This morning, Sen. Joe Lieberman, from Connecticut, will endorse David Weprin, Democratic Assemblyman from New York, in the September 13 special election to fill former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s seat. In a sense, this is insane: Why is Lieberman, a high-profile Democrat (once, it is so easy to forget, the party’s vice-presidential candidate) turned idiosyncratic Independent, involved with one fakarkte district in a state not his own? The answer lies in the fact that one of political journalism’s laziest tropes is to look to special elections—those not held on gray November election days—as bellwethers for the status of the two parties at the moment. And this special election is a doozy: It has become a test of the Obama administration’s (in?)ability to hold onto Jewish votes come November 2012. This despite the fact that Weprin and his opponent, Republican Bob Turner, are for all intents and purposes equally and strongly pro-Israel. The candidates are ciphers. In some postmodern political experiment (paging Beaudrillard?), the race has become about using these two people and this fairly Jewish district encompassing parts of Queens and Brooklyn to send a message to the president—but, really, to the political class, the journalists, and the punditocracy—about how Jews will feel about Obama in approximately 15 months. Got all that?
This isn’t my out-of-left-field hypothesis or sophisticated analysis. You could read all about it yesterday in an excellent Times article, which noted, “New York’s Ninth Congressional District finds itself talking about an unlikely subject—whether Mr. Weprin, who is unabashedly pro-Israel, is the best pro-Israel advocate” (it also notes that Weprin is a practicing modern Orthodox Jew). The cinch is Obama: the politician who has created this beast “has acknowledged that Mr. Weprin is a strong supporter of Israel,” the Times reported, “but argued that the election of Mr. Turner would serve as a rebuke to Mr. Obama for saying that Israel’s pre-1967 border should be the basis for a peace agreement.”