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Matthews to Cohen: Hitler and Jesus are off limits

By Ron Kampeas · September 11, 2008

U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) backed off likening Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, to Jesus, saying the comparison was a mistake.

Cohen, who is Jewish, told the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday that Jesus, like Obama, had been a “community organizer” and that Pontius Pilate was a governor – leaving unsaid but understood the parallel to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential pick who had mocked Obama’s community organizer past in her speech last week to the Republican Party convention.

Chris Matthews carpeted Cohen on “Hardball” on Thursday in a short segment that seemed to have been arranged solely so Matthews could, well, carpet Cohen.

Here’s the transcript of the exchange, courtesy of the Federal News Service:

MR. MATTHEWS: Congressman Cohen, was Jesus a community organizer? I thought he was a carpenter.

REP. COHEN: Well, he was several things, but he was an agent for change and he was outside the system. I certainly didn’t mean to compare Barack Obama to Jesus as a –

MR. MATTHEWS: No, Al Sharpton is a community organizer. Jesus was a carpenter.

REP. COHEN: Well –

MR. MATTHEWS: I just think it’s – well, how do you make – why do you come up with comparisons like that? I thought the rule was stay away from Jesus; stay away from Hitler. These comparisons never work. I’m not giving you a hard time, but metaphors in that category are generally very dangerous.

REP. COHEN: They are dangerous, and I shouldn’t have done it. The first minute of my speech was accurate, and it was the disingenuousness of the Republicans condemning community activists, who brought about much of the change in America. I’d seen a bumper sticker on my e-mail that morning from an activist friend in Memphis. Those things are more for activists and less for congressmen, and I’ve learned from this particular speech.

Matthews then graciously (to Cohen, anyway) segued into a softball about suspicions among Democrats that deriding “community organizers” - former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was even harsher than Palin in his convention speech - was racially charged. That let Cohen get in some campaigning - a sweet chaser after the bitter admission that he had gone too far with the Jesus analogy (and that it had been inspired by a bumper sticker!)

MR. MATTHEWS: Congressman, do you think the phrase “community organizer” is meant to suggest a kind of inner-city, big-city, ethnic, black, if you will, background and somewhat different or remote from the experiences of voters they’re trying to reach? In other words, are they setting up a caricature here through innuendo? Remember welfare mother? Remember how Reagan would talk about the young buck with his – I remember how Reagan used to do it – the young buck with his food stamps buying a bottle of gin. That was a fairly innuendo there. Is that – is this another one of these welfare mothers, community organizers, code phrases?

REP. COHEN: I believe it is. I saw (New York) Governor (David) Paterson reference that. And I felt it when I saw Governor (sic) Giuliani make the comment, as well as Governor Palin. Community activists, community organizers, do a lot of good in helping feed people, helping to take care of health needs, Habitat for Humanity efforts. And if you look at Dr. King and Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth, they’ve done so much good. That’s where change comes from. But I think it is a way to categorize somebody as a liberal, a leftist, an inner-city person. And that’s wrong. You know, Cesar Chavez helped farmers in California, and there have been efforts to help the people in the rural South as well.

Even sweeter, Matthews sent props to Cohen’s hometown before sending him on his way:

MR. MATTHEWS: Well, there’s nothing wrong with Memphis, is there? Congressman, thank you very much –

REP. COHEN: Memphis is great.

MR. MATTHEWS: Thank you for coming on and taking – explaining the whole thing.

The question remains, though - is this the first time a bumper sticker was read into the Congressional Record?

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Iran. Iran. Iran. Iran. And that’s it.

By Ron Kampeas · September 4, 2008

No Israel meat on the last night of the Republican Party’s convention in St. Paul. The candidate, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and three of his senatorial acolytes each devoted a line to Iran’s nuclear threat - and that’s it. Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, got in his Israel licks Wednesday night, but overall, not as intensive an Israel pitch as at the Democratic confab in Denver, where candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) touched on both Israel and Iran in his acceptance speech.

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The roots of “cosmopolitan”

By Ron Kampeas · September 4, 2008

I was chatting with a RWSNBN (Republican who shall not be named) earlier today (Thursday) about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s strong showing last night at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul and how the Democrats have to tiptoe around criticizing her, lest they slide into sexist stereotypes. (It’s a minefield: Her experience or lack of it is certainly fair game, but slams on experience have a way of slipping into “what does a woman know?” territory, or at least can come off sounding that way.)

