Democrats learned how to fix their "Jewish messaging" at a national party meeting in Chicago Friday, The New York Times' Nicholas Confessore reports. Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz will lead the presentation -- one of three given to top fundraisers and donors, as President Obama's lukewarm popularity among Jewish voters has become "a real but unexpected challenge" heading into the 2012 election campaign -- and next week's special election in New York.
The race to replace Anthony Wiener, who resigned from his New York City congressional district after a sext scandal, should have been an easy victory for the Democratic nominee. But David Weprin is now polling six points behind Republican Bob Turner. Notably, a majority of Jewish voters -- 54 percent -- in the district disapprove of how Obama's doing his job, according to the new Siena College poll.
Politico's Ben Smith reports that although Obama's 2008 campaign rejected such conventional constptuency politics, last month his 2012 campaign hired Ira Forman, former executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, as his Jewish outreach director. Jewish donors -- a group critical to Democrats -- are annoyed with Obama for being "too tough on Israel," as The Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler reported this spring.
Wasserman Schultz (pictured above with White House chief of staff Bill Daley) wants her lecture to be "both timely and reflect the interest of our supporters," a Democrat told Confessore. Pretty please let it be titled "How to Talk So Jews Will Listen and Listen So Jews Will Donate."
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Elspeth Reeve
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