Glenn Collins explores whether Jews are more inclined to support Clinton or Obama. He finds that it’s up for grabs.

One attorney says, “I think there is going to be a split between established older voters in the Jewish community, with whom Hillary will do well, and younger and more liberal Jews who see Obama as an agent of change.” So this seems to mirror the general Democratic population.

Each candidate has the support of several Jewish politicians:

Aside from [Ed] Koch, prominent Jewish politicians supporting Mrs. Clinton include New York’s other senator, Charles E. Schumer; Senator Dianne Feinstein of California; and Representatives Gary L. Ackerman of Queens, Eliot L. Engel of the Bronx, Jerrold L. Nadler of Manhattan, Anthony D. Weiner of Queens and Brooklyn.

Among Senator Obama’s political supporters are several Jewish members of Congress: Representatives Steve Rothman of New Jersey, Adam B. Schiff of California, Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and Robert Wexler of Florida.

Me, I agree most of all with Ed Koch, who says, “I don’t speak for the Jewish community, and nobody speaks for the Jewish community. The Jews, individually, speak for themselves.”

Elizabeth Alexander in Salon.com reminds us that Toni Morrison’s anointing of Bill Clinton as “the first black president” 10 years ago never meant what people have lately taken it to mean. He didn’t get that moniker because of what he did for black people; he got it because of the way he was mistreated by the establishment.

Morrison wrote at the height of the Lewinsky scandal in the fall of 1998, when the House was considering impeachment proceedings.

African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”

P.S. Morrison endorsed Obama today.

Reading this weekend that Caroline Kennedy and Ted Kennedy were endorsing Barack Obama, I got to thinking about what might have been.

What could JFK Jr. have become if he had lived?

Would he have continued coasting along as a socialite, perhaps founding another magazine or dabbling in philanthropy? Or would he eventually have entered politics, perhaps running for the U.S. Senate from New York and eventually for the presidency?

Today, JFK Jr. would be the same age as Barack Obama. The two men were born only about 8 months apart. Instead of someone who reminds people of John F. Kennedy, could we have had the real deal?

JFK Jr. never showed much academic achievement. He didn’t have a great academic record and it took him three tries to pass the New York bar exam. If he’d entered politics, he might have been a Democratic George W. Bush, a scion of a rich family who wouldn’t have amounted to much without his connections and didn’t want to work very hard (but without W’s scary messianic certainty and faux-hokiness).

But perhaps not.

We’ll never know.

After Obama’s unexpectedly large victory over Hillary Clinton in South Carolina yesterday, I’m leaning toward voting for him again.

Bill Clinton’s been pissing me off lately. My opinions of him have changed over the years. When he first started running in 1991 and into 1992, I thought he was a big slimeball. This northern Jew would never vote for a slick Southern small-state governor. And then somehow things changed; was it when he picked Al Gore as his running mate? Was it when Ross Perot dramatically dropped out of the race mere hours before Clinton gave his stirring acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, allowing him to make a fresh appeal to dissatisfied voters and catapulting him into the lead with the greatest post-convention poll bounce in 50 years? (This article sums up that crazy week in which Bill’s fortunes changed.)

At any rate, I fell in political love with Bill Clinton. He was incredibly smart. He knew everything about everything and could talk about all of it. On top of that, he loved the New York Times crossword.

I winced at all his missteps in early 1993. I felt personally hurt when the Republicans took back Congress in 1994. I supported him for re-election in 1996, even if I cringed at his bland, substanceless “build that bridge to the 21st century” claptrap. I supported him wholeheartedly during the impeachment crisis, even though I was disappointed at what he’d done to cause it.

I was sad when he left office. I missed him whenever I watched George W. Bush give an Oval Office speech or a State of the Union address. I was impressed with the Clinton Global Initiative. Bill Clinton seemed to have turned into a real statesman.

But in the last few weeks he’s gone down into the gutter. I don’t like it, and I don’t like how Hillary is letting Bill do her dirty work for her. It just seems — well, unfair. Not only that — it also gives the Republicans great ammunition for the fall if Hillary gets the nomination.

I like it when Bill attacks Republicans. I don’t like it when he attacks Democrats. He won’t be attacking any more Democrats if Hillary gets elected, but if she does, is she always going to have to pull him out of her pocket when the chips are down?

This is sort of odd, because I’m making a judgment based on what I think other people are going to be thinking about. If it turns out that the majority doesn’t mind Bill having a high-profile role in a Hillary presidency, then, good. But if the majority does mind, then, that’s not good. The problem is, I don’t know what the majority thinks. If perceptions are going to create reality, and we don’t know what the perceptions are, then things are murky.

But if I had to vote today, I might very well vote for Obama.