Obama’s 2008 AIPAC speech reads very much like his 2007 speech, except that this one is perhaps even more overflowing with boilerplate pander lines than the last.  Here was a new item that I think he neglected last year:

Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.

It is not clear to me how those who want to see Obama as an advocate of “even-handedness” will be able to maintain the hope that he represents any significant change in U.S. policy. 

There were also some notable moments in self-contradiction:

And we should work with Europe, Japan and the Gulf states to find every avenue outside the U.N. to isolate the Iranian regime — from cutting off loan guarantees and expanding financial sanctions, to banning the export of refined petroleum to Iran, to boycotting firms associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, whose Quds force has rightly been labeled a terrorist organization [bold mine-DL].

As every Clintonite remembers, Obama hung the Kyl-Lieberman amendment around Clinton’s neck for months and used it as an example of how Clinton was embracing the policies of the Bush administration (while his supporters simultaneously praised Obama for taking a position on launching strikes into Pakistan that was the policy of the Bush administration).  What did the Kyl-Lieberman amendment do?  It labeled the IRG’s Quds force a terrorist organisation, which Obama at the time interpreted (not entirely absurdly) as a prelude to justifying a military strike.  When it comes to talk at AIPAC, though, this sort of labeling becomes a good and right idea.  The GOP has already latched on to this inconsistency and will keep hammering on it. 

No doubt those who want to portray Obama as “weak” on Israel will conclude from this inconsistency that he says one thing to one group of people and another to a different group, which proves that he can’t be trusted, but what this really shows is that when he goes to an interest group’s conference he toes their line as carefully as he can.  The lesson is that he can’t be trusted to take real political risks or challenge entrenched interests for the sake of anything approaching real policy change.  What this tells me is that he will play antiwar and J Street-type voters for suckers with appealing rhetoric on Iran and then maintain the failed status quo. 

Then there was another rather striking statement:

And then there are those who would lay all of the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of Israel and its supporters, as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of all trouble in the region.

In the AIPAC speech, Obama thinks this is a very bad thing, but when he was talking to Jeffrey Goldberg he said something that his supporters insisted be read in exactly this way in order to deflect the unfair criticism that he was referring to Israel when he said:

But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy [bold mine-DL]. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable.

So something that infects all of our foreign policy, namely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has nothing to do with trouble elsewhere in the region?  Oh, okay.