Even The Debates Will Be Irrelevant

I think the single most cogent and succinct take on Biden's announcement that there will be debates is from New York WOR radio host Mark Simone in the clip from the Kudlow show above. At 1:55, he says,

Whenever somebody suddenly demands debates, it means they're way behind. If he's behind in the rigged public polls, he must really be behind in the private polls. I think Saturday is what made this happen. I think that panicked them that Trump got 100,000 people. We've never seen 100,000, I think that really scared them.

Now, why so early? We've never had a debate before the convention. I think the Biden people know he could be a disaster, and they'll need time to fix it if he is. And also, the people running Bidenworld, they gotta decide if they're gonna keep him. If they switch, it will be at the convention. They wanted to test him out.

Pollster Richrd Baris said on his People's Pundit Daily podcast on Rumble at 37:15:

Biden's team, the Biden White Hoiuse, would not agree to these debates at all if they didn't believe they were behind. They would hide Joe, we know this. And not only is it conventional political wisdom to not expose your leading candidate to potential damage, but it's also part of the Biden campaign's history of thinking. So we know for a fact that if they believed they were in a stronger position than the polls were showing, they would not have done what they just did.

At 1:58:13:

He was already signaling during the primaries that there was no reason to debate. He was already signaling that, so give me a break.

Nate Silver, whose February advice to the Biden campaign I've quoted here frequently (and which the campaign hasn't followed, because it can't) generally agrees with these assessments in his latest Substack essay:

[T]he Trump campaign, after agreeing today to the two debates proposed by Biden, asked for two additional debates in July and August for a total of four. The White House refused[.]

. . . So the White House unambiguously wants fewer debates rather than more. And that’s a bad sign for Biden — part of a pattern where the White House has continually tried to minimize his exposure to unscripted moments.

. . . By moving the first debate to before the Democratic convention in August, Democrats increase their option value. Here’s what I mean by that. If Biden totally and irrecoverably screws up in the June debate — he’s just obviously no longer ready for prime time — then he can step down and Democrats can pull the Ezra Klein break-glass-in-case-of-emergency plan and hold a contested convention. It’s not ideal — that’s an understatement — but it’s much less bad than going into the final months of the campaign certain to lose.

The consensus here is intriguing -- the early first debate gives the Democrats an option, but let's keep in mind that that option consists of Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, J B Pritzker (well, he's Jewish, so that's no longer open), or Gretchen Whitmer. Those are even worse than Joe.

But here's the problem that won't go away for me. If the current polling aggregates are any indication, the campaign season began last fall, incredibly early. The debate scheduled for June is the first ever before either party's nominating conventions in the summer. Nate Silver more or less alludes to this issue when he says,

I can tell you with confidence that polling bounces created by things like debates, conventions and primary wins have a shelf-life. See for instance, Mitt Romney and the first presidential debate in 2012. He was widely regarded as the winner of the debate and then pulled into a near Electoral College tie with Barack Obama. But within a few weeks, the polls reverted back to where they had been before.

By pushing one debate into June, therefore, Biden has made it much less impactful. Whatever effects it has will probably be drowned out by the conventions and then the stretch run of the campaign and umpteen other shifts in the narrative.

What he's implying is that given the unprecedented early extension we're seeing of the campaign season, the debates are irrelevant, and if they're early, it just makes them even less relevant. The biggest problem I see is that the price of the bargain burger at my local fast food joint has gone up twice in the past three months, and this is what people see every day. Frankly, this is why 100,000 people showed up last Saturday for a Trump rally in South Jersey. If anything, the real view of the public is that the election can't come soon enough.

This is why even the rigged public polls have been the same for the past six months, but the other auguries, like the 100,000 in South Jersey, are beginning to be even more troubling. The New York trial has been a circus, but even though the Biden handlers had expected it to be dispositive, its outcome will also be irrelevant -- except that if Trump is convicted and jailed, the 100,000 in South Jersey will be nothing in comparison.

The Biden campaign is in a panic over their position six months before the election, but nobody's looking at how things will shape up just in coming weeks and months, especially if prices keep rising, the border stays open, and there's a major defeat in Ukraine. My take is that the debates will have been overtaken by events even before they can happen.

