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Reid’s Revival

Two months ago, and for a long time before that, one of the most settled propositions in American politics was that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could not win re-election this year. (Google up “Harry Reid is toast” and you get a pretty rich collection of links stretching back for a good while). The idea was that a national leader with universal name ID and his kind of negative approval ratings couldn’t possibly dig himself out of the hole he was in.
Yesterday Rasmussen–yes, Rasmussen–released a new poll showing Harry Reid in a statistical dead heat with Republican nominee Sharron Angle. True, Angle has never been gangbusters in a general election poll, but as recently as June 9 she held an eleven-point lead over Reid–and then her issue positions started drawing attention.
Aside from Angle’s rapidly eroding horse-race numbers, her approval/disapproval ratings aren’t much better than Reid’s; even though she’s had very little time to alienate voters, she’s done so very efficiently.
It’s all a reminder of a simple but oft-forgotten fact about politics: no matter how “nationalized” an election has become; no matter how tilted the “landscape” is; no matter how rigidly partisan voters seem to be–in the end, elections require a choice between candidates, and Harry Reid has drawn an opponent who has given his campaign, and perhaps his career, new life.


Sleazy Strategy to Hold TX Governorship May Backfire

If you were wondering how low could the GOP go in order to hold the governorship of Texas — yes, that Texas, the one that has the Governor who talks up secession — take a peek at Suzy Khimm’s Mother Jones article “Serial Butt-Biting GOP Operative Sinks Teeth Into Texas Race.”
You probably heard that Governor Rick Perry is in serious electoral trouble, which is no small achievement in one of the reddest of states. Perry, it seems is in a dead heat with Houston’s Democratic Mayor Bill White, who Khimm calls “the strongest gubernatorial contender that Texas Democrats have seen in years.” Here’s Khimm on the Perry campaign’s latest connivance in cahoots with Charles Hurth III, a GOP operative who has a somewhat bizarre personal history:

…Last month, Hurth and two other GOP operatives–one a former top aide to Texas Gov. Rick Perry–were implicated in a scheme to bankroll a petition drive to put the Green Party on the ballot. It is an apparent ploy to siphon votes away from Perry’s Democratic challenger, former Houston Mayor Bill White. He’s an appealing target: Tied with Perry in the latest poll…
…Hurth’s first claim to fame was being sued in 1987 for approaching a fellow law student in a bar and biting her on the buttocks so hard that she required medical attention. During the trial, Hurth admitted that he’d used the same toothy overture to approach two other women at fraternity parties–and he said that his latest victim should have taken the gesture as a compliment. The jurors didn’t buy it, and Hurth was successfully sued for $27,500. Since then, he has dedicated himself to being a persistent pain in the butt for Democrats, setting up shop in a tiny Missouri town to create a clearinghouse for Republican electoral schemes. The latest came this spring, when Hurth and his allies succeeded in getting the Greens on the 2010 ballot.

If that wasn’t sleazy enough,

…The Texas Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in early June against a Hurth-run nonprofit called Take Initiative America, as well as Arizona-based GOP consultant Tim Mooney and “unknown conspirators” for their role in the effort. Mooney has admitted that he funneled money through Hurth’s organization to pay Free and Equal Inc., a Chicago-based petition-gathering company that ended up amassing 92,000 signatures for the Texas Green Party’s ballot drive. According to a court document, Hurth’s group spent $532,500 on the effort.

Yes, there’s more:

…This isn’t the first time that Mooney and Hurth have resorted to such schemes to help Republicans at the polls. In 2004, Hurth set up an organization called Choices for America that furtively solicited help from Republicans to get then-presidential candidate Ralph Nader on the ballot in New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, among other states. Mooney assisted with Hurth’s 2004 effort, along with Dave Carney, George H.W. Bush’s former political director who’s now one of Rick Perry’s top consultants. At the time, Carney acknowledged to the Dallas Morning News that he was trying to gather signatures for Nader in order to help George W. Bush get reelected. According to the script for the petition drive, canvassers were instructed to tell Bush supporters, “Without Nader, Bush would not be president.”
Three years later, Hurth undertook yet another effort to manipulate electoral politics to the Republicans’ advantage. In 2007, Take Initiative America funded a California ballot initiative that would have distributed the state’s 55 electoral votes by congressional district instead of winner-takes-all. Had it succeeded, the effort would have greatly benefited Republican presidential contenders in the state. Hurth similarly refused to reveal the donor behind the effort, who finally came forward after Democrats accused the group of money-laundering and California officials vowed to investigate. Paul Singer, a hedge-fund manager and major Giuliani fundraiser, admitted that he gave $175,000 to the effort…

