Please take a moment to digest this provocative article by a
Jewish Rabbi from Teaneck , N.J. It is
far and away the most succinct and thoughtful explanation of how our nation is
changing. The article appeared in The Israel National News, and is directed to
Jewish readership. 70% of American Jews vote as Democrats. The Rabbi has some
interesting comments in that regard.
"The most charitable way of explaining the election
results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo - for the incumbent
President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship,
incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer
people voted.
But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to
eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among
the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane
Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have
chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight
uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.
Romney lost because he didn't get enough votes to win.
That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons.
Romney lost because the conservative virtues - the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free
enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness - no longer inspire
or animate a majority of the electorate.
The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is
impossible to compete against free stuff.
Every businessman knows this; that is why the "loss
leader" or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama's America
is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on
food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by
the tens of millions; those who - courtesy of Obama - receive two full years of
unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentivizes looking for work
and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their
windfall) surely know for whom to vote. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.
The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney
acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which "47% of the
people" start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive
money - "free stuff" - from the government.
Almost half of the population has no skin in the game - they
don't care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their
free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese. They
just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else's expense. In the
end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does
not bode well for the future.
It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning
against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence,
the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a
President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.
That engenders the second reason why Romney lost: the
inescapable conclusion that the electorate is ignorant and uninformed. Indeed,
it does not pay to be an informed voter, because most other voters - the clear
majority – are unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of saying that too many
people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not
have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He
needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly
women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication,
while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich.
During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to
Adlai Stevenson: "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking
person!" Stevenson called back: "That's not enough, madam, we need a
majority!"Truer words were never spoken.
Obama could get away with saying that "Romney wants the
rich to play by a different set of rules" - without ever defining what
those different rules were; with saying that the "rich should pay their
fair share" - without ever defining what a "fair share" is; with
saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to "fend for themselves" -
without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going
bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending.
Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks
that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women
that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to
Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico and
unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws. He could espouse the
furtherance of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions - in
which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the
unions provide the politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians
provide more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the
money is gone.
Obama also knows that the electorate has changed - that whites will soon be a minority in America (they're already a
minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily
from the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that
attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world,
and a
different America . Obama is part of that different America
, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.
Obama also proved again that negative advertising works,
invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged
in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his
"negative ads" were simple facts, never personal abuse - facts about
high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of
American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership,
etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the
devil's bargain of making unsustainable promises.
It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan -
people of substance, depth and ideas - to compete with the shallow populism and
platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class
warfare - never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and
cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. If an Obama could
not be defeated - with his record and his vision of America , in which free
stuff seduces voters - it is hard to envision any change in the future.
The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a
European-socialist economy - those very economies that are collapsing today in
Europe - is paved.
For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats,
the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted
for a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile
to Israel . They voted to secure Obama's future at America 's expense and at
Israel 's expense - in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin.
A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it
is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and
will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. The US will preach the
importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon -
and then state that the world must learn to live with this new reality.
But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is
no permanent empire, nor is there an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the
exile. The American empire began to
decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated
in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is
permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its
moorings and its moral foundations.. The takers outnumber the givers, and that
will only increase in years to come.
The "Occupy" riots across this country in the last
two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead - years of unrest
sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the
fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of
redistribution.
If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America
is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back."
The problems we face today are there because the people who
work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living.
Source: The article
appeared in The Israel National News, and is directed to Jewish readership. Rabbi
Steven Pruzansky is the spiritual leader of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in
Teaneck, New Jersey
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