Things Aren't Fitting The Narrative Here

Fox reported Peter Doocy's question to Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday:

"Why do you think Americans are so down on President Biden?" Doocy asked. "I know you don't like to talk about polls like the five of six swing states that he is losing right now to somebody who is a criminal defendant, but more broadly, it doesn't seem like anything you guys are doing is making [Biden] more popular. Why do you think that is?"

Doocy is putting this in the context of the latest New York Times/Siena poll, but Byron York made the situation plainer in the Washington Examiner:

On Nov. 5, 2023, the New York Times published a story headlined, “Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds.” Focusing on the states most likely to decide the 2024 election, the New York Times reported, “The results show Mr. Biden is losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of four to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.”

. . . Fast-forward six months to May 13, 2024 — yesterday. The New York Times published a story headlined, “Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden.” A new poll showed Biden trailing in the same states by nearly the same margin as the old poll. Compare this sentence with the one from six months ago: “The surveys … found that Mr. Trump was ahead of Mr. Biden in five of six key states: Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden led among registered voters in only one battleground state, Wisconsin.”

York goes on to quote, of all people, Sean Trende. I've singled both of them out as purveyors of mainstream conventional wisdom -- here's what Trende had to say:

As RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende wrote recently, “The political science literature is pretty consistent that this is the time when the electorate’s views about the election start to harden, particularly with respect to the economy.”

In other words, nothing has changed, and we've reached the point where nothing's gonna change. If York (MA, Chicago) and Trende (BA, Yale) agree, this is almost certainly wrong. As I said yesterday, I think at least part of the problem is that the press across the spectrum is basically lazy (we're getting ready for Memorial Day, after all), and all they want to cover is the battleground states and the national popular vote matchup, which is meaningless.

But let's look at another factor, part of the New York trial that almost nobody has noticed:

On Tuesday, Trump was flanked by former 2024 primary rivals Vivek Ramaswamy and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and a pair of Florida GOP congressmen, Byron Donalds and Cory Mills.

Other boldface political names to swing by Manhattan Criminal Court include Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) as well as Staten Island Rep. Nicole Malliotakis.

“It is about paying homage to Trump and positioning themselves for something should he win in November,” one person close to the Republican National Committee said Tuesday.

Wait a moment. The big focus of recent testimony at the trial from both Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen has been the Access Hollywood tape, the one where Trump joked to Billy Bush about grabbing ladies by their body parts. When that came out in 2016, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he would no longer defend or support Trump's campaign[.] But in 2024, the Republicasn House Speaker wants to sit in the trial audience supporting Trump as the prosecution adduces that same tape as part of its case against Trump? Something has changed. and it's got to be big indeed.

The second is the polling in more reliably blue states, which media across the spectrum is covering only sporadically. Yesterday I mentioned Washington State and Minnesota, where a McLaughlin poll last week showed Trump and Biden essentially tied. Now a new poll from Interactive Polls shows Biden ahead of Trump there by only two points, within the margin of error.

Byron York does make another important point in his Washington Examiner piece:

Last month, CNN reported that from March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, through April 21, “Biden’s campaign and other Democratic advertisers spent $27.2 million on advertising for the presidential race, while the Trump campaign and GOP advertisers spent about $9.3 million, according to AdImpact data. The Biden campaign’s ad spending has included millions in key battleground states such as Michigan ($4.1 million), Pennsylvania ($3.9 million), Arizona ($2.5 million), Wisconsin ($2.2 million), and Georgia ($2.2 million).

. . . And yet, Trump leads Biden in the states that will determine who wins the presidency.

This again suggests that the commentators are focusing (1) on polling, which has proven historically inaccurate, and (2) polling almost exclusively from half a dozen states, when important things seem to be happening elsewhere. I think the chief mistake of the commentators in this cycle will be to underestimate the size of Trump's victory in November.

Why Am I Skeptical?

The headlines want to pretend there's something new here, Trump now leading in 5 battleground states — all of which Biden won in 2020: poll, but the polls have been the same for months. In April, according to Reuters,

Republican Donald Trump leads President Joe Biden in six battleground states in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, according to a Wall Street Journal poll released on Wednesday that cited concerns about the economy and Biden's performance.