Khimm goes on to report that the Texas Green Party accepted the money, probably knowing that it could be coming from Republicans and that the state Democratic Party is continuing its legal challenge to ascertain exactly who funded the GOP-backed petition drive. It would be ironic indeed if the fallout is such that Perry narrowly loses because the efforts of Republican activists to divide the Democrats ends up winning them the majority of swing voters who don’t like underhanded ballot manipulation games.


Alabama Shake

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
So far this year, the script for Republican primaries has been easy to follow. There’s usually been a fight between the Tea Party movement and the Republican establishment; between “true conservatives” and those dismissed as RINOs; between fierce opponents of any cooperation with “socialist” Democrats and the occasional, hunted-to-extinction statesman interested in bipartisanship. You often don’t need to have a program to know the players.
But in today’s Alabama runoff, you can forgive true conservatives for being a bit confused. That’s because this primary pits an establishment RINO suspect–former Democratic state senator, upper-crust Episcopalian, and career trial lawyer Bradley Byrne–against an Evangelical conservative candidate who is allied with the teachers’ unions.
Allow me to explain. Byrne, who won 28 percent of the vote in Alabama’s June 1 primary, is closely associated with causes that the local Tea Party hates: He came down on the liberal side of the great litmus-test struggle of recent Alabama political history, Governor Bob Riley’s 2003 tax-reform initiative, which would have significantly changed one of the country’s most regressive tax systems, but is remembered by conservatives as an audacious effort to raise taxes. (It was subsequently rejected by Alabama voters in a referendum that is considered a signature victory for the hard right.) Byrne enjoys strong backing from the Alabama business community and mainstream Republican elected officials, including Governor Riley. And in the heart of the Bible Belt, he is a member of that great blue-blooded liberal establishment denomination, the Episcopal Church–an affiliation which may have influenced his near-fatal admission early in the campaign that he did not believe every single word in the Bible was literally true.
Byrne’s opponent in the runoff, Tuscaloosa state representative Dr. Robert Bentley, is a classic conservative Baptist, closely identified with 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. He ran an “outsider” campaign in which he promised not to take a salary as governor, and emerged from the back of a large pack of candidates on June 1 to win a runoff spot. Bentley has been endorsed by the campaign managers for both Tim James–the closest thing to a confirmed member of the Tea Party in the primary–and for Christian Right icon Judge Roy Moore, whose underfinanced candidacy finished a disappointing fourth.
In other words, Bentley should be considered the “conservative insurgent” against the establishmentarian Byrne. Except that Byrne hates teachers unions a lot, and his extremely personal battle with them has taken center stage in the campaign, earning him a lot of sympathy from conservatives. As a state senator, Byrne was a constant enemy of the Alabama Education Association (AEA)–once staging a one-man filibuster against a bipartisan compromise bill that would submit teacher dismissal actions to arbitration–and his antagonism only intensified during his stint as Governor Riley’s appointed overseer of the state’s two-year college network. (It makes sense that one of Byrne’s early gubernatorial endorsements came from Jeb Bush, who shares his strong hostility to teachers’ unions.) During the primary campaign, Byrne’s opposition blossomed into a monomaniacal vendetta against the AEA. Alabama political reporter Kim Chandler captured the tone nicely:

Last fall, Bradley Byrne held a press conference on the steps of the Alabama Capi­tol. Instead of standing with the white columned capitol behind him for the backdrop favored by most politicians, Byrne faced the capitol so the cameras aimed at him panned down Montgomery’s Dexter Ave­nue.
Visible over Byrne’s right shoulder was the head­quarters of the Alabama Education Association. There, Byrne said, lie many of the problems in schools and in state politics.
“I don’t think AEA stands for the best of their profes­sion. AEA stands for the worst of it,” Byrne said at the news conference.
Public clashes with the powerful teachers lobby have been the trademark of much of Byrne’s 16-year political career and have become a centerpiece of his campaign to be Ala­bama’s next governor.

