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Artick 6. 
The Atlantic 
Mitt Romney's Trip to Israel: Is the Jewish 
Vote up for Grabs? 
Beth Reinhard 
Jul 24 2012 -- Why is this election year different from all other election 
years? The answer to this twist on the age-old Passover seder question is, 
probably not much, at least when it comes to the Jewish vote. 
Every four years, the Republican presidential nominee makes a play for 
Jewish voters, and every four years, the ticket falls woefully short. Since 
1992, the GOP nominee has received between 15 percent and 23 percent 
of the Jewish vote, according to a new analysis from the nonpartisan 
Solomon Projed. 
Recent history is not deterring Mitt Romney, however, who will make the 
biggest overture possible to the American Jewish community when he 
arrives in Israel on Sunday. 
For Romney, it could be worth it. 
Tight races like the 2012 campaign are won and lost at the margins --
picking up a percentage here, another there -- and strategists in both 
parties say that the Jewish community is one place where Romney could 
find an edge. A Gallup_poll in June showed Obama receiving 64 percent 
of the Jewish vote. That's a 10-point drop from his level of support shortly 
before the 2008 election and five points worse than his overall decline 
among registered voters. 
"He's in what I would call the danger zone for a Democrat," said Tevi 
Troy, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a Romney adviser. "The 
question is not whether the Republican nominee is going to get the 
majority of the Jewish vote. It's whether the party will make important 
inroads in the community, and I'm optimistic that we will." 
Romney also will visit London and Poland in his first overseas trip as the 
presumed GOP nominee. 
In a sign that Obama's team is eyeing Romney's itinerary closely, top 
campaign surrogates gave a sweeping defense of the administration's 
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commitment to Israel nearly a week in advance of the Republican's trip in 
a telephone call with reporters. Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to the 
Obama campaign, said on Monday that Obama had "substantive 
meetings" with Israeli and Palestinian leaders as a candidate in 2008 and 
questioned whether Romney's overseas trip will be "one long photo-op." 
Gibbs also downplayed the tension between the Obama administration 
and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Colin Kahl, former 
deputy assistant Defense secretary for the Middle East, said that Obama 
has offered "record high" security funding, helped build an iron-dome 
system to protect Israelis from rockets coming from the Gaza strip, and 
acted aggressively to thwart Iran's nuclear threat. 
Kahl also went so far as to say that Jewish voters could expect Obama to 
make a trip to Israel during his second term. He noted that Ronald Reagan 
never visited Israel during his administration and that George W. Bush did 
not go until the last year of his second term. 
"Being a friend to Israel, at least in our view, shouldn't be judged purely 
by a travel itinerary," Kahl said. "The administration's support and 
cooperation for Israel has been unprecedented." 
Obama himself affirmed his commitment to Israel just last week while 
campaigning in a heavily Jewish retirement community in West Palm 
Beach, Florida, where candidates often warm up the crowd with free 
bagels and cream cheese. "I want everyone here to know, in my 
administration, we haven't just preserved the unbreakable bond with Israel 
-- we have strengthened it," Obama told hundreds of residents. 
Republicans are energetically circulating the opposite message, 
particularly in toss-up states with large Jewish populations, such as 
Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia. Hours after the Obama 
campaign's call on Romney's trip, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., and 
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell both issued broadsides against Obama's 
relationship with Israel. Ros-Lehtinen called the hint right before 
Romney's trip that Obama would visit in his second term "politically 
inspired." 
"U.S.-Israeli relations have been strained by the failure of the Obama 
administration to stress unequivocal support for our long-standing ally," 
McDonnell said in a statement. "Thus, it's no surprise that President 
Obama is struggling to shore up support in the Jewish community." 
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Exit polls in 2008 suggested that Obama received 78 percent of the Jewish 
vote, roughly the same level of support that Bill Clinton got in 1996, Al 
Gore got in 2000, and John Kerry received in 2004. But the analysis of the 
Jewish vote by the Solomon Project, which combined national and state 
data, pegged Obama's Jewish support in 2008 slightly lower, at 74 
percent. That's still a high benchmark, but a lower baseline than widely 
reported. 
"I don't expect he will do quite as well in 2012," said Democratic pollster 
Mark Mellman, one of three authors of the report. "He's going to do less 
well in the country as a whole, so you'd expect him to do less well in the 
Jewish community." 
Jewish voters remain much more Democratic than the rest of the 
electorate, the Solomon Project found. The analysis takes the long view, 
noting that between 1972 and 1988, Republican nominees attracted 
between 31 percent and 37 percent of the Jewish vote. Since 1992, the 
GOP nominee hasn't broken 23 percent, a trend Mellman described in part 
as a reaction to the rise of the Religious Right's influence in the GOP. 
But Romney sees an opening in the administration's failure to broker 
peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. He has delivered critical 
speeches to pro-Israel advocacy groups such as the American Israel Public 
Affairs Committee and the Republican Jewish Coalition, and he's 
deployed high-profile surrogates in the Jewish community, such as John 
Bolton, the former U.S ambassador to the United Nations, and Dan Senor, 
an adviser to the Bush administration. 