Trump garnered a lead of between 2 and 8 percentage points among voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina on a ballot that included third-party and independent candidates, the Journal said. The results were similar in a one-on-one matchup with Biden, it said.

In Wisconsin, a seventh state where the contest is expected to be close, Biden was ahead by 3 points on a multiple candidate ballot and tied in a head-to-head contest with Trump, the Journal said.

In February, According to Morning Consult,

Donald Trump holds leads over Joe Biden in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The former president’s lead is narrowest in the Upper Midwest, where Wisconsin and Michigan voters are almost evenly split between the two.Donald Trump holds leads over Joe Biden in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The former president’s lead is narrowest in the Upper Midwest, where Wisconsin and Michigan voters are almost evenly split between the two.

In fact, there's been little movement since last fall, but every new poll is hyped as if it's big news. There's also been little movement in the Real Clear Politics averages, which have been showing Trump with minimal leads nationally, in battleground states, and in either two-way or five-way matchups for the same period. Philip Wegmann of Real Clear Politics staff lays out the site's conventional wisdom:

Donald Trump has been indicted in four separate criminal cases, tethered to the courtroom for the past month, and confronted by the embarrassing testimony of not just the former White House officials who worked for him but also by the porn star who allegedly had sex with him.

And yet he still leads in the polls. The long-awaited prosecutions, which Republicans condemned and Democrats cheered, have not cut him down as he seeks a return to the White House. In fact, President Biden has not surpassed Trump a single time this year in the RealClearPolitics Poll Average. Six months from the election, Trump leads Biden 46% to 44.9%.

. . . “It just looks bad, and the voters are getting it,” Trump pollster John McLaughlin told RCP. “They don’t like the idea that the courts are deciding the presidential election.”

But if the voters don't like what they see in four weeks of trial, how come the polls simply haven't moved over the past four weeks? As I noted yesterday, commentators have been calling Biden's acknowledgement that he's put ammunition supplies to Israel on hold "disastrous" -- but a quick web search on the words "Biden disastrous" brings up as well references to his State of the Union, his campaign visit to a Pittsburgh Sheetz station, and his gaffes in general over past weeks and months. But the polls haven't changed.

I'm finding this harder and harder to believe. Three weeks ago, when I first posted about this, I quoted Rush Limbaugh's often-repeated view on the polls:

The polls are an attempt to not reflect public opinion, but to shape it. Yours. They want to depress the heck out of you, and they want to suppress your vote.

In a year where things do in fact look good for Republicans -- and have looked consistently good for the past half year -- it's hard not to infer that the goal of the pollsters, whose customers, let's always keep in mind, are legacy media, will be to minimize the Republican lead, always leaving open the hope that Biden can still turn things around. Any little statistical chatter that might suggest things could change is hyped by the conmmentators in unison.

Let's look at this one strange blip from last week:

A presidential election poll conducted April 16 through 23 by The Bullfinch Group, has the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J Trump, winning Washington state in a 5-way race with current presidential contenders Joe Biden (D), Robert F Kennedy Jr (I), Jill Stein (G), and Cornel West (I).

According to the poll, which is sponsored by The Independent Center, Trump leads with 40%, to Biden’s 35%, Kennedy has 13%, Stein is at 4% West came in at 1%, and approximately 8% of respondents were unsure who they would be voting for president.

This appears to be consistent with polling results in Minnesota:

McLaughlin & Associates surveys conducted for the Trump campaign shows him tied with Biden in Minnesota at 40% each with the inclusion of third-party candidates like independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (9%), the Green Party’s Jill Stein (1%), independent Cornel West (1%) and libertarian Lars Mapstead (0.5%).

But these aren't states that Real Clear Politics considers "battlegrounds", there aren't enough polls in those states to put into averages, so they don't fit the current conventional wisdom, so nobody's taking them seriously. On the other hand, I think there are just too many data points -- polls like these, the collapse of the "lawfare" strategy, and record-breaking rallies in places like the New Jersey shore -- that the conventional wisdom is assiduously ignoring.

