The old joke is that the most dangerous place in the world is between Alan Dershowitz and a TV camera. He is still irked by the fact that Jimmy Carter, whom he says he worked with once observing an election overseas, did not agree to debate him over his last book. Last summer he took personal credit for getting Jimmy Carter sidelined at the Democratic Convention. "I pushed him [Obama] very hard" on that, he bragged, suggesting a personal relationship. And here he is in a recent conference call organized by the rightwing Israel Project, suggesting to reporters that he went to Sderot with Barack Obama last summer:
They weren't there at the same time. In fairness to Dersh, maybe this is just a slip of the tongue. (Here in the Jerusalem Post, Dershowitz states that the two visits took place at different times, Obama's in July, his own in March.) But it strikes me as grandiose. (Phil Weiss)
It's a clumsy sentence, but insofar as it was off-the-cuff speech rather than a written statement, perhaps that's excusable. Certainly one could infer from it (incorrectly) that "When I was in Sderot" refers to the same occasion as "when President Barack Obama was in Sderot," but it can also be read as saying no more than that the two of them saw the same things during their respective visits. Regardless of that, though, the grandiosity you perceive in his words is certainly there: he's implicitly suggesting that the President of the United States sees things the way he does.