Yes, the mighty Lobby didn’t get what it wanted, for now. It seems Sen. Schumer gave up ground here in exchange for a leadership position later.
I am not one for admitting I am wrong but sometimes the evidence is so overwhelming that I have to say it. I was wrong.
Specifically I have been repeatedly wrong when I said that the Israel lobby could not be defeated unless and until the President of the United States confronted it directly. In that situation, I always believed the United States would prevail. I did not understand that a deft president could beat the lobby through indirect means — by quietly using his authority to prevail.
But that is what happened when the Obama administration first nominated and then achieved the confirmation of former Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense.
There of course are those who accept the line put out by the lobby, most notably its main component AIPAC, that it was neutral on Hagel.
That is just silly. If AIPAC was neutral, it could have ended the whole battle against him by issuing a statement that it recognized a president’s right to choose his own cabinet. That might not have stopped Republican groups like Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee ror Israel or Sheldon Adelson’s Republican Jewish Coalition from pursuing their smear campaign against Hagel, but it would have stopped the very mainstream Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee from joining the attack. AIPAC’s public silence on a campaign waged by its closest allies demonstrated what it wanted: Hagel’s defeat.
President Obama outsmarted the lobby by ignoring it. He understood that if he could get Sen. Chuck Schumer to endorse Hagel, then the game would be over. That is because Schumer, a Jewish senator from New York, is the de facto leader of the lobby’s forces in Congress.
Usually a hardliner on all matters relating to the Middle East, Schumer might have been expected to oppose Hagel and thereby give a signal to his fellow Democrats that doing so was the safe pro-Israel position. Had he done that some Democrats would have felt that they had better oppose Hagel.
With most Republicans already on record as opposing his nomination, just a shift of a few Democrats would have killed the nomination. Schumer’s announcement in support of Hagel guaranteed that not a single Democrat would oppose him.
So what convinced Schumer to stand with Obama on Hagel? My friends on Capitol Hill, who without exception correctly predicted Schumer’s position, tell me that it was made clear to him that he could not oppose Obama on Hagel and still expect to become leader of Senate Democrats when Harry Reid retires.
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