Damage Control

Biden ally and Democrat US Senator Chris Coons was on ABC’s “This Week” with Martha Raddatz yesterday to spin Joe's acknowledgement Wednesday night that he was pausing military aid to Israel. But this attempt at damage control came between Trump's Saturday rally in New Jersey that was estimated to have drawn 80-100,000, and Michael Cohen's anticipated appearance in Trump's New York trial, which will likely focus all of this week's media attention on Trump as well. Poor Joe's handlers can hardly get a word in edgewise.

The odd part about Coons's defense is that it walks nothing back, despite commentators calling Biden's move a "terrible miscalculation" that threatens the loss of the Jewish vote from the traditional Democrat coalition. Instead,Coons tries to shift the blame onto Netanyahu:

RADDATZ: So, you’re saying he’ll stop offensive weapons? . . . So are you saying offensive weapons should be stopped?

COONS: Look, I think whatever munitions, such as the 2,000-pound bombs that have previously been used in Gaza, that are supplied only by the United States, and that can cause massive civilian casualties may well be paused.

It is tragic that we’re at this point. And, Martha, I want to conclude by saying that I hope Prime Minister Netanyahu is thinking about his legacy. Right now his legacy is the huge, strategic and defensive failure of October 7th and his legacy could be a real gap, a break in the long, strong, bipartisan, strategic relationship between the United States and Israel. I think that would be tragic. His legacy could instead be achieving regional security and peace for Israel.

Whatever happens now, it's Netanyahu's fault. And Democrat US Senator Chris Murphy said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Joe is a centrist on this issue, of all things:

Anchor Dana Bash said, “Do you think that when the president said what he said to Erin Burnett this week that what ended up happening is he tried to, I don’t want to take away from what he tried to do on policy, but just on the politics that it ended up kind of pleasing no one. Is that a potential problem, or do you think that is what he said and did is helpful for his detractors on the left?”

Murphy said, “I think, frankly, when you’re being a good leader, who you are often upsetting people on the right and the left. And so President Biden advertised himself when he ran for office as someone who would often play it down the middle, who would not pay attention to the extremes of the debate and would just do what he thought was right for the country and what the broad middle of the country wants.”

He added, “I actually think that’s where the broad middle of the country is. I think the broad middle of the country wants to support Israel’s ability to destroy Hamas but is very concerned about the fact that there are so many kids dying that, for the last week, there’s been no humanitarian assistance getting into the country. I think the president really is squarely where the middle of this country is on this on this conflict.”

But as of Saturday, even the UN had halved its estimate of Gaza civilian casualties:

On May 8, the UN published data showing 34,844 people had reportedly been killed, including 4,959 women and 7,797 children.

The new figures showed the number of identified deaths as of April 30, which total 24,686 people. The new data also specified that 10,006 men and 1,924 elderly had been killed.

The UN also highlighted that the plurality of identified fatalities were 40% men, while children were 32% and women were 20%.

. . . The Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a report in January that showed major discrepancies in the fatality reports. The research concluded that such discrepancies were most likely caused by manipulation.

In other words, Joe's handlers are claiming to base a highly controversial shift in policy on unreliable and manipulated data. But this leaves aside the generally accepted view that Biden is catering to Muslim voters in Michigan, which is actually part of his overall miscalculation:

Ahead of the 2024 elections, the Marxist-Islamist alliance in Michigan has been insisting that Biden’s re-election is dependent on their votes. And so they used the Democratic primary on Feb. 27 to try and demonstrate their power. Led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the alliance’s “uncommitted” campaign called for Israel haters to vote “uncommitted” in the primaries to show the White House that U.S. support for Israel will cost Biden the swing state of Michigan.

In the event, the “uncommitted” campaign was a dud. Biden won 81.1% of the vote. The “uncommitted” ballots comprised a mere 13.2% of the ballots. While the media, Tlaib and her cronies presented 13.2% as a major accomplishment, it was a failure. Around 10% of Michigan Democrats habitually vote “uncommitted” in presidential primaries. Ahead of the 2012 elections, 11% of Michigan Democrats voted “uncommitted” against then-President Barack Obama.

