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GOP Jewish Group Calling Jewish Voters with Questions Some Find Meshugah

September 16, 2008 9:36 PM

A Jewish Republican organization has polled 750 Jewish voters in five key battleground states -- Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania -- to test messages that would cause them not to vote for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

Matthew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told ABC News Tuesday evening that despite complaints by some liberal Jewish organizations that the calls were part of a "push poll" -- that is, designed to spread salacious information as opposed to collect views of voters -- this was a "traditional poll of issues," with 82 questions using "standard polling methodology."

The point of the calls were to explore "why Obama continues to have significant problems with Jewish voters," Brooks said.

The calls have caused some outrage among members of the Jewish community and have been reported as far away as Israel. The fact that the RJC is behind the calls was first reported this evening by Ben Smith of the Politico.

Ben Cohen, a 37-year-old lawyer in Ohio received one of the calls last night and he was clearly offended.

"It was evocative of a time and a kind of politics that I would never want to see rise in America," Cohen told ABC News. "You shouldn't scare people to get elected -- Jewish people have experienced that before really horrifically."

Cohen received the call at his Cleveland Heights home Monday night. The third question, he recalled, was what religion he is. After telling the woman polling him he's Jewish, Cohen was asked how often he attends synagogue -- daily, frequently, or only on the High Holidays.

"That was a little odd," Cohen said. But then the poll turned into more standard questions such as which issue was most important to him.

After Cohen said he was leaning towards voting for Obama -- he was undecided until McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee, Cohen said -- the questions took what he called an "inflammatory" turn.

"Would you still vote for Barack Obama if you knew he'd been endorsed by Hamas?" Cohen said the questioner asked.

"Would you still vote for Barack Obama if you knew he had given money to the PLO?" Cohen said the question asked.

"Would you still vote for Barack Obama if you knew he supported a divided Jerusalem?" the questioner asked, Cohen recalled.

Recalled Cohen, "as the questions became a little more untoward," he reminded the pollster that she'd said the call would be brief.

"She said she was half done," Cohen said. "And I waited because I wanted to see if she would ask the same questions about McCain that they did with Obama."

She didn't.

"Then someone else gets on the phone," Cohen said. "And he said, 'I just wanted to check: Are you Jewish?' That was one of first questions the poll asked but at that point I felt uncomfortable answering it. it was odd. I felt like I was being targeted in the poll."

Brooks would not share the list of 82 questions from the RJC poll, but he said the three questions as Cohen recalled them were not precisely the ones asked.

Instead, Brooks said, those being polled were asked how their support for Obama would be affected if they knew that a leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yousef, had expressed support for Obama.

Yousef, a political adviser to Hamas in Gaza, said in April, "We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the election," but after Obama delivered a pro-Israel speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said the group had changed its mind: "Hamas does not differentiate between the two presidential candidates, Obama and McCain, because their policies regarding the Arab-Israel conflict are the same and are hostile to us, therefore we do have no preference and are not wishing for either of them to win."

Brooks said the poll "absolutely did not" say Obama gave money to the PLO, but he said a question may have addressed that when Obama was on the board of the Woods Fund, the philanthropic group gave a grant to an Arab-American community organization in Chicago that Brooks characterized as anti-Israel.

After initially declaring before the AIPAC audience that Israel's capital must remained an undivided Jerusalem, Obama backed off that pronouncement, saying it's a matter to be decided by the Israelis and Palestinians in the final stages of a peace process. Brooks insisted his poll stated merely that Obama had flip flopped on the issue.

Obama supporter Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Florida, in a statement, said that "the fact that the Republican Jewish Coalition is targeting Jewish Americans with these disgraceful and deceitful tactics fits in perfectly with the dishonorable campaign that John McCain has chosen to run. Peddling lies and hateful distortions to scare Jewish voters is reprehensible and deeply disrespectful to Jewish Americans."

Said Brooks, "What's really interesting is the reaction from Jews who are supporting Obama. The questions we asked are all legitimate. Why don’t they like us asking these questions? Because they don't like the answers."

Brooks acknowledged that much of the leadership of the RJC has ties to the McCain campaign, but he said his organization does not coordinate in any way with the McCain campaign and anyone who "has a title" in the McCain campaign who is also active with his organization "has taken a leave of absence from the RJC so there's no question whatsoever of any integration or any overlap."

But even though Brooks stands by his poll and says it's no different from any other poll of the Jewish community, it has rubbed many voters the wrong way.

"I lived in New Orleans for nine or ten years," Cohen said, "and I would often get polls with salacious or inflammatory information. This one made the hair on the back of my neck stand up."

- jpt