I pointed out that this was a tetchy season for Republicans as well: A lot of the “elitist” cracks at Obama last night suggested to me a trope that could easily creep into “uppity” territory, and sure enough, a day later, that’s exactly the word a southern congressman used to describe the Democratic candidate and his wife.

In my conversation with the RWSNBN, I cited the constant battering of community work as touchy-feely, somehow irrelevant (Palin made much of this; so did former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani). Sure enough, community organizers are duly outraged. To boot, over at CNN, Roland Martin said jibes at community organizers “degrade the women who fought for their rights.”

And that’s not all.

They disrespect the labor activists and immigrant worker activists like Cesar Chavez. They dismiss those in the civil rights movement – folks from small town America who were sick and tired of being sick and tired. They thumb their noses at the Nelson Mandelas of the world who want a better life for their children.

The weirdest riff of all, though, was Giuliani’s improvised dig at Obama as a “cosmopolitan”:

She’s been a mayor. I love that. I’m sorry – I’m sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn’t cosmopolitan enough. (Switching to deeper, haughty voice) I’m sorry, Barack that it’s not flashy enough. Maybe they cling to religion there. Ooh.

Obama has cited Palin’s experience as a “small town” mayor and he notoriously slipped during the primaries by describing rural voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio as “bitter” and “clinging to religion.”

Tone deaf, sure, reductive too, and it offers ample material for portraying Obama as out of touch. But I’m not sure how that gets to the “cosmopolitan” slag, launched by Karl Rove not long ago.

They went to good universities, yes, but don’t Rove – or Giuliani – want that for their own kids? They live in a nice house – don’t Rove and Giuliani? Isn’t that what we all want? The thing is, even the usual underpinnings to this fatuous class warfare cliche about “elites” (a love of ballet, classical music, fine food, etc.) are missing, as far as I know, from the Obamas’ biography, so what the hell are Rove/Giuliani talking about? Even if the Obamas appreciated these things, so what? But, as far as we know, they don’t. They’re middle class, their song is “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” Michelle’s favorite show is “The Brady Bunch.” What gives?

What especially discomfits me about “cosmopolitan,” then is… how it’s been used against Jews. As in, rootless. Unbelonging. Not of us.

Look, I know Giuliani doesn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body. But you can borrow a trope from a bigotry you reject to thrust forward one you uphold. And that’s when it becomes viral. (See under: Balkans.)

I’m just saying. There are a lot of ways for this election to slip into ugly territory. Depicting the Obamas as “cosmopolitan” is among the slipperiest.

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At RNC, foreign policy on stage, and in the margins

By Ron Kampeas · September 3, 2008

Not a lot of foreign policy in Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential acceptance speech on Wednesday night at the Republican Party convention in St. Paul, but what little there was nodded to pro-Israel concerns about her thin resume. (Palin met with officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Tuesday.)

Lots of red meat from Rudy, though.

And around the margins of the convention, Republicans are trying hard to make the case that it wasn’t all about John McCain, the man. (Much - no, make that just about all - of the convention has been about the extraordinary biography of Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.), with little room left for policy.)

In a special press conference Wednesday for foreign press (with an RNC official checking passes!) and at a session of the Center for U.S. Global Engagement (held at U-Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey Institute), top foreign policy advisers to the campaign said McCain was much friendlier to the notion of working with allies than - well, it was left unsaid, but certainly the Bush administration’s record of unilateralism hung heavily over the proceedings.

Key to making the case was Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the onetime Democratic vice-presidential nominee - and McCain’s preferred running mate until the Arizona senator caved last week to party base demands for a conservative candidate (embodied in “hockey mom” Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin).

Lieberman was the star speaker at the event hosted by Global Engagement (a group that advocates for greater political investment in foreign policy and that held a similar event at the Democratic confab in Denver last week) and brought reassurances that McCain has been mis-characterized as a hawk. McCain, a former POW, “hates” war, Lieberman said, suggesting that as president, McCain would shift powers from the Pentagon to the diplomatic corps.

“He’s going to take a very close look at our foreign and defense policy,” Lieberman promised.

At the foreign press event, deputy foreign policy adviser Kori Schake was asked what foreign policy advice McCain would take from Palin. Schake evaded the answer, replying that McCain would keep trusted advisers close - chief among them, Lieberman.

Schake also emphasized that McCain would reach out to allies, but was uncompromising on facing down Iran’s suspected nuclear threat: “A nuclear Iran would be an unacceptable danger for all of us.” Pressed for details, Schake told reporters to dig up two speeches: one to the Los Angeles Council on World Affairs, and the other to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

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Rudy Red Meat

By Ron Kampeas · September 3, 2008

Hizzoner got in the Jerusalem line.