Moreover, perhaps buoyed by this week’s Harvard-Harris poll that showed massive majorities of Americans supporting Israel and its war aims, including its planned conquest of Hamas’s final outpost of Rafah, establishment American Jews are beginning to openly criticize the Biden administration’s hostile policies towards Israel.

On Thursday, Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote a long post on X sharply criticizing the Biden administration’s refusal to support Israel’s planned operation in Rafah. The Washington Institute has long been viewed as AIPAC’s think tank, and its views are perceived as representative of the liberal American Jewish establishment. It is hard to think of any instance where its senior leaders have openly rejected a Democratic administration’s positions on Israel.

. . . As one Washington insider quipped, “If Satloff is advocating in public what is subtly but clearly a sharp break from the administration over Hamas and Rafah, then it is a strong sign the political winds have shifted in the Jewish establishment and bodes very ill ultimately for the Democrats.”

The piece makes the final point that other Jews have been making, that the Jewish vote in swing states is larger than the Muslim vote in Michigan:

According to Richard Baehr, co-founder and former political correspondent for American Thinker, not only does the Jewish vote matter, it could easily be decisive. It is true that New York and California have the largest Jewish communities, and they remain firmly in the Democratic column. But four swing states—Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona—may well be decided by their large Jewish communities.

Baehr explains that the Jewish vote in all four states is larger than the margins of victory in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential races. In 2020, Baehr notes, the final margin of victory in Pennsylvania was 80,000 votes. It was 33,000 in Nevada, 10,000 in Arizona and 12,000 in Georgia. According to the World Population Review, in 2022, Pennsylvania’s Jewish population stood at 434,165. Georgia’s numbered 141,020. There were 123,725 Jewish Americans in Arizona and 79,800 in Nevada.

But this brief discussion on the Sunday talks is likely to be swamped by wall-to-wall coverage all this coming week of Michael Cohen's testimony in Trump's New York trial, in which the focus will inevitably be on Trump, not Joe -- and as the saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity. The timing here, if nothing else, is indicative of the general miscalculations that have characterized Biden's reelection campaign.

They're Shocked, Shocked

Thinking about my last several posts on Dershowitz and Netanyahu, I'm puzzled why it is that if I do a web search on "Biden Israel betrayal", I get so many hits, like at the UK Telegraph, Biden’s sudden betrayal of Israel is a terrible miscalculation. This was neither sudden nor a surprise, or at least it shouldn't have been.

It almost certainly wasn't sudden or a surprise to Netanyahu. Yesterday I linked to a 2016 article at the Times of Israel that said, "On January 20 — Inauguration Day — President Barack Obama will exit the world stage, and with him the specter of vindictive action against the Israeli government." Netanyahu fully understood where he in particular stood with Obama and any of his Democrat allies. A 2015 story at CBS made this plain:

President Obama sent top political advisers to Israel to influence the election's outcome and prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's win, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Tuesday.

"He can't say he has a business-like relationship or that it isn't personal when his entire political machine, virtually, some of the top people in his political operation, were in Israel on the ground trying to defeat Netanyahu, which is unprecedented," Rubio told conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt in a radio interview Tuesday. "You know, he didn't send anyone in any other country to try to influence the outcome of those elections."

. . . [Obama] has recently dismissed reporting of his strained connections with the newly re-elected Israeli leader, instead characterizing their relationship as "very businesslike."

"The issue is not a matter of relations between leaders. The issue is a very clear, substantive challenge," Mr. Obama told reporters Tuesday in a press conference held with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. "We believe that two states is the best path forward for Israel's security, for Palestinian aspirations and for regional stability. That's our view and that continues to be our view. And Prime Minister Netanyahu has a different approach."

What puzzles me is that Alan Dershowitz is very close to Netanyahu, and in at least two recent podcasts, he's made the point that he speaks to Netanyahu on the phone several times a week. Netanyahu seems never to have harbored any illusions about US views on a two-state solution, particularly under Obama and Biden, yet Dershowitz's current podcasts have expressed the much more typical, and naive, reactions of surprise and disappointment.

