I helpfully added the black line representing journaiists
Jonathan Schanzer:
The era of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [is] coming to an end,” read one Reuters headline. Similarly, Slate declared Netanyahu to be “Israel’s Sore Loser,” explaining that “he has botched his re-election the same way he has botched everything else.” Hundreds of other news items and analytical articles in recent weeks prophesied the demise of Israel’s embattled prime minister.
Today, of course, a triumphant Netanyahu is laying plans for a new government, and the media should be asking themselves why they tend to make the same sort of Dewey-Defeats-Truman mistakes, cycle after cycle, about Israeli elections. During the last round in 2013, the New Yorker’s David Remnick proclaimed that “the story of the election is the implosion of the center-left and the vivid and growing strength of the radical right.” Remnick was not alone, either. Pundits across the board predicted the meteoric rise of right-wing politician Naftali Bennett. Indeed, this was going to be the “Darth Bennett” government. In the end, Bennett’s party, Jewish Home, mustered only 12 seats in the Knesset, while centrist Yair Lapid played a far more pivotal role in the formation of Netanyahu’s government.
It’s a small consolation, perhaps, that observers outside of Israel aren’t the only ones who often can’t predict what the political system there will do. Israeli experts often get their predictions badly wrong too. A lot of that has to do with polling data that doesn’t ever tell the full picture. But there is a lot more to it than that.
WaPo:
The [Miguel] Recarey case illustrates aspects of {Jeb] Bush’s business record that are likely to resurface as he moves closer to a campaign for president. Time and again, he benefited from his family name and connections to land a consulting deal or board membership, sometimes doing business with people and companies who would later run afoul of the law.
In the case of Recarey, Bush has said over the years that he “made one call” to a mid-level official to seek a fair deal for a Florida businessman.
But new interviews and a review of congressional testimony show that Bush engaged in multiple calls on Recarey’s behalf to senior administration officials — and that his advocacy made a difference.
WaPo:
In the past, Israeli leaders who risked damaging the country’s most important relationship, that with Washington, tended to pay a price. In 1991, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir opposed the Madrid peace talks, President George H.W. Bush held back loan guarantees to help absorb immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Shamir gave in, but his government soon collapsed.
But this time, Netanyahu was not hurt by his personal and substantive conflicts with the U.S. president.
“While the United States is loved and beloved in Israel, President Obama is not,” said Robert M. Danin, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “So the perceived enmity didn’t hurt the way it did with Shamir when he ran afoul of Bush in ’91.”
He wasn't helped either. Read this piece to better understand how little has changed after this election. It was a status quo win for Netanyahu, not sweeping change:
Daniel Bernstein:
Don't believe anyone who tells you that Israel "moved to the left" or "moved to the right."
CBPP:
While Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi’s new budget plan differs in some significant ways with House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price’s plan, the similarities greatly outweigh the differences. Like Chairman Price’s plan, the Enzi plan would increase poverty, decrease key investments to promote opportunity and foster economic growth, and rely on enormous “magic asterisks” to balance the budget.
Dylan Matthews on the firing of Scott Walker hire Liz Mair for dissing Iowa:
The most that could be said in defense of Iowa and New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation statuses is that they're epiphenomenal, that nominations are really decided via an invisible primary of party officeholders, activists, interest groups, and donors. In the most extreme version of that view, having Iowa and New Hampshire go first lets them have a little fun without actually giving them undue influence on the nominating process. But that's an implausibly strong view — presidential candidates certainly act as though Iowa and New Hampshire matter, and it's reasonable to think their party elites wield disproportionate influence in the invisible primary — and doesn't really offer up a defense. If going first is just a fun experience that doesn't matter, why not share it? Why not give Delaware or Hawaii a turn?
All of which is a long way of saying: Liz Mair is right. Steve King's views on immigration are terrible, ethanol subsidies are stupid, and the Iowa caucuses should be abolished. Maybe Scott Walker is correct in thinking he can't afford to acknowledge those truths, but Mair should be commended for keeping it real.
If we're saying Mair has more integrity than Walker does, well, that's a pretty low bar.
Bill Gates:
Much of the public discussion about the world’s response to Ebola has focused on whether the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other groups could have responded more effectively. These are worthwhile questions, but they miss the larger point. The problem isn’t so much that the system didn’t work well enough. The problem is that we hardly have a system at all.
To begin with, most poor countries, where a natural epidemic is most likely to start, have no systematic disease surveillance in place. Even once the Ebola crisis was recognized last year, there were no resources to effectively map where cases occurred, or to use people’s travel patterns to predict where the disease might go next.
Then, once it became clear that a serious emergency was underway, trained personnel should have flooded the affected countries within days. Instead it took months. Doctors Without Borders deserves a lot of credit for mobilizing volunteers faster than any government did. But we should not count on nonprofit groups to mount a global response.
Brendan Nyhan:
Has the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account hurt her in the polls?
You might think so if you read a CNN article published Monday night, which reported that “unfavorable views of Hillary Clinton are on the rise” after disclosure of her use of the email account while serving as secretary of state. (The network’s televised coverage of the poll made similar claims.)
This framing suggests that her standing with the public has declined considerably. In fact, the new poll actually seems to be good news for Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner. CNN found that 53 percent of Americans have a favorable view of her, which is somewhat higher than in other recent polls, including those conducted before the controversy.
In fact, that's supported by an even newer CNN poll, showing
Clinton beating Bush and Walker by 15 points.