This vendetta, in turn, has scrambled Alabama’s political alignments, attracting conservatives who hate teachers’ unions to Byrne, while pushing the state’s Democratic allies into bed with a candidate who, in most other states, would be considered a champion of the hard right.


Heck, They Got Color TV Sets

I don’t know how much Rand Paul’s latest tin-eared gaffe will cost him in terms of votes in the KY senate race (AP report here). But I’m pretty sure he didn’t win any hearts and minds in the Louisville forum, where he commented on poverty. Paul said “The poor in our country are enormously better off than the rest of the world…” and referenced an old propaganda film that showed color TV sets in homes of the poor.
For sheer arrogance, it may not top Jim Bunning’s ‘Tough Shit’ response to a question about unemployment, but it reflects a similar, clueless spirit. Kentucky has been hit harder by unemployment than most states, and tied for second of the 50 states in percentage of residents living in poverty.
Paul’s Democratic opponent Attorney General Jack Conway didn’t pounce on Paul’s remark, a missed opportunity to make Paul back up and eat it. All is not lost, however. Conway should still be able to make Paul elaborate. One possible response to get things rolling:

Mr. Paul’s remarks reveal a disturbing callousness about poverty and a profound ignorance about the economic hardships many Kentuckians are experiencing. Kentucky doesn’t need another deaf ear toward working people in the U.S. Senate, and we certainly don’t need another errand boy for the rich representing our state.

Kentucky is tricky political terrain, fairly described as a red state in recent years. That’s not the same thing, however, as saying a majority of KY voters have unlimited tolerance for would-be leaders who keep making embarrassing remarks.


Palin Strikes Again

Sarah Palin’s selective intervention in Republican primaries this year reached a new level today, as she endorsed another female “conservative reformer” in Georgia’s highly competitive Republican gubernatorial contest.
Former Secretary of State Karen Handel, who recently surged into second place in one recent poll of Georgia Republicans, was the beneficiary of Palin’s gesture.
It was fairly predictable, given Palin’s clear-cut desire to be closely associated with the election of conservative women around the country. Indeed, Handel’s overall profile and message–the brave conservative reformer taking on the corrupt good ol’ boys–has been remarkably similar to that of SC’s Nikki Haley before the SC contest was taken over by hamhanded attacks on Haley’s morals and background.
There is one, difference, however, that made the Handel endorsement a bit less of a slam dunk for Palin: she’s not necessarily the favorite candidate of social conservatives, Palin’s most reliable base. Handel’s been at odds with Georgia’s premier anti-abortion group over her refusal to back a ban on IV fertility treatments, and has also been attacked for a friendly attitude towards the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group.
The campaign of former Congressman Nathan Deal, whose struggle to edge Handel for a runoff spot has been significantly endangered by Palin’s embrace of Handel, pushed back hard, in a statement reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Jim Galloway today:

It’s disappointing that Sarah Palin has chosen to back the most liberal Republican in this race.
In past races, Karen Handel endorsed taxpayer-funded domestic partner benefits and gay adoption — and she’s been caught lying about it. Just last night, Handel finally admitted she’d written a check to a gay rights group — when previously she said the check was a forgery and she never lived at that address.
As Fulton Commission chair, Handel voted to give taxpayer dollars to “Youth Pride” which did outreach to gay and “questioning” kids as young as 13 and funded seminars such as “Unsung Heroes of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community” – this was during a budget crisis.
We do hope that the former governor will look at the record and reconsider, or explain to conservative Georgia Republican primary voters why she’s endorsing Handel in light of these well-documented facts and Handel’s clumsy effort to cover them up.

Georgia Right-to-Life officials are said to be “shocked” by Palin’s endorsement, and like Deal, can be expected to try to discourage her from personally campaigning for Handel.
It will be interesting to see what happens during the last week of this primary. Palin got a lot of credit–probably too much credit–for Haley’s ascent to the top of the primary pile, and then her landslide runoff victory. The long-time front-runner in the Georgia race, insurance commissioner John Oxendine, has long been considered vulnerable to a late surge from one of the other candidates. Handel, whose big handicap has been a lack of funds to run ads, will get a lot of free media, and maybe some last-minute cash, from the bear hug by the mother of the Mama Grizzlies.


