DCRepublican.com

Yiddish Translation: Kappore = Catastrophe.

In September the Jewish Council of Education & Research launched an innovative and attractive campaign to motivate young Jews around the country to make their way down to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama.

With an edgy (yet compelling) video-plea from Sarah Silverman, this campaign received a great deal of fanfare and had many believing that this effort would lead to hundreds of young Jews schlepping down to Florida.

So did this campaign live up to its expectations?

According to the Telegraph:

A novel campaign to boost Democrat support in Florida proved a “schlep” too far for young Jewish supporters after just 100 of them answered a call to visit the state and convert their grandparents to the Obama cause.

….

Around 20,000 people signed up as Great Schlep fans on Facebook but the big push last weekend saw only one in 200 of them actually make the trip.

Having 20,000 people sign up and only 100 actually show up for the “schlep” might seem like the effort was a complete failure. However, those people probably don’t understand the Jewish community and how close-knit they actually are, and more importantly what impact that closeness can have.

If you make your way down to Florida and find yourself in a large Jewish community, Boca Raton for example, you might notice that there is a strong sense of community amongst the elderly Jewish population. It’s been this strong sense of community that has held the Jewish people together for so long, and it will be that very attribute that keeps the Jewish people together for many years to come.

Just one elementary overview of this concept can be seen in this clip from Fiddler on the Roof:

With that being said, what impact could these 100 Jews have had on influencing the Jewish community? A lot.

All it takes is one person to make a comment about their grandson or granddaughter talking to them about Barack Obama, and in no time a group discussion will be started. While not everyone is going to be convinced, minds will be opened and the discussion will quickly spread.

While there is no concrete correlation, if you look at the polls in Florida, almost immediately after the Great Schlep was launched, Barack Obama pulled ahead, while John McCain went into a short-term free fall.

What’s even more fascinating is how this one campaign was able to start a discussion amongst the older Jewish population regarding the potential of Barack Obama being the next President of the United States.

Just as an example, the other day I was speaking with a Jewish man in his late 60’s, a busy executive who doesn’t watch much TV and has little time for the Internet. During our conversation, the topic of Barack Obama came up and he had asked me if I had heard about this “great schlep.” I told him yes and asked if he had heard about it on YouTube. While I was surprised by the fact that he wasn’t a YouTube user, what was even more surprising was how he found out about the project.

It wasn’t from YouTube, it wasn’t from an email or even from the radio. No, this busy executive had heard about it from a friend who heard about it from another friend who had a grandson participate in the Great Schlep. This was just one of what I’m guessing are thousands of examples of how this campaign spread the old fashioned way: by word of mouth.

Was this effort a failure? Absolutely not. If anything, the real-time success of the Great Schlep isn’t measurable due to the unique community dynamics of the Jewish community and we’ll just have to wait until Election Day to see what effect it really had in Florida.

Seeing such a unique program in action really makes me wish the Republican Party would embrace more ideas like this. There are many ethnic and religious groups that we could reach out to more, but unfortunately we seem to concentrate our major efforts solely on Evangelicals.

I truly hope that every Republican is taking notes during this election and will immediately analyze them after Election Day to figure out what we need to do to make our beat-up Party stronger than it’s ever been.

Of course step one would be to make sure that whoever takes over the RNC next is a choshever mentsh (genuinely respected person).

Update: If the McCain campaign, or another 527 puts forward some effort in going after Obama for his relationship with Rashid Khalidi, this could present a severe blow to the Obama campaign and might actually shrink Obama’s narrow lead. We’ll see how it plays out, and we’ll have more soon.