When Governor Mitt Romney talked about ending funding for PBS – and Big Bird – during his first debate with President Obama, he was describing only one of the deep cuts in Romney-Ryan budget.
JTA reviews the positions of presidential candidates Barack Obama, the Democratic incumbent, and Republican challenger Mitt Romney on some issues of importance to the Jewish community.
Mitt Romney’s record as a moderate Republican governor would seem to have made him ideally suited to peel off Jewish votes from President Obama. The problem is that he spent much of the past half decade running from that past.
President Obama has been criticized for being wrong for Israel. Even in the third debate of the Presidential campaign, a lovefest toward Israel, which was mentioned 31 times by the candidates, Governor Romney managed to get in a couple jibes against Obama\’s Israel policy.
If Barack Obama is re-elected, he ought to consider making Mitt Romney his new secretary of state. I propose this far-fetched howler not because I’m trying to get into my own Dumb Idea Hall of Fame, or because white, male secretaries of state seem to be going the way of the dodo at Foggy Bottom (there hasn’t been one since Warren Christopher departed in 1997).
Many political organizers talk about themselves as reluctant activists, but when Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg said it wasn’t his intention, initially, to establish the group Rabbis for Romney, it’s hard not to believe him.
Is it the individual citizen who is more important in a free society, or is it the government? It’s easy to see this as the philosophical choice during this election season: One side seems to favor the liberty of the individual, while the other favors the primacy of the government.
Spending a week in Florida on the eve of a presidential election has become a habit for me — one I cherish. Meeting the elderly women who suddenly become interested in politics; attending synagogues, to which the candidates flock in droves to speak.
Israel had a starring role in the third and final presidential debate last Tuesday night. How big? China, a country of 1 billion people to which America owes $1 trillion and whose military and economic decisions will affect us for years to come, rated 32 mentions.
Israel, a heated issue throughout the campaign, finally took center stage at the final presidential debate. It was mentioned a total of 29 times by President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney at Monday night\’s foreign policy debate at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.