These were the most interesting-boring elections one could ever hope for. Boring – as the top job was secured early on by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Fascinating – as the parties, unburdened of having to compete for the top job, were free to combat one another for votes.
A Mitt Romney campaign ad criticizes President Obama for not visiting Israel during his presidency and refusing to call Jerusalem the capital of Israel.
A candidate for the Democratic nod for Connecticut\’s U.S. Senate seat called a rival a \”whore for AIPAC.\”
Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the Democratic Party leader, urged Jewish leaders to push back against what she said were distortions of President Obama\’s Israel record.
Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain pushed back against a proposal by Ron Paul to cut funding to Israel.
Potential 2012 presidential contender Sarah Palin is scheduled to have dinner with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on her second and last day in Israel. Palin will dine with Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, on Monday before returning to the United States. \”As the world confronts sweeping changes and new realities, I look forward to meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu to discuss the key issues facing his country, our ally Israel,\” Palin said in a statement on her official SarahPAC website.
If anybody will ever earn the respect of the warring parties of the Middle East and of the rest of the world, it will be a black American president with a Muslim name, a sense of universal fairness, and the courage to speak the truth as he sees it. As someone who is deeply pained by how the world continues to malign the state of Israel, I have the audacity to hope that such a change will be good for the Jews.\n\n
Interview with presidential candidate Senator John McCain and a transcript of remarks by the Senator to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.\n
You have to judge politicians, especially those running for prime minister, without sentiment. And if they\’ve changed direction, you have to give more weight to what they\’ve done lately than what they did before. Unless the candidate is a truly malevolent character, you have to judge him or her on two things: leadership ability and political direction. And on that basis, I think Olmert is better suited to be prime minister than anybody else around.
Just after dawn two years ago today, May 29, 1996, the all-night vote count finally tipped against Shimon Peres and for Binyamin Netanyahu, who would become the new prime minister. In the intervening two years, Peres was succeeded as head of the Labor Party by the slain Yitzhak Rabin\’s protegé, Ehud Barak. After a long stretch of running ahead of Netanyahu in the polls, Barak has now slipped behind.
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