I've got to think there's some deliberate indirection taking place here -- Dershowitz often implies that he's much closer to the thinking of Israeli leadership than he lets on here. And as I suggested yesterday, Netanyahu is necessarily a US political player as much as he is an Israeli, because as we've seen here, US politicians will send their advisers to help Netanyahu's opponents in Israel -- so if he's smart, Netanyahu will fight back in the US.

For instance, what just happened here?

Buried in a glowing [New York] Times report written by far-left columnist Peter Baker is a mention that's raising some eyebrows and will no doubt be of interest to Congressional Republicans. In the piece, the president is painted as a stalwart defender of human rights standing up to the evil Israeli government, but amid the tongue bath is an admission that the White House hid a call readout to avoid public backlash.

That revelation comes just days after Biden was caught stopping aid shipments to Israel in an effort to regain his domestic political footing, yet another thing Democrats have assured us is impeachable.

Biden privately threatened to rethink his support for the war in a private call with Netanyahu in February, two months before doing so publicly, but the White House didn't put it into the readout of the call to try to avoid a public blowup. https://t.co/zPytMW5glq

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) May 11, 2024

That threat, made in the call February 15, was more than two months prior to the passage "after months of struggle" in the House of aid to Ukraine and Israel --but Biden himself appears to have been equivocal. This appears to have surprised Speaker Johnson:

House Speaker Mike Johnson said he felt betrayed by President Biden’s threat to withhold US weapons shipments to Israel and expressed hope the remark could be chalked up to a “senior moment.”

. . . “I don’t think that’s something that staff told him to say. I hope it’s a senior moment, because that would be a great deviation in what is said to be the policy there.”

However, the question does arise -- who leaked the threat and forced Biden to take a public stand? Because the big loser here is Joe Biden.

From a political and tactical standpoint, this decision by the President may be the dumbest one he's committed to date, and that's saying something with Joe Biden, because there is literally no upside, and only downside. If you are a Democratic member of the House or Senate who voted for the aid package last week that the President signed, a vote that was fraught with political peril considering a third of the Democratic base is abjectly antisemitic, . . . you only have the fever swamp trying to primary and/or harass you wherever you go. You're pretty ticked off.

If you're a NeverTrumper, one who made the case in 2020 that Joe Biden was by far the better option, and until this week still tried to stake out that ground in 2024, Wednesday's interview from Wisconsin with CNN's Erin Burnett stabbing Israel in the back was the final straw.

If Netanyahu was at least rooting for Trump from the sidelines in 2016, it looks like he's actively in the game in 2024. And he's a very agile politician.

Thinking About Netanyahu

According to Wikipedia,

Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu . . . is an Israeli politician who has been serving as the prime minister of Israel since 2022, having previously held the office from 1996 to 1999 and again from 2009 to 2021.He is the chairman of the Likud party. Netanyahu is the longest-serving prime minister in the country's history, having served for a total of over 16 years. He is also the first prime minister to have been born in Israel after its establishment.

. . . Netanyahu rose to prominence after being elected as the chairman of Likud in 1993, becoming Leader of the Opposition. In the 1996 election, Netanyahu beat Shimon Peres, becoming the first Israeli prime minister elected directly by popular vote, and its youngest-ever. Netanyahu and Likud were heavily defeated in the 1999 election by Ehud Barak's One Israel alliance; and Netanyahu chose to retire from politics entirely, entering the private sector. Netanyahu later returned to politics, and served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Finance under Ariel Sharon. During the latter position, he initiated reforms of the Israeli economy that led to significant growth.

. . . After the 2009 election, Netanyahu formed a coalition government with other right-wing parties and was sworn in as prime minister for a second time. He went on to lead Likud to victory in the 2013 and 2015 elections. A period of political deadlock ensued after three consecutive elections in 2019 and 2020 failed to produce a government, which was solved after a coalition rotation agreement was reached between Netanyahu and centrist Blue and White alliance's Benny Gantz. The coalition collapsed in December 2020, before the rotation could take place, and a new election was held in March 2021. . . In June 2021, after Naftali Bennett formed a government with Yair Lapid, Netanyahu was removed from the premiership, becoming opposition leader for the third time, before returning as prime minister again after forming a coalition with right-wing parties after the 2022 election.

