Joe Lieberman, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination for 2004, isn't breaking any records for collecting campaign contributions from fellow Jews...

Yet, Mr. Lieberman, though well-known nationally as Al Gore's running mate in 2000, estimated Wednesday that on the official reporting date of July 15, his campaign will tell the Federal Election Commission that he has raised only something more than $5 million from April through June of this year.

That would be considerably less than Howard Dean, the liberal former Vermont governor, raised over the same period. And preliminary estimates by campaign officials for the nine top Democratic hopefuls indicate the July 15 FEC report could show Mr. Lieberman ranking as low as No. 4 in fund raising.

There you have it, in a nutshell. The smart money is on the Left in the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party Left is the single largest anti-Semitic movement in this country's history. With luck the Jewish vote will figure that out in time. I'm not holding my breath, but there does seem to be some reason for optimism:

Matthew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, says that in the last two weeks of fund-raising events by Mr. Bush, in communities like Los Angeles, New York, Washington and Miami, there has been "significant and highly visible participation by the Jewish community."

"In at least three of those events, the invocations were done by local rabbis," Mr. Brooks notes.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.