Pa. Democratic Jewish PAC avoids primary endorsements, until now
Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania PAC picks Biden over Sanders, who is Jewish. Send us captions for photo of former Philly Mayor Mike Nutter gazing at Mike Bloomberg, who quit the president race March 4.
As far as political action committees go, Democratic Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania isn’t going to shatter any fund-raising records. The group, based in the Philadelphia suburbs, raised about $17,000 last year.
And while it may not hold as much sway as Jim Clyburn does in South Carolina, the group says the presidential race is so important that it’s breaking its own rule prohibiting endorsements in a primary.
“We think in order to defeat Trump, we need to solidify and unify,” said Jill Zipin, the PAC’s chairwoman. “We consider ourselves liberal. We consider ourselves progressive. But we don’t consider ourselves revolutionary. We believe that Vice President Biden best reflects Jewish values.”
She said the PAC wanted its donors, 9,800 Facebook followers, and email list of 1,500 people to “know of our support.”
Zipin and others founded an earlier iteration of the group in 2008 to counter a Republican Jewish group’s attack ads against Barack Obama. It later became a political action committee.
Powered by mostly small-dollar contributions, the group places ads in Jewish media and in newspapers like The Inquirer, the Morning Call in Allentown, and the Centre Daily Times in State College. Its events draw members of Congress and prominent Democrats like former Gov. Ed Rendell.
“We take the small-dollar donations and leverage them in a very big way,” Zipin said.
Kind of like Bernie Sanders.
Clout caption contest — Mike & Mike
With Mike Bloomberg’s exit from the Democratic presidential race, former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s time as national campaign cochairperson has come to an end. That got us thinking about this photo from Clout colleague Julia Terruso, of Nutter pondering the visage of his candidate while out on the trail this week in San Francisco.
Give it a gander and then shoot your best captions to clout@inquirer.com. We’ll peruse the entries and publish any that strike our fancy.
For inspiration, you can see Nutter introduce Bloomberg as “a great leader, a great man, a great person” when Bloomberg delivered a speech Wednesday about the end of his campaign. And yes, Nutter dropped the mic on stage. It’s a thing he does. Don’t ask us to explain it.