• Al Franken (D) leads Sen. Norm Coleman (R) by nine points in a new poll of voters in Minnesota, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The paper also has a report on the first debate of the campaign, held Sunday night.
• On “Meet the Press”… Democratic strategist Paul Begala warns that the GOP’s guilt-by-association reasoning could be turned on its head to make John McCain look like someone who has associated with anti-Semites.
• Jackie Mason flip-flopped on McCain? The Miami New Times posts a video of the comedian calling John McCain a “disgusting lowlife” and a “fraud” during the Republican primaries, quite a contrast with his pro-McCain, anti-Sarah Silverman video released Friday.
• Andrew Silow-Carroll, in the New Jersey Jewish News, decodes the presidential candidates’ High Holiday messages — and finds that they encapsulate their strategies for winning the Jewish vote.
• By the end of this campaign, every South Florida Jewish voter will have been interviewed at least once about the campaign. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel contributes with this article.
• And Salon does its part, but with a fresher spin — it finds a lot of Florida Jews who really don’t like Sarah Palin.
• Palin said during the vice-presidential debate that she backed a Sudan divestment bill in Alaska, but the bill’s Democratic sponsor says she was against it before she was for it, according to ABCNews.com.
• And Joe Biden’s statement that the U.S. and France “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon” wasn’t accurate either.
• The Levin brothers, Carl and Sander, stump for Obama at a Bucks County, Pa. synagogue, reports the Bucks County Courier Times.
• Menachem Rosensaft urges Jews to listen to Ed Koch and vote for Obama.
  Willy Stern, in the Weekly Standard, quotes a Palestinian pollster who says Palestinians aren’t that optimistic about an Obama presidency.
• Fox host Sean Hannity uses a source with a history of anti-Semitism to attack Obama, according to Todd Gitlin at TPMCafe.
• The Jewish Council for Education and Research has released a video of seven former IDF generals and Mossad chiefs endorsing Barack Obama, but two of them say they had no idea their interviews were going to end up in a pro-Obama video, according to Haaretz.

Sen. Arlen Specter, the veteran Jewish Republican from Pennsylvania, is letting neither Hodgkin’s disease nor age get in the way of his re-election effort, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.

J Street says that on Monday it will announce its first slate of endorsed candidates. …

MEDIA ADVISORY

June 11, 2008

JStreetPAC to Announce First Endorsements Monday

WASHINGTON – The country’s first and only pro-Israel, pro-peace PAC will announce its first endorsements Monday of House candidates committed to strong American leadership to achieve a negotiated, two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In keeping with its mission to establish a new voice on Israel and the Middle East in American politics, Monday’s endorsements will highlight fresh faces – freshmen members of Congress, challengers and competitors for open seats – whose public records and campaign platforms are in line with the PAC’s positions.

Monday’s endorsements will be the first of several rounds that JStreetPAC will make in this election cycle. The PAC will target its efforts in 2008 on no more than a few dozen candidates running for the House and one or two for the Senate.

The Forward reports that comedian Al Franken is making headway in his effort to unseat U.S. Sen. Norm Colemen, noting a recent poll putting him ahead 49% to 46%. Surveys also put him ahead of his rivals for the Democratic nomination, and he also holds a commanding lead in the money race over his top primary rival, Mike Ciresi.

Franken has led the Democratic field in recent polling — he held a wide margin over Ciresi, 32% to 17%, in a survey conducted in early February by Minnesota Public Radio and the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs — but the race could prove unpredictable, because of Minnesota’s arcane primary process. While the official primary for the Democrats, known as the Minnesota Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party, will be held in September, 1,400 party delegates will issue an official endorsement at a state convention held in June. By tradition, the endorsement is seen as binding, and both Franken and Ciresi have vowed to withdraw from the race without it.

The American Jewish World, Minnesota’s Jewish paper, recently ran an article profiling Franken and looking at the race. The Democratic candidate said that if elected he would work with the new administration to actively seek peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

“I think Bush missed a huge opportunity when [Yasser] Arafat died,” Franken said. “We had [Mahmoud] Abbas in and Hamas was not there… We’re sort of the indispensable power in the Middle East, and in the world, and we have to play a much more active role than we’ve been playing. We kind of know what a two-state solution would look like, we just got to get there… We need patient diplomacy and that requires two things: patience and diplomacy. The bottom line is Israel deserves to exist with neighbors that recognize its right to exist and who have renounced terrorism as a way of achieving political objectives. With Hamas in Gaza, that’s very, very hard right now.”

Franken encourages continued talks with Abbas as well as talks with the leaders of Syria and Iran.

“As Yitzhak Rabin said, ‘You don’t make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies,’” Franken said. “And I liked Yitzhak Rabin a lot.”

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