Rosensaft Gives His Reasons for Supporting President Obama

Sari Weintraub — November 1, 2012 – 3:25 pm | Barack Obama | Domestic Policy | Election 2012 | Israel Comments (0) Add a comment

In an op-ed for the Huffington Post, Professor Menachem Rosensaft detailed his top reasons why he supports President Barack Obama. Rosensaft wrote:

Superstorm Sandy: Leaders are judged by their behavior in times of crisis. Since the Sunday before Superstorm Sandy devastated the New Jersey shore, entire neighborhoods of New York City and other parts of the Northeastern United States, President Obama’s actions and demeanor have been pitch-perfect. Suspending his campaign, he threw himself fully into the urgent needs of the moment. Speaking frequently and late into the night with governors and mayors of the affected region, he has demonstrated a compassion and a steady leadership that should remind us all of the qualities we not only want but should require in our president.

‘The president has been all over this, and he deserves great credit,’ New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a prominent Romney supporter and surrogate, said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday. ‘He gave me his number at the White House and told me to call him if I needed anything, and he absolutely means it. It’s been very good working with the president and his administration. It’s been wonderful.’...

Israel: President Obama has been a stalwart and reliable ally of, in his own words at the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, ‘a secure, Jewish state of Israel.’ Only two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that the first of 1,000 U.S. troops had arrived in Israel to take part in what US Air Force Lt. Gen. Craig A. Franklin called the largest joint missile-defense exercise in US-Israeli history…

Based on President Obama’s record, I wrote in June and September that there is every reason for American Jews and other supporters of Israel who voted for him in 2008 to do so again this year.

The Supreme Court: There are likely to be several vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court over the course of the next several years. With the Court precariously balanced along ideological lines, all Americans concerned about the protection of Constitutional liberties and civil rights should bear in mind that a President Romney’s Supreme Court appointments would unquestionably, by his own campaign website’s admission, be in the far-right mold of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas…

Richard Mourdock, Rush Limbaugh, et al.: We are entitled to judge candidates for public office by the company they keep. While the Romney campaign has distanced itself from Indiana GOP senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock’s pronouncement that ‘even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen,’ a television ad in which Governor Romney enthusiastically endorses Mourdock has not been pulled.

Governor Romney has also been extremely careful never to cross Rush Limbaugh or any other conservative extremist. In March, after Limbaugh had called a young woman named Sandra Fluke a ‘slut’ and a ‘prostitute’ for publicly advocating contraceptive health insurance coverage, the most Governor Romney was willing to say was that Limbaugh’s odious remarks were ‘not the language I would have used.’...

Click here to read Rosensaft’s full piece. 

 

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