As Americans get ready to go to the polls, I’m once again baffled that virtually all of my relatives – together with the vast majority of American Jews – will be pulling the “Democrat” lever.

They tell me they’re angry at President George W. Bush – the most consistently, dogmatically pro-Israel president this nation has ever had.  They tell me they’re worried about the religious right – a group that is disaffected because they feel they have gotten nothing of substance from the Republicans, and also a group that stands with the President in strongly backing Israel.

Country-club Republicans may mutter at the fact that our commitment to Israel seems out of kilter with the balance of power, petrol, and population in the world.  But the religious right and neoconservatives are motivated by beliefs, and their beliefs in religious freedom, in support for those whose religion lies at the core of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in democracy commit them to backing Israel to the hilt.

Compare all of that with the Clintons, heroes to left-leaning Jews.  President Clinton invited Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat to Camp David, pressured Barak into extraordinary concessions, and left Arafat with the impression that a bit more turmoil in the region would persuade him to lean on Barak even more.  And, voilŕ, Intifada again!

As for Mrs. Clinton, who could forget her embrace of Mrs. Arafat – right after Mrs. Arafat’s speech denouncing Israel?  Apparently four-fifths of American Jews.

What about Iraq, my Jewish friends and relatives ask? Isn’t that a mess? One we should have known to avoid?  It is a mess in many ways, and I was skeptical about the war because I couldn’t see how we got out of it after defeating Saddam. But we would do well to recall that Saddam was a brutal tyrant who paid bounties to terrorists for killing Jews.  He also killed his own people and attacked his neighbors, flouted UN resolutions, treated international law and humanitarian law with contempt – in short did everything that Jews who will vote again for the Democrats say they oppose.  Unlike his predecessor and unlike most of the Democrats running for office now, President Bush and the Republicans were willing to do something about Saddam.

The list of complaints, concerns, anxieties, neuroses (you can fill in all the other words describing what emerges when you ask most Jews about the Republican Party) goes on.  But the bottom line is that Jews think there is something morally superior about being a Democrat.  So Jews keep voting Democrat – expecting that our friends will all be voting Democrat and will be happy that we do the same.

And polls predict that Jews will overwhelmingly do this again next Tuesday.  Despite everything Democrats do that goes against our fundamental precepts. Don’t like being treated as a class, discriminated against, not allowed to compete on your own merits?  How do those beliefs fit with the sort of affirmative action programs championed by Democrats?  On almost any subject, Democrats are out of step with what Jews believe, with our history, and with our own interests.

So, maybe, maybe, a small group of us will stop, think, and vote Republican on Tuesday.  Maybe we’ll tell our friends and family that they should do the same.  Maybe we’ll confound the pundits and pollsters.  That would be a blessing.  And a surprise.

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