Another intermittently successful politician comes to mind, Benjamin Disraeli,

a British statesman, Conservative politician and writer who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He played a central role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach. Disraeli is remembered for his influential voice in world affairs, his political battles with the Liberal Party leader William Ewart Gladstone, and his one-nation conservatism or "Tory democracy". He made the Conservatives the party most identified with the British Empire and military action to expand it, both of which were popular among British voters. He is the only British Prime Minister to have been born Jewish.

After several unsuccessful attempts, Disraeli entered the House of Commons in 1837. In 1846, Prime Minister Robert Peel split the party over his proposal to repeal the Corn Laws, which involved ending the tariff on imported grain. Disraeli clashed with Peel in the House of Commons, becoming a major figure in the party. When Lord Derby, the party leader, thrice formed governments in the 1850s and 1860s, Disraeli served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons.

Upon Derby's retirement in 1868, Disraeli became prime minister briefly before losing that year's general election. He returned to the Opposition before leading the party to a majority in the 1874 general election. . . . the Liberals defeated Disraeli's Conservatives at the 1880 general election.

It's worth noting, though, that Netanyahu's career as prime minister has been longer than Disraeli's, and Netanyahu is also to some degree a politician whose familiarity with the US has been key to his tenacity in Israel. Back to Wikipedia,

Between 1956 and 1958, and again from 1963 to 1967, his family lived in the United States in Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. . . .Netanyahu returned to the United States in late 1972 to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . After briefly returning to Israel to fight in the Yom Kippur War, he returned to the United States and, under the name Ben Nitay, completed a bachelor's degree in architecture.

. . . At MIT, Netanyahu studied a double-load while simultaneously taking courses at Harvard University, completing a master's degree in two and a half years, despite taking a break to fight in the Yom Kippur War. . . . In 1976, Netanyahu graduated near the top of his class at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

. . . Netanyahu was headhunted to be an economic consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Boston, Massachusetts, working at the company between 1976 and 1978. . . . In 1978, Netanyahu returned to Israel.

A protégé of Moshe Arens, who was Israeli Amassador to the US, he was appointed Deputy Chief of Mission in Washington between 1982 and 1984, and between 1984 and 1988, he was in New York as Israeli Ambassador to the UN. He returned to Israel again to build his political career.

Netanyahu was the Likud's candidate for prime minister in the 1996 Israeli legislative election which took place on 29 May 1996 and were the first Israeli elections in which Israelis elected their prime minister directly. Netanyahu hired American Republican political operative Arthur Finkelstein to run his campaign, and although the American style of sound bites and sharp attacks elicited harsh criticism, Netanyahu won the 1996 election[.]

But it's increasingly plain that Netanyahu isn't just a US-style politician in Israel; he has to negotiate the US political environment as well. For instance, according to the Times of Israel, as of late 2016,

In less than 45 days, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be able to finally rest assured that he won what might have been the riskiest political poker match of his career.

On January 20 — Inauguration Day — President Barack Obama will exit the world stage, and with him the specter of vindictive action against the Israeli government. When Donald Trump ascends to the presidency, Netanyahu will no longer have to worry about a backlash from Washington for vociferously opposing the Iran nuclear deal or for expanding Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

. . . If this assessment is correct and the outgoing administration does not take any steps on the Palestinian front, Netanyahu can congratulate himself for having a played a very risky hand for years but eventually coming out on top.

Biden's current reversal on sending military aid to Israel -- only a short time after getting the House to pass that same aid -- comes in the context of long-standing enmity between both the Obama and Biden administrations and Netanyahu, something Netanyahu has been able to negotiate with some skill over a period of many years. And as of the past week, things are continuing to work in Netanyahu's favor:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic support is on the rise as Israel’s war against Hamas advances, according to poll numbers released on Thursday.

. . . In a matchup for prime minister between Netanyahu and his longtime rival, Benny Gantz, Netanyahu is the preferred candidate, securing 46 percent of the total sample’s support compared to Gantz’s 33 percent.

. . . On Thursday, the Israeli premier again affirmed Israel’s readiness to confront Hamas alone if necessary, invoking the unity and determination from the Jewish State’s war of independence.

