If the polls are to be believed, the Gore-Lieberman results shouldn't be much affected by anti-Semitism this fall. Gallup has asked voters for decades whether they would pull the lever for someone nominated by their party to be president who is "generally well qualified" and who also happens to be Jewish.
In the most recent such sounding, in February 1999, some 92 percent said they would vote for a Jewish candidate -- comparable to the 94 percent who said they would support a Catholic candidate or a Baptist candidate. (But you gotta believe, so to speak: Only 49 percent of voters say they would support a well-qualified atheist.)
But about those 8 percent who say they wouldn't support a Jewish candidate -- as far as THE SCRAPBOOK can tell, there is no breakdown of the party affiliation of these voters. Nonetheless, the Gore apparatus was quick to assert that these people probably wouldn't be Democrats. After all, it has been an article of the Democratic faith for years that theirs is the party of tolerance. As Joe Andrew, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, put it: "The people that would be antagonistic towards Joe Lieberman because he's Jewish are not going to vote for Al Gore anyway."
Well, so they might want to imagine. But as it happens, the first and thus far only significant outbreak of hostility to Lieberman has come not from the fever swamps of the American right, but straight from the heart of the Democratic base: the president of the Dallas NAACP, Lee Alcorn. Make that, the former president of the Dallas branch of the NAACP.
Before his summary dismissal from the NAACP, Alcorn went on the radio in Dallas last Monday and unburdened himself: "I'm concerned about, you know, any kind of Jewish candidate, you know. And I'm concerned about the Democratic party. I'm sick of the Democratic party taking the African-American vote for granted. If we get a Jew person, then what I'm wondering is, I mean, what is this movement for, you know? I think we need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between Jews at that kind of level because we know that their interest primarily has to do with, you know, money and these kinds of things."
Alcorn memorably complained that his comments had been "taken pretty much out of context," and then by way of providing context, he pretty much repeated them to a reporter from the Dallas Morning News. He was subsequently drummed out of the organization with admirable dispatch. Although it was front-page news in Dallas, where the story broke, and in the Los Angeles Times the next day, this outbreak of hate from within the Gore universe only barely made it into the New York Times (page 17) and the Washington Post (page 19). Had Alcorn been the regional functionary of a pro-Bush organization -- well, let's just say THE SCRAPBOOK can picture the front page headlines.