Eric Cantor and the Jewish Vote

By Eric Futterman

Eric Cantor is one of us.  

I say that as an active member of the Richmond Jewish Community that sits in the heart of Cantor’s huge 7^th Congressional District. After all, he is a member of what we in the Jewish culture call the Tribe.    

As we commemorate the most important holidays in the Jewish faith, while at the same time circle around our decision as to who represents us in Congress, it’s an important time to assess the 12-year history of Eric Cantor’s representation in Congress of the people of the 7^th district and the Jewish community here.

It has become quite clear on the eve of these important dates that Eric Cantor does not represent either the 7^th District or the Jewish code of conduct and faith.

I acknowledge right up front that I speak for myself, as I am neither worthy, nor do I have the right to speak for Judaism as a whole. But when I see someone highlight our faith as a rationale for support and then watch as he tarnishes our core principles, I am speaking out due to an insatiable urge to defend the tenants of my faith.    

Enter Eric Cantor.

Thus invites a big dilemma Jews in our area as we face come election time. Do we elect one of our own—a member of the Jewish faith and culture who we expect will most certainly do what he can to protect the relationship between the United States and Israel—or do we turn to his opponent Wayne Powell, who promises to take a far different approach to the way Congress works.
  

Or do we risk creating a new generation of Americans who will be fooled by the old and horrific stereotypes of Jews we have been forced to endure and fight to discard for centuries by electing a Congressman who is lending unwelcome credence to those stereotypes?

I am talking of course about Eric Cantor, my Congressman in the 7^th District of Virginia since 2001.  Cantor’s actions as a member of Congress in the last decade have caused many of us in the Jewish community true angst by showcasing the worst of greed that we see all too often in Congress.

I remember going out on a first date many years ago. My date, upon realizing I was Jewish, immediately asked if I was wealthy.  Children in the Arab world are still taught the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the book ordered up by the Russian Czar Nicholas who was looking for a scapegoat while his imperialistic kingdom was crumbling around him.

The book is a greatest hits version of all the worst stereotypes used to demonize, criminalize and decimate the Jewish populations of many different Easter European countries. It’s being taught to millions of Arab children every day, creating an almost innate bigotry against a people who share such similar DNA and even cultural heritages.

We Jews have been called all of these ugly names: miserly; greedy; cheap; all consumed with making money; willing to obviate the larger population in order to create a small, elite group that seeks to control the world’s riches. Some stereotypes stick and all it takes is one example of someone reflecting those stereotypes to make them stick to an entire culture for more than a generation, Just ask any successful and educated African American who has to deal with certain types of rap that misogynies women.

In his 12 years in the United States Congress Eric Cantor has seemed to do all the things that deliver this stereotype about the Jewish people.

The latest in a string of decisions, speeches and votes is the one that makes me the most uncomfortable.

Unbelievably, until this year members of the United States Congress could legally conduct Insider Trading; buying and selling stocks and investments based on information they knew as members of Congress that was not available to the public or to investors at large. I admit, I didn’t even know this until the Democrats came up with a bill, the STOCK Act, which banned Insider Trading among members of Congress. The entire Congress approved and passed the bill and President Obama signed it into law in April.

But there was a catch. Eric Cantor’s office, according to an investigative report by CNN, “wrote a loophole into the House version of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK) by exempting Congress members’ spouses and children from having to report stock market transactions.”

This was one of those instances that give every anti-Semite who ever lived an opportunity to say, “See I told you so!”

Cantor, whose family enjoys great wealth, has a gold plated health care plan provided by the U.S. Government; has voted to give his family more than $1 million in tax cuts over the last ten years; has taken money from Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Insurance and worked tirelessly to deregulate those industries. The result of that support has been a disaster for our nation.

Cantor’s desire to deregulate Wall Street led to the collapse of our entire economy in 2007 and 2008. His support of deregulating the Oil Industry led to the BP Disaster, and of course he has fought vigorously to allow insurance companies to reject children who have pre-existing conditions by repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Cantor is clearly a man who is for sale.

For instance, Cantor took $625,000 from the pharmaceutical industry and gave them $439 billion in return with the Medicare Part D drug plan. This plan, which also added more than $700 billion to the National Debt, took away the government’s right to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma on behalf of the millions of Medicare enrollees across the nation, forcing seniors to negotiate one on one. It was a giant windfall for Big Pharma and a big loss for seniors. When ObamaCare repealed it, Cantor voted no.