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, brought attacks on Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to a crescendo on Wednesday night at the Republican Party convention in St. Paul. That’s the night when parties traditionally trash the opposition, and then use whatever time’s left over to debut vice presidential picks (in this case, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin).

“When speaking to a pro-Israeli group, Obama favored an undivided Jerusalem, like I favor and John McCain favors it. Well he favored an undivided Jerusalem, don’t get excited – until one day later when he changed his mind.”

In fact, Obama did not retreat from favoring an undivided Jerusalem: After his speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in June, Obama’s campaign clarified (after Palestinian complaints) that Jerusalem’s final status should be left to the parties.

That’s also the position of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the Republican candidate, by the way.

Israelis (and, I suspect, much of the AIPAC room) understand a pledge to keep Jerusalem “undivided” to include the possibility – however discomfiting – of a shared capital. The underlying pledge is not to keep Israel sovereign in every neighborhood – but to ensure that the United States will not allow a war that could end with the city divided, as it did 1948.

The Obama campaign muddled the message, though, with surrogates apologizing for “poor wording” in the days that followed, although the wording was boilerplate. That gave Republicans wiggle room to cut away at what had been a very well-received speech.

It was hardly a surprise, then, that Giuliani brought it up as a flip-flop.

A few lines later, Rudy got back to the Middle East, by way of tearing into what he said was Obama’s equivalence in dealing with the Georgian crisis.

“Obama’s first instinct was to create a moral equivalency, suggesting that both sides were equally responsible, the same moral equivalency that he’s displayed in discussing the Palestinian Authority and the State of Israel.”

Here, I’m not not clear about what Giuliani was referring to: Obama has said he is willing to pressure both sides in peace talks, but has always added that he believes there is a greater onus on the Palestinians to push forward with peace negotiations.

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Political Tidbits: Biden vs. Begin, Lieberman and Cantor buzz, new pro-Obama Jewish effort

By Ami Eden · August 27, 2008

• Commentary editor John Podhoretz has two posts up (here and here) about Joe Biden’s testy 1982 exchange in the Senate with Menachem Begin and the young senator’s reported threat to cut off aid to Israel over settlements (of course, you don’t even have to go that far back to find Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein and Dick Cheney working to lift sanctions aimed at Iran).


• The Republican Jewish Coalition has a statement out highlighting the Begin incident – and several pro-Israel resolutions and letters that Biden failed to back.


• Douglas Bloomfield argues in the Jerusalem Post that Joe Biden is more in sync with Jewish voters than Joe Lieberman is.


• Eric Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in the House, is in Denver: “I’m part of the John McCain truth squad here in Denver.” And, by the way, his kids “think it’s cool” that he’s in the middle of the Veep buzz.


• Without much hard evidence, New York Magazine dubs Joe Lieberman ... ”Joe Vengeance.” And left-wing blogger Richard Silverstein says he’d be a bad Veep.


• The New York Post: Rudy Giuliani rips Obama on Israel. Politico: Obama campaign responds (and plays the house card).


• Speaking of Politico ... Ben Smith, one of our favorites (and TNR’s rookie of the year), has a story on a new pro-Obama Jewish outfit.


• The Forward reports that the Obama campaign has tapped a new Arab outreach director.


• Paul Starobin of the National Journal: “Obama’s A Mensch, Not Yet Mishbucha.”


• The Washington Times profiles a Jewish grandmother who loves Obama so much, she is paying to volunteer for him.


• The Miami Herald reports on a Republican non-Jew named Israel running for sheriff in Broward County: “In Pembroke Pines, Israel’s supporters handed out small Israeli flags and urged voters to ‘support Israel,’ hoping it would give them a boost with the hundreds of Jewish voters in Century Village.”

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Conference Call-Gate

By Ami Eden · August 21, 2008

We strive to break news, but Wednesday – at least for a fleeting moment in the blogosphere – JTA was the news.

The story started early in the day, with a New York Sun article by Eli Lake, reporting on Obama adviser Daniel Kurtzer’s previously unreported July trip to Syria. Lake’s story was pretty straightforward, making clear that Kurtzer is an unpaid adviser to Obama, and was not in Syria representing the campaign but in his role as a member of the board of the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative. During his trip, Kurtzer said, he told the Syrian foreign minister that no matter who the next U.S. president is, he would only make an Israeli-Syrian deal a priority if the two sides make significant progress.