"Republicans say every four years that Jews are moving away from the 
Democratic Party, but, if anything, the trend is in the other direction," 
Mellman said. "I don't expect that to change significantly." 
Obama's success among Jewish voters in 2008 defied a whisper campaign 
that called him a Muslim with terrorist leanings -- falsehoods that the 
campaign sought to dispel with truth-squading websites that emphasized 
Obama's Christian background. 
Obama's reelection campaign has not launched any similar platforms this 
year, suggesting that it does not see the persistent rumors about his 
religion as a problem for now. However, the campaign website does 
include a section titled "President Obama's Stance on Israel: Myths vs. 
Facts." 
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Beth Reinhard is a political correspondent for National Journal. 
Anicic 7. 
Project Syndicate 
How the West Was Re-Won 
Dominique Moisi 
24 July 2012-- In 2005, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, a 
prestigious exhibit sponsored by the Chinese Government, "The Three 
Emperors," celebrated the greatness of Chinese art. The show's central 
piece was a giant painting in the European (Jesuit) style depicting the 
envoys of the Western world lining up to pay respect to the Chinese 
emperor. The message could not have been more explicit: "China is 
back." The West would have to pay tribute to China in the future the way 
it had kowtowed to it in the past. 
In 2012, China is on the verge of becoming the world's largest economy 
and is by far the leading emerging power. Yet two simultaneous 
phenomena suggest that the West may have been buried prematurely by 
its own Cassandras and by Asian pundits who sometimes behave like 
"arrogant Westerners." 
First, the West, particularly Europe, is slowly taking the measure of the 
Asian challenge. Second, it is doing so at the very moment that the 
emerging countries are starting to feel the consequences of a world 
economic crisis that has Europe as its epicenter. In other words, a new 
balance of strengths and weaknesses is emerging beneath the surface of 
events — and runs contrary to current mantras. Europe has awakened to the 
Asian challenge just as its own crisis exposes and intensifies the emerging 
countries' economic, political, and social weaknesses. 
A few years ago, in my book The Geopolitics of Emotion, I stressed the 
differences that existed between a Western world dominated by fear and 
an Asia animated by hope. While the West accumulated debts, Asia had 
startled the world with its long economic boom. This continues to be the 
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case, but nuances are appearing. There is more fear today in the West, but 
also a little less hope in Asia. 
Indeed, global investors are starting to hedge their bets, as if preparing 
themselves for a more genuinely balanced world spanning different 
continents and cultures. Asia may have caught up with the West; Latin 
America may be on track to do so; and Africa may be slowly positioning 
itself to grow. The Arab world, too, with its ongoing revolution, may also 
be joining the game, overcoming the humiliation that had been its 
peoples' animating emotional force. 
The West, meanwhile, may be slowly adapting to the new realities of a 
world that it no longer dominates, but in which it still occupies an 
essential role, owing to values whose universalism is now formulated in a 
more restrained and coherent way. Indeed, to fear, hope, and humiliation, I 
would now add a fourth and decisive cultural mood: modesty. 
Today's West is very different from the historical West. It is a reduced 
entity, increasingly aware that it can no longer be the center of the world, 
if only because of its shrinking demographic weight. Europe accounted 
for 20% of the world's population at the beginning of the eighteenth 
century; the population of the West as a whole will constitute slightly 
more than 10% in 2050. 
The West is also fragmented: the American West is growing increasingly 
apart from the European West. The question is no longer one of shared 
interests or common security goals, but of culture, as the United States, in 
particular, increasingly looks to Asia and Latin America and attracts 
immigrants from those regions. As for the Asian West, Japan will continue 
to remain alone and unique. 
Given this, it might seem premature, to say the least, to announce the 
"return of the West," especially at a time when the US economy remains 
fragile, Europe's financial crisis is fueling an existential funk, and Japan's 
deep structural malaise continues. Still, across Europe, particularly in the 
south, one is witnessing a willingness to learn from others. There is a 
growing awareness, even in France — not known for its humility — that 
benchmarking is necessary, and that tough sacrifices will have to be made. 
In other words, Europeans are beginning to understand that they have 
lived well beyond their means materially, and well below their means 
intellectually, spiritually, and ethically — a process that might be described 
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as the beginning of Europe's "Montization," to pay tribute to Italian Prime 
Minister Mario Monti's embodiment of responsibility and courage. Just 
imagine: a more virtuous Europe encountering a more "decadent" China, 
whose venal elites are starting to turn on each other? 
What we may be witnessing is the consolidation of a truly multipolar 
world, in which the West no longer dominates, but is not about to be 
replaced by Asia or the emerging world in general. The West is not 
"striking back." But a more modest West may stabilize its position with 
respect to China, particularly at a time when China has become both more 
arrogant and less confident in its own political and social system. 
Dominique Moisi is the founder of the French Institute of International 
Affairs (IFRI) and a professor at Institute d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences 
Po) in Paris. He is the author of The Geopolitics of Emotion: How 
Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World. 
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