Have the neocons been defeated?

After 40 years as a leading spokesman for the Neoconservative takeover of the conservative movement, former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz admits in his new book Why Are Jews Liberals? that Neoconservatism has failed utterly at what would seem its most basic task: persuading Jews to vote Republican.

While Podhoretz recounts his role in key steps in the Neocon ascendancy over the GOP, such as helping drive former National Review stalwart Joe Sobran into penury ("to encourage the others") and organizing denunciations of then-National Review editor John O’Sullivan, he confesses that the Neocons’ growing power over the Republican Party has proven useless at converting Jews to the GOP.

According to Podhoretz’s numbers, in the 1928 Presidential election, Al Smith received 78 percent of the Jewish vote. Eighty years later, Barack Obama’s share of the Jewish vote was … 78 percent. I’ve graphed the data here: