As someone who has written a few words about political life for half a century, I’d like to ask two gnawing questions today and hope there’s somebody out there who can answer at least one of the following:
1. Politically speaking, what’s the matter with Jews?
2. Politically speaking, what’s the matter with women?
Roughly a year ago, I found myself at a lovely wedding at the Baltimore Museum of Art, standing next to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California). Pelosi and I know each other a little bit. With her Baltimore roots, she helped me some years ago with a book I wrote, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Hopkins Press). I knew her parents and a couple of her brothers and a nephew, all named D’Alesandro, many of them political legends.
Pelosi, as everyone knows, is the former speaker of the House of Representatives. She’s closing in on retirement and will leave behind a record as arguably the most powerful woman in American political history, and one of the savviest people ever to serve in the U.S. Congress.
So I was delighted to find myself standing next to her, and took the opportunity to ask, “Who have you got to run for president next time?”
Meaning in 2028, who is the best bet the Democratic Party has to defeat whichever Republican candidate might further extend the long night of darkness foisted upon the country by Donald J. Trump?
And right off the bat, Pelosi says, “JB Pritzker.”
And then she says, “Josh Shapiro.”
Pritzker is governor of Illinois, and Shapiro is governor of Pennsylvania.
And each is Jewish.
So I say to Pelosi, “Not to make too much of this but as Jew, I have to ask you: Do you think this is the right time for a Jewish candidate for president?”
To which Pelosi replies, in words that I find stunning, “All our polling tells us it would be easier to elect a Jewish president … than a woman president.”
I find this shocking because, first, we live in a time when we’re bombarded with daily reports about the latest incidents of antisemitic attacks. And we live in a nation that is roughly 2 percent Jewish and 50.5 percent female.
Nearly a decade after Trump was first elected president, it is still astonishing that women anywhere, of any age or political persuasion or even the slightest self-worth, could vote for a man with Trump’s record of felonious piggishness toward women.
Some of us still remember the last presidential election, and the televised debate Trump had with the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, and the way she decimated him from start to finish.
And yet Trump got roughly 45 percent of the female vote and another trip to the White House.
I have no answer to my second question, “What’s the matter with women?”
So let’s look at my first question: “What’s the matter with Jews?”
Maybe nothing. But maybe there’s yet another Democratic candidate worth watching: Jon Ossoff, the U.S. senator from Georgia.
As Michelle Goldberg wrote in her recent New York Times column: “People from across the Democratic ideological spectrum have been buzzing about a possible Ossoff presidential candidacy. If you were cooking up an ideal 2028 candidate in a lab, he — and, let’s face it, it’s probably a he — would look a lot like Ossoff. He’s young and handsome, with a picture-perfect family: a beautiful wife who works as an obstetrician-gynecologist and two small daughters.
“He’s a Southerner from a reddish state with a history of wooing Black voters. And he’s a Jewish critic of Israel who, as much as anyone in politics today, has the potential to bridge the Democratic Party’s agonizing divide over Zionism.
“But the excitement Ossoff is generating … stems from his skill in eviscerating Trump’s gluttonous profiteering, his brazen attempts to turn this country into the most squalid sort of kleptocracy.”
If the 39-year-old Ossoff could pull off an upset, we would no longer have to ask that eternal question, “Politically speaking, what’s the matter with Jews?”
Leaving us with that other head-scratcher: “Politically speaking, what’s the matter with women?”
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University)
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