Unstable Platform

Seyward Darby has an amusing piece at the New Republic‘s site with some of the loonier provisions found in state Republican Party platform documents.
It’s all good clean fun, but does this craziness matter? No, suggests the CW; party platform committees these days, at any level, are a sandbox dominated by ideological activists, producing turgid documents that candidates feel free to ignore.
Fair enough, I guess, but what about those states where ideological activists have an unusually important role? How about, say, Iowa, whose caucuses often all but dictate one or the other party’s nominating process?
I strongly suggest a reading of the Iowa Republican Party Platform by anyone who accuses “liberals” or “the media” of exaggerating the extremism of today’s conservatives.
This 367-plank, 12,000-word document, adopted just last month at the Iowa State Republican Convention, is relentlessly kooky. Right up top, before the “statement of principles,” the platform features a long, ominous quote from Cicero about “traitors.” It’s not made clear whether said traitors are Democrats, RINOs, or Muslims, but treason sure seems to be a major preoccupation for Iowa Republicans.
Once you get to the “statement of principles,” it’s hard to miss principle number seven, which would have satisfied Ayn Rand even on one of her crankier days:

The individual works hard for what is his/hers. Therefore, the individual will determine with whom he/she will share it, not the government. No more legal plunder. Legal plunder is defined as using the law to take from one person what belongs to them, and giving it to others to whom it does not belong. It is plunder if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what that citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Given that principle, it’s not surprising that elsewhere the platform flatly calls for the abolition of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (along with minimum wage laws), and of the federal departments of Agriculture (!), Education and Energy. It also appears to oppose any anti-discrimination laws of any sort.
Beyond such basics, the Iowa GOP Platform is essentially a compilation of every right-wing consipracy theory-based preoccupation known to man. In a nod to Glenn Beck, the statement of principles mentions “Progressivism” along with “Collectivism, Socialism, Fascism, [and] Communism” as ideologies incompatible with the Founding Fathers’ design. There’s a birther plank. There’s a plank about the “NAFTA Superhighway.” There’s a plank about ACORN. There’s a plank about the “fairness doctrine.” There’s plank after plank after plank opposing the nefarious activities of the United Nations. There’s a plank calling for abolition of the Federal Reserve System. Needless to say, there are many, many planks spelling out total opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage in excrutiating detail, and attacking any limitation on campaign activities or use of tax dollars by religious organizations.
The very end of the platform holds that Republican candidates should be denied party funds if they don’t agree with at least 80% of the platform, as determined by questionnaires asking about every single crazy plank. This is something we should all be able to get behind; I’d love to see not only Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidate Terry Branstad, a notorious fence-straddler on many issues, but the entire 2012 GOP presidential field, have to check boxes next to solemn items like:

We oppose any effort to implement Islamic Shariah law in this country.

If all this madness is really out of the mainstream of Republican thinking, then perhaps the adults of the GOP should expend the minimum effort necessary to say so very explicitly.


TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira: Public Cautious on Spending Cuts

Conservatives are pulling out all stops in trying to implant the meme that the public wants an all-out war on the federal deficit, including spending cuts of the sort Republicans favor. In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, however, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains:

…The grain of truth here is that the public is in fact concerned about the size of the deficit. But everything else is wrong. There are many more important things to the public than cutting the deficit.
Take jobs, for example. The public declared by 60-38 in a mid-June Gallup/USA Today poll that they favored Congress passing new legislation this year that would provide “additional government spending to create jobs and stimulate the economy.” Of course, this is exactly the kind of legislation conservatives are now strenuously opposing on the grounds the public is sick and tired of spending to create jobs.

As for other cuts in social spending,

…A late June Pew poll asked the public if they’d approve of various spending cuts to balance their state’s budget this year. The public opposed all of them. This included 73-21 opposition to cutting funding for K-12 public schools; 71-25 opposition to cutting funding for police, fire, and other public safety departments; 65-27 opposition to cutting health care services provided by state or local government; and 50-43 opposition to cutting funding for maintaining roads and public transportation systems.

At a time when congress is considering a range of new initiatives to stimulate the economy and hiring, Teixeira says it’s important to remember that the public wants to keep essential social programs: “Policymakers would do well to remember this as they consider bills that would pump additional money into the economy by extending unemployment benefits, preventing teacher layoffs, and the like. Killing these bills in the name of deficit reduction is not doing the public’s bidding–it’s exactly the reverse.”


