Jeremy B. Mayer, in Politico:
Imagine that Joe Lieberman had been inaugurated this past January, as an independent with a neocon foreign policy that infuriated Democrats and a domestic health care plan that enraged Republicans.That's actually the first worthwhile thing I've read on Politico in months.We’d surely see some posters at anti-Lieberman rallies showing hook-nosed bankers meeting in cabals planning the invasion of Iran or the destruction of the American health care system.
The fringes of both the left and the right of American politics have elements of anti-Semitism in them. In that sense, the first Jewish president would have to deal with what our first black president deals with today: ugly stereotypes utilized by angry demonstrators.
But the mainstream leadership of both parties would immediately react to even subtle appeals to anti-Jewish sentiment. One reason Pat Buchanan ended his long career in Republican politics as an obscure third-party candidate was his consistent tendency to cozy up to neo-Nazis, former Nazis and other anti-Semites. When former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) and those closest to her spouted anti-Semitic rhetoric, mainstream Democrats largely abandoned her.
The same ostracism just doesn’t happen with a lot of anti-black rhetoric. Mark Williams, the organizer of the national tea party movement, called Obama, on national television, a “welfare thug,” while marchers at a recent rally carried pictures of Obama as an African witch doctor. I think that’s pretty close to calling a Jewish president a “cheating landlord” or “kike banker” while carrying signs depicting Lieberman in a yarmulke running the world’s media. But there has been no outcry among Republicans, no pledges to avoid Williams and his movement.