ball for the New York 400, she might as well have billed it as a gathering for the
Republican Party’s staunchest supporters.

There was one Republican, President Theodore Roosevelt, who stood up to business, reviving the nearly forgotten Sherman Anti-Trust
Act to bring suit against dozens of corporations. But when William Howard Taft succeeded Roosevelt as president, Taft reverted
to laissez-faire, and the Republican association with big business resumed.

During the 1920s the relationship between the GOP and business reached its apex. Business produced goods and services at a
rate that raised the standard of living to levels theretofore unknown. Benefiting from the boom, the GOP held the White House
and both houses of Congress for most of the decade. “The chief business of the American people,” announced Calvin Coolidge,
the man who as president led the Republican Party from 1923 to 1929, “is business.” Then came the Great Depression.

After succeeding Calvin Coolidge in the White House, Herbert Hoover had the misfortune to be president when the Depression
struck. The irony is that by Republican standards Hoover was something of a progressive. He believed in activist government.
He used the Federal Farm Board to supply relief to farmers and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to supply capital to
the banking system. If he had been reelected in 1932, Hoover might have pursued some of the same policies as did the man to
whom he lost, the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. Yet none of this mattered. When Hoover gave speeches to restore public confidence,
he seemed merely to be telling people to buck up and bear it. Encampments of the homeless, huddling in tents and sheds, soon
became known as Hoovervilles.

By contrast, Franklin Roosevelt promised a New Deal, which, while lacking in specifics, at least sounded encouraging. Elected
in 1932 in a landslide, Roosevelt spent the first years of his presidency enacting one piece of legislation after another
intended to help labor, farmers, and the needy. The Depression never really ended until the Second World War, when the production
of war matériel reopened the factories and created new jobs. But while economists now doubt that the New Deal played much
of a role in the nation’s economic recovery, there is no doubt that it played a role in the lives of the voters, giving them
new hope. Thus did the Democratic Party, and emphatically not the Republican Party, become the party of the little man.

It is, as I say, easy enough to understand why Jews first became Democrats. It is a lot harder to understand why they are
still Democrats. As immigrant groups become more affluent, they become more Republican. The Irish, Italians, Slavs, and every
other immigrant group you can name have all conformed to this pattern. The only exception are the Jews. In the words of Seymour
Martin Lipset, Jews today “live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans.” Why?

There seem to be two reasons. Marty Lipset himself emphasizes the Jewish fear of anti-Semitism. The descendants of people
subjected to anti-Semitism for centuries, American Jews fear anti-Semitism even today. According to the 1999 Survey of American
Jewish Opinion, American Jews name anti-Semitism as the greatest threat they face. “When you ask people which groups are more
likely to be anti-Semitic,” Marty says, “Jews answer Republicans and groups that support the Republicans, such as conservatives,
businesspeople, and evangelical Christians.” Jews remain loyal to the Democratic Party, therefore, because they see the GOP
as their enemy.

The second reason Jews are Democratic is that Jews are liberal—the most liberal ethnic group in the country. To cite one statistic,
Jews are more than twice as likely to be pro-choice as members of any other ethnic group. To cite another, Jews are four times
more likely than the members of other ethnic groups to come right out and identify themselves as “liberal.” Long after Democratic
politicians have learned to avoid the l-word, Jews embrace it.

Dedicated liberals who see Republicans as anti-Semites. These are not likely GOP voters. So why did Michael Medved convert?

Slouching in a chair in a conference room after the show, Medved explained that there were three reasons why he left the Democratic
Party to become a Republican. “First, I became more religious.”

When in his late twenties he became an observant Jew, Medved said, his political outlook changed. He found himself drawn to
the way the Republican Party stood up for traditional morality, which he now took seriously. At the same time, he found that
he had stopped worrying about anti-Semitism among some of the GOP’s most ardent supporters, evangelical Christians. “Evangelical
Christians worry secular Jews,” Medved said. “They don’t upset the devout nearly as much. People of faith understand people
of faith.”

The second reason for Medved’s conversion was that when he observed the liberal culture close at hand, he disliked what he
saw. After graduating from Yale, Medved spent several years during the early 1970s living in Berkeley. The protest movement
had already crested, but it had left behind a large residue of student radicals. “All those people who wore long hair, never
bathed, spent their time protesting—I decided I didn’t want to have anything to do with them,” Medved said.

His views of liberals, already trending downward, reached a nadir after his apartment was robbed. The police apprehended the
burglar. “It was a black kid who was twenty-four,” Medved said. “It turned out that he had committed seven other burglaries.”

Medved attended the trial. “I can still hear the public defender,” Medved said. “She was a Jewish woman from New York. ‘Travel
with me now,’ she said to the jury. ‘Travel with me now to the impoverished backwoods of Louisiana. There is a baby crying,
a black baby.’ Then she went on through the whole history of slavery and oppression, as if it excused repeated acts of theft.”