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: Can Democrats Recover Before the Midterms?

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
I’ve just received the top-line numbers of Democracy Corps’ most recent poll. From a Democratic standpoint, there’s hardly any good news. Here are the essential findings among likely voters:
· right track/wrong track: 31/61
· the economy: has bottomed out and is starting to improve (40); is at the bottom and is not yet getting any better (22); has not yet bottomed out and will still get worse (34)
· Obama approval/disapproval: 45/51
· Obama shares/doesn’t share your values: 46/51
· Obama is/isn’t on your side: 45/52
· Obama is/isn’t too liberal: 57/38
· Obama is/isn’t a big spender: 61/34
· Obama is/isn’t a socialist: 55/39
· Obama has/doesn’t have realistic solutions to the country’s problems: 43/55
· Mean Republican/Democratic Party ratings: 46.0/43.3
· Mean Congressional Republican/Democrat ratings: 43/4/40.7
· Generic Republican/Democratic Congressional support in November: 48/42
As if all this weren’t bad enough for Democrats, the survey reveals that they’ve lost control of the narrative. For example:
“The best way to improve our economy and create jobs is to invest more to put people to work, develop new industries, and help businesses grow in expanding, new areas.”
OR
“The best way to improve our economy and create jobs is to cut government spending and cut taxes so businesses can prosper and the private sector can start creating jobs.”
FIRST STATEMENT: 43
SECOND STATEMENT: 50
I doubt that anything that will happen between now and election day (or anything Democrats can say) will substantially alter these views; history suggests that by now, they’re too entrenched. And Obama’s ratings, though higher than those of congressional Democrats, are hardly robust. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that in this year’s contested races, Democrats who can’t win based on local issues or opposition research will probably lose.


Angle’s Angling a Tad Late

There’s an interesting sub-drama playing out in the Nevada Senate race. (Update : Thanks to Jim Gibson for correcting the state) Kristi Keck at CNN.com reports on Sharron Angle’s efforts to tone down her message and persona to the point where she appears to have an actual chance of being taken seriously by a majority of voters. Here’s how it’s playing in the website campaign:

In Nevada, Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle last week unveiled a revamped website that no longer details some of her more controversial positions, such as her calls to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and support for a nuclear waste dump facility at Yucca Mountain.
The campaign of Angle’s November opponent, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, posted a copy of Angle’s original site at www.therealsharronangle.com. Angle’s campaign sent a “cease and desist” letter to Reid’s campaign, saying that the website falsely represented itself as Angle’s website.
Reid’s campaign temporarily removed the site, but the Nevada Democratic Party reposted it, claiming First Amendment protection. Reid’s campaign said Angle was trying to mask her views, but Angle’s campaign insisted its Democratic opponent was “doing desperate things to win.”

Keck quotes Angle copping a plea on a conservative radio program: “Today, I actually softened because I’m being held accountable for every idle word.” Not being a career politician, she said she doesn’t always say the best words.
John Avlon, author of “Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America,” explains in Keck’s article: “When you are all of a sudden confronted with the possibility of real governance, then some of the red meat stops making practical sense…” TDS contributor Alan Abramowitz, author of “The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy,” adds “It’s when some Tea Party candidates or figures start engaging in Obama derangement syndrome that their message starts becoming political kryptonite.”
One of the most devastating takes on Angle’s campaign comes from GOP veteran insider Michael Gerson, who writes in his WaPo op-ed column this morning:

The Republican wave carries along a group that strikes a faux revolutionary pose. “Our Founding Fathers,” says Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle, “they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.”
…Mainstream conservatives have been strangely disoriented by Tea Party excess, unable to distinguish the injudicious from the outrageous. Some rose to Angle’s defense or attacked her critics. Just to be clear: A Republican Senate candidate has identified the United States Congress with tyranny and contemplated the recourse to political violence. This is disqualifying for public office. It lacks, of course, the seriousness of genuine sedition. It is the conservative equivalent of the Che Guevara T-shirt — a fashion, a gesture, a toying with ideas the wearer only dimly comprehends. The rhetoric of “Second Amendment remedies” is a light-weight Lexington, a cut-rate Concord. It is so far from the moral weightiness of the Founders that it mocks their memory.

