When in April, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asked then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton what she would do if Iran attacked Israel, and she said the Islamic Republic would be met with “massive retaliation,” the question — and henceforth the answer — was arguably beside the point.
After all, it doesn’t really matter what the United States would do if such a thing took place, considering that Israel is believed to possess a second-strike capability.
The real question is what the next U.S. president will do if the Israelis decide to launch a first strike against Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
And if the vice presidential candidates have any say, the answer is that the next administration will trust whatever decision the Israelis make.
“We are friends with Israel,” the Republican VP candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, told ABC News’ Charles Gibson in a Sept. 11 interview. “I don’t think we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.”
In a conference call with members of the Jewish media, the Democratic VP candidate, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, said, “This is not a question for us to tell the Israelis what they can and cannot do.”
He said, “I have faith in the democracy of Israel. They will arrive at the right decision that they view as being in their own interests.”
The only problem with Palin’s and Biden’s virtually identical answers is that by most accounts it will be impossible for Israel to attack Iran without U.S. knowledge and cooperation, considering America’s control over air space in neighboring Iraq.
And if you believe the gloomiest of doomsday scenarios, Iran would not only retaliate with a rocket barrage against Israel, but would also move to cripple the world’s oil supply with pinpoint attacks and unleash a wave of terrorist attacks against U.S. and European targets.
This is not to say that John McCain or Barack Obama would automatically order the Israelis to hold their fire — though, depending on whom you believe, the Bush administration is doing just that right now.
It’s just to stress how suspect Biden’s and Palin’s answers are — how implausible it is that, given the need for U.S. cooperation and the wider ramifications of a strike against Iran, Obama or McCain would blindly follow the lead of the Israeli government.
Palin’s love song to small-town values at the Republican convention earlier this month may have nauseated some urban liberals, but the delegates in St. Paul ate it up.
Little noticed, however, was the inspiration for this line: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.”
As Thomas Frank noted last week in the Wall Street Journal, the source for that line was the sharp-mouthed anti-Semitic John Birch Society member Westbrook Pegler, who died in 1969.
Frank’s point was that Republicans might preach the virtues of rural America, but their policies are directly responsible for the heartland’s decline. As evidence, he notes that the Farmer’s Union gave the urbane Obama a
100 percent rating for his congressional votes; McCain scored a 0.
But another angle on Pegler, reported by Politico’s Ben Smith, may be even more interesting to Jews: “He was also known for what Philip Roth described as his ‘casual distaste for Jews,’ which had become so evident by the end that he was bounced from the journal of the John Birch Society in 1964 for alleged anti-Semitism,” Smith wrote. “According to his obituary, he’d advanced the theory that American Jews of Eastern European descent were ‘instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared.'”
Palin’s speech was written by Matt Scully, a former speechwriter for President Bush and other top Republicans.
JTA asked the McCain campaign to talk to Scully about why he chose to include the Pegler quote, if only anonymously attributed. The request is still outstanding.
In the meantime, the McCain camp says it’s “unbelievably ridiculous” to think the quote suggests Palin has any sympathy for Pegler’s views, racist or otherwise. That may be true, but it would still be interesting to understand Scully’s thinking behind quoting a person with that kind of baggage.
“Frankly, I would not be surprised to learn that a lot of people involved in American politics 50 years ago were anti-Semitic,” a McCain spokesman said. “Her quoting him is no more an endorsement of his anti-Semitism than Joe Biden quoting Thomas Jefferson would be an endorsement of slavery. She quoted one line. It’s unbelievably ridiculous.”
Looks like Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) took all that Christian talk to heart. Last month the Memphis lawmaker trounced an opponent in the Democratic primaries after she failed to convince Cohen’s majority black constituency that he wasn’t “Christian” enough to represent them.
Cohen, among the first Jewish Democrats to endorse the Obama presidential candidacy, took aim last week at Palin, who has mocked Obama’s background as a community organizer.
Echoing a trope that arose almost as soon as Palin — and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani — initiated the dig two weeks ago, Cohen argued that Jesus might have been considered a community organizer and pointed out that Pontius Pilate was a governor.
Two days after Cohen’s comments, he received a lecture from host Chris Matthews during the MSNBC program “Hardball.”
“Why do you come up with comparisons like that? I thought the rule was stay away from Jesus, stay away from Hitler,” Matthews said. “These comparisons never work. I’m not giving you a hard time, but metaphors in that category are generally very dangerous.”
Cohen acknowledged his mistake: “They are dangerous,” the congressman said, “and I shouldn’t have done it.”
These items were adapted from JTA’s Election Central blog (www.blogs.jta.org/politics).