“Today, we are much stronger. We are determined, and we are united in order to defeat our enemies and those who want to destroy us,” the prime minister said, adding that “If we need to stand alone, we will.”

It's plain tnat Netanyahu is playing US politics in the current election cycle just as much as he's playing Israeli politics. He's gambling again, and I suspect the risks are going to pay off again.

The CNN Interview

I keep returning to Nate Silver's Feburary advice to the White House, in which he warns

[H]e's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong[.]

I'm starting to think that Silver, like Alan Dershowitz, is a highly intelligent traditional Democrat who's sincerely trying to think his position through, and it's a fascinating process to watch. Let's revisit his February position on Biden interviews:

Biden’s doing a lot fewer interviews than even the media-hostile Trump. And when he does them, his performance is still just mediocre.

Again, he recommended that Biden turn things around:

Over the course of the next several weeks [i.e, in March}, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.

. . . This really isn't too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done. I admit that I'm asking Biden to pack in several in a row, but he has to make up for lost time. And the timing is urgent because he and his inner circle have to make sure that he's really up for a second term and that this is the best option for Democrats. If Biden was willing to take five hours to speak with Hur, he ought to to take five hours for this.

So he's implying that these interviews, to turn Joe's prospects around, should be roughly an hour long, and there should be maybe four of them. Well, even though the timing was urgent in February, Joe and his handlers haven't done what Silver thought would be needed. Finally on Wednesday, months behind schedule, Joe gave an interview -- but news of it didn't break until Thursday morning, when Stormy Daniels's resumed cross-examination dominated the breathless headlines. It might as well not have happened -- but by Thursday evening, the New York Post editorialized,

The White House rarely allows President Biden to sit down for interviews, and Wednesday’s chat with CNN’s Erin Burnett shows why.

In a brief 17 minutes, Biden told 15 lies — nearly a lie a minute.

From whoppers about the economy to prevarications on Israel, Biden spun a fantasyland of a presidency that voters know is false.

Once people tore themselves away from Stormy Daniels, which did little but keep the ongoing focus on Trump, giving him yet another day of free media, they learned of Joe's claims that inflation was 9% under Trump or that people are reading the wrong polls.

The president, comparing his policies with those of former President Trump, rejected polls that show that voters trust Trump on the economy more than they trust Biden.

During an interview with CNN, the president was hard pressed to construct an accessible story about how his economic policies are affecting real Americans.

“We’ve already turned it around,” Biden said from Wisconsin. “The polling data has been wrong all along.”

David Axelrod seems to be another Democrat who's trying to recalibrate.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” CNN Senior Political Commentator and former Obama Adviser David Axelrod. . . . stated, “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand, all these months later, he went — I thought they spent $25 million, mistakenly, last fall, touting Bidenomics and making the same argument that the President’s making here. It is absolutely true, the world was plunged into an economic crisis and America was plunged into an economic crisis by the pandemic, and we’ve come back faster than almost any other country. . . but that’s not the way people are experiencing the economy. They’re experiencing it through the lens of the cost of living. . . . I think he’s making a terrible mistake. It may not be — if he doesn’t win this race, it may not be Donald Trump that beats him, it may be his own pride.”

It's fascinating that Axelrod, whom Wikipedia says was raised in a liberal Jewish family, should attribute Biden's failings to "pride", which is more often addressed as a sin in a Roman Catholic context. According to Britannica,

Pride, in Roman Catholic theology, one of the seven deadly sins, considered by some to be the gravest of all sins. In the theological sense, pride is defined as an excessive love of one’s own excellence. As a deadly sin, pride is believed to generate other sins and further immoral behaviour and is countered by the heavenly virtue of humility.

But Axelrod's assessment is insightful. It reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect, "a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities". It's hard to avoid thinking something like this is a basic mover in Biden's character, and I think it's a pretty good explanation for why so much has been going wrong on his watch.

The interview strongly suggests that he's in a bubble, the polls are wrong, he's already turned the economy around, corporations are gouging, and Israel is targeting civilians. And he's going to be stubborn about this -- he isn't listening to reasonable people on his side like Nate Silver, David Axelrod, and Alan Dershowitz. This is disturbing and dangerous.