Jon Margolis, [1] once the Chicago Tribune's chief political reporter and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

With but a few days of campaigning before the primary, Walter Mondale and Gary Hart hit the Big Apple in late March of 1984 in full-throated agreement on one policy issue: The U.S. Embassy in Israel must be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Not everyone in the target audience was impressed.

“I’m offended,” said a Manhattanite who confirms her membership in this particular target audience on Friday evenings when she lights two candles and recites a Hebrew blessing to begin the Jewish Sabbath. “I’m an American. I care about foreign policy, the economy and clean air. Of course I care about Israel, but who cares where the embassy is?”

That evening her reaction was recounted as a few reporters joined a couple of Hart campaign staffers at the fabled Carnegie Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue. Again, not everyone in the audience was impressed.

“That was one of those Upper West Side intellectual Jews,” said one reporter. “Maybe the embassy issue is more important to working-class Jews, someone like our waiter.”

Who at that moment appeared, his tray laden with victuals dripping delight and  cholesterol, just in time to be asked by the ever-vigilant journalists how deeply he cared about the location of America’s embassy in Israel.

“Embassy?” he shot back, displaying the sense of timing for which delicatessen waiters are widely renown. “Embassy schmembassy.”

That waiter got a great tip.

First of all, the story never demonstrated that Barack Obama was having any special problem with Jewish voters. In fact, it never said he had a problem, merely a “challenge,” and provided precious little evidence for that contention.

The first instance of what purported to be evidence was a statement from one Ed Lasky, news editor of the online magazine American Thinker. Lasky might be a most astute fellow, but Times readers deserved to know that his magazine regularly displays a revulsion as visceral as it is rational toward any policy position to the left of Dick Cheney’s, not to mention a special distaste for Barack Obama.

The Times story did say that exit polling indicated that Sen. Hillary Clinton was outpolling Obama among Jewish primary voters -- but not by much, and only because she piled up big margins in New York, where Jewish voters are most numerous. In Massachusetts, Connecticut and his home state of Illinois, Obama actually got more support from Jews. In California, they were 50-50.

The most obvious statistical analysis, then, is that Clinton got the votes of those New York Jews less because they were Jews than because they were New Yorkers. Clinton is their senator. They’re accustomed to voting for her, as are their Catholic, Protestant and Hindu neighbors who voted for her in comparable numbers.

What would be a real problem for Obama, and a must-write story for any political reporter, would be some indication that lots of Jewish Democrats who voted for Clinton would vote Republican or stay home if Obama wins the nomination. But there was no hint of any such evidence in the Times story, even though the newspaper has the information that would contain such evidence.

Alicia Buhse of the Edison-Mitofsky polling firm said one of the questions asked of primary voters was whether they were satisfied with their party’s candidates. It would be easy, she said, to compare the results of the entire exit poll sample with the five percent Jewish sub-sample. Alas, she could provide such information only to those who had paid for it, which does not include your humble agent here. But the Times paid for it, as did the networks and other big newspapers. If Jewish Democrats were less satisfied with the Clinton-Obama choice than other Democrats, somebody should have written that story by now. Its absence strongly implies, if it does not quite prove, that the exit poll results reveal no such dangers for Obama.

But the problem here transcends this one story or this one voting bloc. Perhaps it is time for journalists and other political chatterers to re-think their inclination to lump people together by observable category, not because it is demeaning, but because it is misleading.

Is there, for instance, really a “women’s vote”? At first glance, it does seem that most women are voting for Clinton. But look again. It’s really just most older, white, Hispanic, and less-affluent women who are voting for Clinton. These women are no more female than black, younger, or more affluent women. When it comes to voting behavior, economics and demographics outweigh chromosomal composition.

Even the much-discussed “gender gap,” while real, can be confusing. It results far less from wives cancelling out the votes of their Republican husbands (though that does happen) than from single women voting Democratic more than either married couples or single men. That probably reflects the lower income of single women as much as or more than their sex.

No doubt gender solidarity inspires some women to support Clinton. But all kinds of people have a tendency to vote for one of their own. In 1988, Republican Bob Dole and Democrat Richard Gephardt won the Iowa precinct caucuses, to no small extent because they both came from neighboring states. Iowans were accustomed to the way those men walked, talked, and handled themselves, in contrast to George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, both raised in New England. But nobody suggested the emergence of a “Midwesterner’s vote.”

Besides, that tendency to vote for one of your own is just a tendency, easily offset by other considerations. Had Joseph Lieberman received massive support from Jewish voters when he ran for president in 2004, he would have done a lot better than he did. In this case, ethnic loyalty and cultural affinity was no match for the simple fact that most Jewish voters thought he was wrong about the war in Iraq.

Underlying the false assumption that people vote according to their sex, religion or ethnicity is the equally false assumption that people in those groups base their votes on issues of special concern to those groups. Some women will not vote for a candidate who opposes abortion rights. But others will not consider a candidate who supports legal abortions, and aside from abortion it’s hard to see just what is a “women’s issue.” Women, especially lower-income women, may feel more strongly than most men about social services, health care, public safety, or even an end to the Iraq war. But these are everybody’s issues.

The big “Jewish issue,” of course, is Israel, but evidence that most Jews base their votes on a candidate’s Middle East stance is almost nowhere to be found. A nationwide poll of Jewish voters taken by the American Jewish Committee last year found that the most important issues for these voters were the economy, health care, terrorism and the war in Iraq.

Gee, just like everybody else.

Tied at the bottom, with six percent of the sample calling them the most important issue, were energy, immigration and support for Israel.

This result probably does not mean that American Jews don’t care about Israel as much as it means that they understand that everyone in mainstream American politics is committed to Israel’s security. That certainly includes all the presidential candidates. Parsing each candidate’s statements to make sure he or she says nothing critical of Israeli policy or even expresses the slightest sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians does not seem to be a common pastime of the typical Jewish voter, who often disagrees with Israeli policy and has some compassion for the plight of the Palestinians.

It is easy to forget this because many of the organized Jewish lobbying groups do base their endorsement and contribution decisions exclusively on a candidate’s support for Israel, indeed for its hardliners. The above-mentioned Ed Lasky and his online magazine appear to be part of that school. What is considered “the Israel lobby” in the United States is often really the Likud lobby, insisting on policies much more uncompromising than those of the Bush administration, most American Jews and often the government and people of Israel.

Again, there is some similarity here to other constituencies. Leaders of feminist organizations have often been strident in attacking anyone – especially women – who do not support Hillary Clinton. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights sees anti-Catholicism in nooks and crannies never peered into by the most devout Catholic. The leaders of almost all constituency groups are more single-minded than the constituents they purport to represent.

There are voting blocs in America. Blacks, American Indians and (to a lesser extent) Hispanics vote overwhelmingly Democratic, and it is easy to see why. Even among these groups, though, rank-and-file voters rarely march in lockstep with the leaders of those constituency groups, most of whom they could not identify.

All this is interesting, important and largely ignored by political journalists. It’s easier to latch onto whether a candidate distanced himself from some objectionable fellow with sufficient fervor to satisfy the self-appointed guardians of one group or another’s sensibilities.

Or, as one might say if only one had the perspicacity of a delicatessen waiter, “sensibilities schmensibilities.”