Philip Klein can rest easy–anything that he finds troubling or worse about Wright’s foreign policy views is simply not to be found in Obama’s views.  Obama’s remark about Palestinian suffering was a one-time thing during campaigning in Iowa, which I suppose you can read as either a slip-up “revealing” his true beliefs or an isolated incident that has no deeper meaning.  His abasement before AIPAC, his vote backing the campaign in Lebanon and his campaign literature all paint a clear picture of someone who not only wants to demonstrate his “pro-Israel” position, but who has not shown any evidence, except for one remark about distinguishing between “pro-Israel” and “pro-Likud” positions, that he would change anything about current policy towards Israel.  Yes, the line about cynicism was silly, but when it comes to policy questions he takes all the conventional views.  In the issue currently online, Scott makes the argument that Obama may potentially represent a shift towards a more even-handed approach to Israel and Palestine, and I think that would be a very good development, but even if Scott is right in reading the “hints” that he sees, I’m not sure that I see where Obama gains the political capital to make moves towards that even-handedness.  In short, even if Obama did hold some of the views that worry Klein, he would be so busy trying to prove that he was a supporter of Israel that he couldn’t afford to make meaningful moves away from a reflexively “pro-Israel” position as we have come to know it during the past seven years. 

Indeed, in Obama’s speech at AIPAC he said, “Iran’s President Ahmadinejad’s regime is a threat to all of us.”  He spoke out against the Mecca agreement, which should lay to rest any concerns that he is secretly keen on Hamas.  Obama said furthermore, in a line that echoes then-Gov. Bush’s critique of Clinton’s last minute negotiations: “No Israeli Prime Minister should ever feel dragged to or blocked from the negotiating table by the United States.”  For exactly the same reasons that Klein was right to challenge Prof. Bacevich’s support for Obama partly on foreign policy grounds (which does not necessarily mean that Bacevich disagrees with Obama on all of these things), he should have no worries about what an Obama administration would do with respect to Israel.  If the last seven years have proved satisfactory, Obama offers more of the same in this particular area.