McCain Is Winning ¿ In Israel

While the European leg of Barack Obama’s much-touted overseas trip will take him to nations where he’s vastly more popular than John McCain, Obama is not nearly as well liked in Israel. Polls there show Israelis prefer John McCain by as much as 20 percentage points.

Obama’s Middle Eastern swing will also take him to Jordan and possibly to Iraq, but the electoral stakes may be highest in Israel, which has long played a prominent role in American foreign policy and domestic politics.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor downplayed the electoral significance of the senator’s Israel visit, saying the purpose is “to convey to Israeli leaders and the Israeli people his commitment to the special U.S.-Israel relationship and his strong personal feelings of friendship. He is deeply committed to Israel's security.”

If Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, impresses in his visit, it could help him close the international affairs experience gap with his Republican rival, and also solidify his support amongst Jews and evangelicals skeptical of Obama’s expressed commitment to Israel.

Israelis appear to share those concerns. In the past month, one poll found 36 percent of Israelis preferred McCain, versus 27 percent for Obama, while in another, 46 percent of respondents said a McCain presidency “would be better for Israel,” compared to 20 percent who said the same about Obama.

Those results stand in stark contrast to public surveys conducted in most other nations. A spring Pew Global Attitudes Project poll of 23 foreign nations — not including Israel — on six continents found respondents in all but two countries had more confidence in Obama than McCain to do the right thing in world affairs, often by wide margins. (In the two outlying countries, Jordan and Pakistan, few people expressed confidence in either candidate.)

Obama’s support tended to track fairly closely with widespread distaste for President Bush’s foreign policy — which includes strong support for Israel in its conflicts with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors.

But that foreign policy has been embraced in Israel, where Bush remains a popular figure.

“Israelis see Bush as having been better to Israel than almost any president before has been,” said Albert Baumgarten, a Jewish history professor at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. Israelis, he said, “feel almost as if he’s their president.”

Baumgarten, a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen who’s supporting Obama, said Israelis believe McCain is more likely to continue pursuing the Bush administration’s foreign policy agenda.

McCain has received mostly positive coverage in Israel, both for his hard line on Iran and for his military service, including his time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. That’s an experience valued by Israelis, who are required to serve in the country’s armed forces.

He’s also benefited from the support of Sen. Joe Lieberman, the former-Democrat-turned-independent, whose Orthodox Judaism and staunch support of Israel make him a popular figure in Israel. Some Israelis, said Jerusalem-based pollster Mitchell Barak, count against Obama “that the Democratic Party is not a welcome place for Joe Lieberman.”

But McCain’s edge in the Jewish state seems to stem in large part from an antipathy toward Obama. In May, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, then seeking the Democratic nomination, outpolled McCain in a head-to-head matchup by a margin of 57 percent to 18 percent. The same poll, conducted by Barak’s firm, showed McCain with a 43 percent to 20 percent edge over Obama among Israeli voters.

Barak asserted that Clinton’s popularity stemmed mostly from her years as first lady to Bill Clinton, who was also popular in Israel.

“Israelis generally don’t know senators, even the more popuar ones,” said Barak, who was raised in the U.S. and worked briefly for the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Obama’s press coverage in Israel has not won him many friends. He got harsh treatment after backtracking on his declaration last month to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," and for saying he would meet without preconditions with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Discredited rumors that Obama is Muslim have spread to Israel, said Baumgarten, as have supportive comments toward Palestine made by Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama’s visit should boost his standing with Israelis, Barak said. “He’s going to get great coverage. They’ll be pictures of him at the Kotel,” one of the nation’s most significant religious sites for Jews, “and Israelis will listen very carefully to what he says.”

Obama will be accompanied by Dennis Ross, a high-ranking diplomat who worked for Presidents Clinton and George H. W. Bush, and a popular figure among organized American Jewry.

He’s slotted to meet Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayad.

According to Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, president of The Israel Project, a nonpartisan group that helped plan Obama’s trip, the candidate intends to travel to Sderot, a city near the Gaza Strip that has been barraged by Qassam rockets fired from Palestinian territory.

The city, which McCain toured in March with Lieberman and Barak, currently the Israeli Defense Minister,  has become a rallying point for Israelis and American Jews concerned about Israel’s national security.

Obama’s likely to do well with American Jewish voters no matter the impression he makes on Israelis, asserted Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“American Jews almost always vote heavily Democratic, and my guess is that Obama will carry the American Jewish vote regardless of what his polling is in Israel,” he said.

A poll released on Wednesday by J Street, a self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace movement," found American Jews favor Obama over McCain 62 percent to 32 percent. That’s a drop from the 79 percent of American Jews that exit polls showed voted for Al Gore in 2000 and 74 percent that voted for John Kerry in 2004.

Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, said enthusiastic receptions in Israel and the rest of his stops could be very effective for Obama.

While the trip won’t help Obama show that he’d be a tough commander in chief, that doesn’t mean such displays are meaningless, said Kull, who pointed to studies showing that Americans care about world opinion of U.S. foreign policy.

“It’s not hard power,” he said. “It’s soft power. And American soft power can be a real asset.”