Ed Koch, the former New York Mayor who has been highly-critical of some Democrats in recent years and was an active supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton for President, is now endorsing Obama-Biden.
Sarah Palin is a plucky, exciting candidate, but when her record is examined, she fails miserably with respect to her views on the domestic issues that are so important to the people of the U.S., and to me. Frankly, it would scare me if she were to succeed John McCain in the presidency.
What this means: Koch has carved out a love-hate image in the eyes of both many Democrats and Republicans. He has been exceedingly outspoken. But he remains highly-popular among many Jewish-Americans — not only for his specific, sometimes-peppery views but because over the years he has been a highly-popular, headliner speaker who would be brought into synagogues. He speaks to many corporate and private groups around the world.
I covered one of his speeches years ago when I was a reporter for the San Diego Union and Koch addressed a temple in La Jolla, CA. I did a brief interview with him afterward. He had and has a lot of clout with Jewish-Americans — and if he’s on the stump for Obama-Biden (you can see from his statement linked above that he is most enamored with Biden) he will be a highly-effective surrogate for the Democrats.
Another plus: he is highly-quotable — so print and broadcast journalists love him.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.