Gerson notes that, in her fondness for excess, Angle is not alone among the current crop of high-profile GOP candidates:

The Republican wave also carries along a group of libertarians, such as Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul. Since expressing a preference for property rights above civil rights protections — revisiting the segregated lunch counter — Paul has minimized his contact with the media. The source of this caution is instructive. The fear is not that Paul will make gaffes or mistakes but, rather, that he will further reveal his own political views. In America, the ideology of libertarianism is itself a scandal. It involves not only a retreat from Obamaism but a retreat from the most basic social commitments to the weak, the elderly and the disadvantaged, along with a withdrawal from American global commitments…. Libertarianism has a rigorous ideological coldness at its core. Voters are alienated when that core is exposed. And Paul is now neck and neck with his Democratic opponent in a race a Republican should easily win.

Gerson goes on to add that the GOP “wave carries along a group more interested in stigmatizing immigrants than winning their support” and he laments the response of too many Republicans who should know better “to stay quiet, make no sudden moves and hope they go away.” He adds

…Significant portions of the Republican coalition believe that it is a desirable strategy to talk of armed revolution, embrace libertarian purity and alienate Hispanic voters… With a major Republican victory in November, those who hold these views may well be elevated in profile and influence. And this could create durable, destructive perceptions of the Republican Party that would take decades to change. A party that is intimidated and silent in the face of its extremes is eventually defined by them.

For Dems, we can hope that enough swing voters will get it sooner than later, in time to tell the Republicans in November “Go sell crazy somewhere else. We’ve got serious problems here, and this is no time for tea party nonsense.”


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: Preparing For a Showdown In the Middle East This Fall

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic
In his session with the press after an Oval Office discussion with Prime Minister Netanyahu. President Obama said, “We expect … proximity talks to lead to direct talks, and I believe that the government of Israel is prepared to engage in such … talks.” Indeed it is, without further ado and without preconditions. But it takes two to tango, and the Palestinians have steadfastly refused to initiate such talks unless Israel agrees to a complete settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Responding to the meeting, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that “Netanyahu must decide if he wants peace or settlements. He cannot have both.” Last year this was Obama’s view as well. As he said in his Cairo speech, “The U.S. does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.” For his part, Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of Yisrael Beitenu, which controls 15 vital seats in Netanyahu’s coalition, has declared unequivocally that the current partial freeze will not be extended when it expires in November; the settlements will grow. Several smaller right-wing coalition partners have said the same thing.
For the reasons stated in my column last week, I do not think that the prospects of replacing the current Israeli coalition with one more forthcoming on the settlement issue is likely to succeed. Arithmetically, Likud, Kadima, and Labor would produce a solid 68 votes in the 120-seat Knesset. But there’s a problem: even if Netanyahu wanted to bring his Likud party into such a coalition, he probably couldn’t. There’s no evidence that a majority of Likud MK’s would go along, and splitting Likud would destroy Netanyahu’s political base. There’s an outside chance that Shas, which represents Sephardic Orthodoxy, could be bribed with yet more state funds for its educational and social institutions. (It has worked before.) But recent developments within Shas have brought it closer to the pro-settler camp, and there are other obstacles as well.
There’s one remaining possibility, articulated today by my Brookings colleague (and former U.S. ambassador to Israel) Martin Indyk after his trip to Jerusalem and Ramallah last week: Obama’s perceived even-handedness has emboldened Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, to move into direct negotiations and to try to strike a final deal with Israel. If Indyk is right, substantial Israeli concession on West Bank security issues would give him the “fig leaf” needed to make direct negotiations possible, even if settlement activity continues.
Indyk has a thousand times more experience in these matters that I do, and I very much hope that he’s right. But somehow I doubt it. The settlements are as visceral for the Palestinians as they are for pro-settler Israelis, and I find it hard to believe that Abbas could so easily set aside or explain away his previous position. If Netanyahu is serious about squaring this circle, he’ll probably have to put his cards on the table and answer some questions about the shape of a final settlement, including borders, Jerusalem, and mutual security. Whether he could do this without blowing up his coalition is anyone’s guess. And I haven’t even mentioned Hamas or questioned the willingness of either party to enter an agreement that doesn’t include it. My best guess: it will take some brave steps on both sides and skillful U.S. diplomacy plus an ample helping of luck to avert a crisis this fall. I am not optimistic.