Hil & Bam gear up for battleover Jewish vote
BY MICHAEL McAULIFF
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON - Fresh off their battle for the hearts of black Americans, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are about to go head to head for Jewish votes.
The leaders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 plan dueling receptions Monday when an influential pro-Israeli lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, holds its major Washington policy conference.
The competing receptions are one more sign of the intensifying scrum between Clinton and Obama over key Democratic interest groups, highlighted Sunday by near-simultaneous civil rights speeches in Selma, Ala.
"It would be amazing if you didn't have a fierce competition," said Norm Ornstein, an American Enterprise Institute scholar who is leading a panel at the AIPAC forum.
Clinton had been counting on black support before Obama got in the race. Ornstein said she had a natural base among Jews because of her Senate work and her husband's record, but some liberal Jews favor Obama because he opposed the Iraq war.
"If you get over the bar on the Israeli issue, which I think he has, then for many people, Iraq becomes the issue," Ornstein said.
Obama got help from an unlikely source yesterday when pro-Palestinian Prof. Rashid Khalidi denied a report that Obama used to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and had recently shifted his stance to pro-Israel.
Khalidi spoke to the Daily News to rebut a report on a pro-Palestinian blog that was circulated by Clinton supporters. The blog, the Electronic Intifada, offered no evidence that Obama used to be supportive of the Palestinian cause, but cited private conversations, including one at a 2000 Obama fund-raiser hosted by Khalidi.
Khalidi, now head of Columbia University's Middle East Institute, said he hosted the fund-raiser because he was friends with Obama while the two lived in Chicago.
"He never came to us and said he would do anything in terms of Palestinians," Khalidi said.
Originally published on March 6, 2007
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