Award-Winning Conservative Playwright Reminds Jewish Voters: Ballot Is Secret (So No One Will Ever Know if You Don’t Vote Obama)

Award-winning playwright and screenwriter David Mamet, an outspoken political convert to conservatism, has penned an open letter in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal to Jewish Americans planning to vote for President Barack Obama on Election Day.

Invoking Bible imagery in the title of his piece, “A Note to a Stiff-Necked People,” he implores Jewish voters to cast a ballot reflecting their most closely-held values, which he implies are more in line with Mitt Romney’s positions, though he never invokes the Republican presidential candidate’s name.

In the letter which is comprised of a series of rhetorical questions, he asks his coreligionists who have traditionally voted Democratic:

Are you prepared to explain to your children not the principles upon which your vote is cast, but its probable effects upon them?

Irrespective of your endorsement of liberal sentiments, of fairness and “more equal distribution,” will you explain to your children that top-down economic policies will increasingly limit their ability to find challenging and well-paid work, and that the diminution in employment and income will decrease their opportunity to marry and raise children?

Will you explain (as you have observed) that a large part of their incomes will be used to fund programs that they may find immoral, wasteful and/or indeed absurd?

And that the bulk of their taxes go to no programs at all, but merely service the debt you entailed on them?

Will you tell your children that a liberal government will increasingly marginalize, dismiss and weaken the support for and the safety of the Jewish state?

Will you tell them that, in a state-run economy, hard work may still be applauded, but that it will no longer be rewarded?

A prolific writer working in the overwhelmingly liberal entertainment industry, Mamet is uniquely placed to voice his concern that more government control in key sectors of society could impede a citizen’s ability to speak freely:

Will you explain that whatever their personal beliefs, tax-funded institutions will require them to imbibe and repeat the slogans of the left, and that, should they differ, they cannot have a career in education, medicine or television unless they keep their mouths shut?

Suggesting they give pause before pulling the lever for Obama, Mamet implies that voters in traditionally liberal communities can employ a “don’t ask, don’t tell” posture upon exiting the curtained booth:

Please remember that we have the secret ballot and, should you, on reflection, vote in secret for a candidate you would not endorse in public, you will not be alone.

Besides the award winning plays and films for which he is famous, David Mamet authored the book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culturein which he detailed his conversion from liberal champion to devoted conservative. In 2008, he wrote an op-ed in the The Village Voice, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal."

A tracking poll of American Jewish voters last week showed Obama at 69.3 percent with Romney at 29.7 percent. By contrast, Israeli Jews that were polled favor Romney 57 percent versus 22 percent for Obama.