The jury returned a verdict of guilty, but the judge, apparently as liberal as the public defender, sentenced the burglar
to just four months in jail. Medved found himself looking at the GOP’s tough stance on crime with new eyes.

The third reason was Israel. When that nation suddenly found itself at war in October 1973, Medved, who had cousins in Israel,
followed events closely. The first week of the war went badly. Sustaining massive losses, Israel came close to defeat. Then,
warning the Soviets not to intervene, President Nixon resupplied Israel, enabling the Israelis to transform the dynamics of
the war so completely that they captured the Sinai and the Golan Heights. “Democrats like McGovern, whom I had supported,
said we ought to wait awhile and not rush into it,” Medved said. “Not rushing into it could have cost Israel its existence.”
Republicans, Medved felt forced to conclude, were better friends of Israel than were Medved’s fellow Democrats.

Thus the conversion of Michael Medved. He came to believe that Jews have less to fear from evangelical Christians like those
who support the GOP than from the anomie of secular culture, that liberal permissiveness is inferior to conservative firmness
in confronting crime, and that Republicans are more serious than Democrats about defending Israel. Is Medved’s case unique?
Or are there lessons the Republican Party can learn from his experience? I fear the former.

True, there was a time in the 1970s and 1980s when it looked as though the GOP might indeed win the support of many Michael
Medveds. The Democratic presidential candidates Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis got Republican hopes up.
Running against them, the Republican presidential candidates Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush all polled more than
30 percent of the Jewish vote, considerably more than had been the Republican norm. During the same period, the neoconservatives
emerged. An influential group of Republican intellectuals who used to be liberal, and in some cases radical, most of the neoconservatives
were Jewish. Norman Podhoretz, editor of
Commentary
, and Irving Kristol, publisher of
The National Interest
, attracted particular attention, in part because they were important in their own right, in part because they had sons who
themselves rose to prominent positions in Republican politics. John Podhoretz became a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, William
Kristol the chief of staff for Vice President Quayle. After leaving government, John Podhoretz and William Kristol founded
the conservative magazine
The Weekly Standard
. Support among Jewish intellectuals, a new, higher share of the Jewish vote—at last, Republicans hoped, the GOP was gaining
ground.

They were mistaken. The GOP wasn’t gaining ground, the Democratic Party was putting up bad candidates. Jimmy Carter, Walter
Mondale, and Michael Dukakis appeared weak, both in their support of Israel and in their resolution to maintain our own defense,
the strength of which, in turn, lends American support for Israel its credibility. Then the Democrats nominated Bill Clinton.
Clinton pledged himself to the staunch support of Israel. And he promised so persuasively to uphold our own defense that he
won the endorsement of no less a figure than Admiral William Crowe, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To the extent
that Jews had ever begun a migration toward the GOP, Bill Clinton reversed it. In 1992 Bill Clinton won 78 percent of the
Jewish vote, holding George Bush to just 12 percent; in 1996 Bill Clinton again won 78 percent of the Jewish vote, holding
Bob Dole to just 16 percent.
^*
As for the neoconservative movement, it remained Republican. But it also remained tiny.

Like any other institution, the Republican Party has limited resources. It therefore needs to pick and choose the groups to
which it will make its strongest appeals. Since Jews cast almost the same overwhelming percentage of their votes for Bill
Clinton four years ago that they cast for Franklin Roosevelt sixty-four years ago, it seems fair to conclude that they are
unlikely to receive overtures from the GOP particularly warmly. What should the GOP do?

The Republican Party should oppose anti-Semitism of any kind, and it should remain explicitly committed to the well-being
of Israel. But it should take those steps for the sake of its own self-respect. As for appealing to Jews, I see only two approaches.
One would be to recognize that Jews have made up their minds about the GOP and to let it go at that. “The GOP has a better
chance with religious Jews than secular Jews,” Michael Medved said, “but do you know how few religious Jews there are? Less
than 10 percent of Jews attend synagogue regularly. And even among religious Jews, most are Democrats. There’s just a lot
of history we’re dealing with here.”

Yet it is hardly in the nature of a political party to give up on an entire bloc of voters, no matter how insistently the
bloc has spurned the party’s advances. The Jewish population of the United States is about 5.8 million, or just a scant 600,000
more than the combined population of Iowa, Alaska, New Hampshire, and Delaware, the first states to select delegates to the
national party conventions. This suggests the second approach. Like a long shot presidential candidate campaigning in those
four states, the GOP would shrug off the odds, ignore the cold reception, adopt a cheerful, dogged insistence on the rightness
of its cause—and go right on trying to persuade Jewish voters to support it, simply refusing to take no for an answer.

The only group even more Democratic than Jews is African-Americans. This seems odd. They are the very group the Republican
Party was founded to help. It was a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing
slaves in the Confederacy, and it was Republicans in Congress who enacted the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing African-Americans
the full rights of citizenship throughout the nation.