Political Insider: New Poll: Good News for Obama, McCain -- Depending on Spin

Spin is everything in politics, which is why competing campaigns can take the same polling data and convincingly use it as proof their candidates are doing better than their opponents.

That was apparent on Wednesday when Gallup released a new snapshot of Jewish voters (read it here),  and both the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) and the Barack Obama campaign sent it out to reporters as if it was unambiguous good news for their side.

The new poll showed Obama doing "better than might be expected among Jewish voters," in the words of the pollsters.

But what, exactly, does that mean? Gallup says it means Obama is "trailing Hillary Clinton only slightly in Jewish Democrats' preferences for the Democratic nomination."

That's good news for the Democratic frontrunner because the assumption from the outset has been that Clinton - with her longstanding connections to the Jewish community, her New York base and her seven years in the Senate - would capture the lion's share of Jewish Democrats.

Perhaps more importantly for Obama, daily tracking polling "finds no recent decline in the percentage of Jewish Democrats favoring Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination," according to Gallup.

Coming after weeks of controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago preacher who evokes images of Louis Farrakhan for many Jewish voters, that suggests Obama's "Jewish problem" may not be as deep as Republican spinmeisters claim.

Looking ahead to the general election, the Gallup data shows Obama getting 61 percent against McCain.  That's a solid majority, right?

But that 61 percent isn't particularly good by recent Democratic standards; Sen. John Kerry got 74 percent in 2004.

Thus the enthusiastic press release from the Republican Jewish Coalition.  The poll, the group said, is "another important indicator of the ongoing troubles Barack Obama has with Jewish voters."

The RJC, the release went on, "remains confident that John McCain will continue the trend of the GOP making inroads among Jewish voters."

Indeed, Jewish Republican voting seems on the upswing - unless you take a longer view.  Ronald Reagan won 39 percent of the Jewish vote in 1980, and George H. W. Bush snared 35 percent in 1988, before plunging to 11 percent in 1992.

In fact, the GOP average tally from Jewish voters in presidential contests in the 1970s and 1980s was 34 percent.  Viewed that way, the Republicans seem to be creeping back from some dismal lows in the 1990s and early 2000s.

So: McCain is doing better than recent Republican nominees with the Jews, Obama is doing better than many experts predicted with that same electorate. As usual, the polling data contains something for everybody - except, maybe, Hillary Clinton, whose problem now is mostly Democratic convention delegates, not folks surveyed by Gallup.

But there's only one poll that really counts, and we won't find out how that one goes until November 4.  And the results will be a lot harder to spin.

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