Last year the Republicans deliberately created a financial crisis by refusing to pass the same kind of debt ceiling increase they passed more than a dozen times when Bush and Cheney were in office, Cantor bet against the United States, ‘shorting’ U.S. Treasury Bonds in his personal portfolio and thereby bettering against his own country in a blatant conflict of interest.

Back in January Cantor was on 60 Minutes trying to explain to Leslie Stahl why American Jews tend to be more liberal. Cantor’s response was telling;   “It’s Tikun Olam,” he said. “That is a concept in Judaism which means, “ repair the world” – and it’s a very charitable concept. And it’s that way in the Christian faith and others as well, that you give back. And clearly there is the ability to characterize all the social programs that exist at the federal level as reflecting that need to repair the world and to help those who can’t help themselves.”

It’s almost astonishing to see how he quickly understood why American Jews have supported the most vulnerable in our society from civil rights for African Americans, to Gays & Lesbians to the impoverished and uneducated.

Yet Cantor has turned directly away from this sense of morality. Time and again when George W. Bush was President Eric Cantor voted against the middle class. He voted to put the ‘donut hole’ into Medicare, forcing millions of seniors to pay more for drugs. Then he did it again with Medicare Part D, which put an end to Medicare negotiating drug prices for all Medicare recipients, which took away all the negotiating leverage for American seniors and raised drug prices.

To counteract President Obama’s Jobs Act, an effort to reconstruct America’s infrastructure and in way that would not increase the national debt, Cantor proposed his own Job’s act, very simply a massive tax cut for millionaires.

Time and again, for his entire run as a representative of Virginia’s 7^th District, Eric Cantor has favored windfalls, giveaways and subsidies to the millionaires and billionaires of our society, while cutting the legs off of teachers, firefighters and police officers; middle class Americans who struggle to get by.  

This is not the Jewish way. It never has been.

Eric Cantor has also had the audacity, the chutzpa, if you will, of joining in with the negative stereotype of President that has been pushed hard by the Tea Party and its leadership of President Obama; using his ethnic sounding name to brand him as somehow anti-Semitic or anti-Israel. I cannot tell you how many times I have encountered fellow Jews who believe this. Though Obama’s philosophy of Middle East Peace and Israel’s rightful place in the world is nearly identical as all presidents since Truman, I hear some of my fellow Jews say they are sure he hates Israel and wants it destroyed.

Cantor joined this phony fight before Obama was even elected. During the 2008 election Cantor even accused Obama of calling Israel “a sore on America.” This was a misquote from an interview Obama gave with Atlantic magazine calling the never ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict “a sore on America and a danger to Israel’s security.”

Of course the reality of President Obama’s relationship with Israel is quite different. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served under both Bush and Obama, testified before Congress on March 2, 2011 that, “In terms of concrete steps to improve the security relationship between [the U.S. and Israel], more has been done in the last two years than in any comparable period in my entire career.’ Gates Career started at the CIA in 1966.

Former Israeli Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barack refutes Cantor’s assertion rather bluntly. Barak recently praised Obama, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I should tell you honestly that this administration under President Obama is doing, in regard to our security more than anything that I can remember in the past.”

Beyond all those specific issues, Eric Cantor regularly sides with the far right Christian Conservatives who have dominated the Republican party over the last 40 years. He sides with them on gay rights, women’s reproductive rights and claims them as allies in their support of Israel.

It’s so easy to vote for one of your own; to support someone who has lived within your own culture and faith; especially when your culture has suffered so terribly over so many generations. It’s instinctive to feel more secure about someone from your own faith and culture to represent you at the highest levels of government.

But Eric Cantor does not represent the humanity and values that American Jews have displayed since coming ashore in such great numbers in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Instead he represents the power of greed or humanity, the power of money, obtained in ways that ordinary Americans, including American immigrants just like the Jews of earlier generations had no way of obtaining.

By violating so many tenants of the Jewish faith; by decidedly voting on laws and regulations that favor the wealthiest people and biggest corporations at the expense of seniors and children who are of modest and impoverished means, by voting against the expansion of education, Eric Cantor does not deserve the support of the Jewish people in our district.

He needs to be sent home and back into the private sector. And maybe a lesson in humility will teach Eric Cantor to make changes in his values that can bring him back to the Jewish American values that have benefited our nation and our district so well.

©2012 EAF Custom Communication