“I urged him to move ahead in the Israel-Syria negotiations as much as possible so that whoever is the next president would not start from too far down the track,” Mr. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel, said yesterday in a phone interview. “I did not say anything about Obama or McCain. I said whoever is the next president is not going to want to inherit a process that isn’t going anywhere.”

John McCain’s campaign seized on the article, which included the detail that the conference Kurtzer attended was co-sponsored by an organization chaired by “Dr. Fawaz Akhras, a London-based cardiologist and the father of the Syrian president’s wife, Asma al-Assad.” The McCain campaign held a conference call with reporters in the afternoon featuring former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann.

Things got a little testy when JTA’s Washington Bureau chief Ron Kampeas raised the inconvenient fact that the two McCain surrogates who were bashing Kurtzer for benefiting, however indirectly and minimally, from foreign largess and associating with the Syrians have their own relevant histories. According to several media reports, as Kampeas pointed out, Giuliani’s law firm represented an oil company controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Saudi Arabia’s oil ministry, and Scheunemann until earlier this year lobbied on behalf of Georgia.

Other reporters on the call say Kampeas was cut off mid-sentence as he was pushing his line of questioning. Giuliani and Scheunemann both fired back.

[UPDATE: CNN has the audio.]

Several blogs picked up on the exchange, including MSNBC’s FirstRead:

The first question came from Ron Kampeas from the JTA, a Jewish news wire service, who asked if there was an “imbalance” on the call due to both participants’ foreign lobbying and legal involvement. First Kampeas asked about Giuliani’s legal dealings with Citgo, the Chavez government and the Saudis – all of which Giuliani said were “factually inaccurate.”

Then he began to ask about Scheunemann’s extensive lobbying involvement with the country of Georgia when he was abruptly disconnected. Scheunemann nonetheless addressed a portion of his question, saying he “got the gist of his statement if not his question.”

“First of all, I’m not a paid lobbyist for Georgia, I haven’t been for some time,” Scheunemann said – he stopped working for Georgia earlier this year, according to the AP. “But the difference between being a lobbyist and going on covert trips that are only disclosed later through aggressive media reporting is night and day. The only reason everybody can talk about what business activities I’ve done in the past is because it’s been fully disclosed. It’s been fully addressed by this campaign.”

And this from Politico’s Ben Smith (headline: Cutting off the JTA):

Rudy Giuliani’s appearance on a McCain conference call got off to a rocky start when Ron Kampeas ... compared an Obama advisor’s trip to Syria – the subject of the call – to Giuliani’s and McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann’s paid work on behalf of Georgia (in Scheunemann’s case) and Venezuela’s Citgo and the Saudi government (in the case of Giuliani’s law firm).

“You’re making an issue of him taking a hotel room?” Kampeas asked – and then dropped off the call mid-sentence.

“I think they cut me off,” he said in an e-mail just now.

Scheunemann noted that his lobbying contract, unlike Obama advisor Daniel Kurtzer’s trip to Syria, was publicly disclosed and not “covert.” Giuliani said that Citgo, which is owned by the Venezuelan government, is an “American company.”

“I never represented Saudi Arabia,” he said.

The Associated Press reported that Bracewell & Giuliani, a Texas-based energy firm, has represented Saudi Arabia.

Click here, here, here and here for other media reports suggesting that Kampeas did have it right when it came to Hizzoner’s past legal/lobbying activities. As for Scheunemann’s comments, it’s not at all clear that Kurtzer was in any way keeping his trip a secret, nor that the trip compares to working on behalf of a foreign government. But, more interesting, is that neither Giuliani or the McCain family seem to be abiding by the principle of providing the public with information about their business contacts.

Even as he himself was campaigning for president, Giuliani was not forthcoming with information about his client list. And McCain’s wife, Cindy, has said that she will not provide complete details about her family fortune (a particular interesting twist considering that revelations about her business dealings with failed savings & loan bank owner Charles Keating certainly didn’t help McCain as he struggled to save his political career in the late 1980s and early 1990s).

Back to Kurtzer… today the New York Sun has an editorial criticizing the Syrian trip. And Shmuel Rosner has a lengthy post over at Commentary weighing in on the issue.

A final thought ... I wonder if this whole thing was Eli Lake’s revenge for my making him laugh during our high-school production of “Fiddler on the Roof” (I was the rabbi, he was the rabbi’s son).

And if you still have a moment, and are interested in a more thoughtful/substantive look at Kurtzer’s worldview, check out this Kampeas article.

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