Minority retort

For centuries, Divide and Conquer has been an effective strategy of the powerful, and nobody does it better than our very own GOP. Those seeking evidence need look no further than the erosion of the union vote. There are some limits, however, to how much you can get an individual or group to act against their own interests. Unsurprisingly therefore, there was much skepticism when the irrepressible right-wingers embarked on appropriating the black vote. The wedge (apart from a rather lame "what have they done for you lately?" argument) was to be "family values". Seeing their own jaundice reflected in their fellow believers, they appealed to general revulsion against a myriad of "social issues", primary among them the permissibility of two XY-chromosomoids to get it on. Nobody, including our friends at MyDD, are buying it (More Evidence Blacks, Jews Won't Soon Jump Ship from Democratic Party):

Of course non of the poppycock about Jews and African-Americans switching their allegiances from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party was proved to be founded in reality. According to exit polling from 2004, John Kerry received about 88 percent of the African-American vote and 74 percent of the Jewish vote...

But whence the introduction of Jews into this picture? That comes from the fact that Jews in general resisted similar seductions from the party of bigotry. However, there is a difference: the wedge, in the case of Jews, is one grounded in reality -- the issue of Israel. As MyDD's own quotation of Gallup shows, Jewish support for Democrats (thankfully) does not correlate (tightly) to their position on Iraq:

The greater opposition to the war is not simply a result of high Democratic identification among U.S. Jews, as Jews of all political persuasions are more likely to oppose the war than non-Jews who share the same political leanings.

The corollary to this is the possible alterations in Jewish opinion in response to further isolation of Israel (as the level and number of atrocities mount) and any possible progressive influence on the Democratic party that could swing it away from its current pandering attitude (we refer you to Hillary Clinton). The community hotshots are already halfway across the line, and for that I refer you to Lieberman, Dershowitz (who is turning loonier by the day) and Friedman (What was it? Given war a chance?). And since we are talking black and Jews, I will even throw in a Eli Weisel: "racism as such has vanished from the American scene".