I was blown away by Joe Biden last night. He was truly presidential. He got more and more confident as the evening went on. He grew into it. I wondered why he had not been able to defeat Obama earlier this year. He is real and he has gravitas, a rare combination, Trumanesque. I felt safe with him. I had the inkling watching him, Some day this guy will be President, and that's not a bad thing.
The Truman analogy works because in the middle of this great performance came the complete pander to Israel, for which he feels "passion." And Sarah Palin promptly chirped, We both love Israel. The amazing thing about the moment was that at this very time Ehud Olmert is speaking in the most extreme terms about Israel's future, as he has been for the last year, and American politicians are stuck in their happy talk about Israel. If American politicians could be at all realistic, they might actually lead the situation. As it is, they feel beholden to the Israel lobby, which has absolutely stymied discussion in high circles about the place.
At the grass roots, it's changing (as Alison Weir said 2 weeks ago at Yale), but at the high levels there is no shift. And here I would mention Ralph Seliger. All through our conversation I have been hammering the Occupation, which as Mohamed ElBaradei of IAEA has said, is a "red flag" of injustice across the Arab world. Lately Seliger responded to my hectoring on this score by saying that his organization, Meretz USA, said in its latest publication:
erred."
I think this is pathetic lukewarm language. If this is how a leftleaning Jewish group attacks the occupation, it just shows how noble Jewish Voice for Peace has been, or Jews Against The Occupation. They have no qualms about attacking the apartheid conditions head on. And even Olmert has used the word apartheid in speaking darkly about Israel's future. The very best of our politicians are craven.
