Jewish Voters: Libya Over Israel?

Looking forward to 2012, Jennifer Rubin writes that typically it is the domestic issues--and not the international ones--that most influence the voters in choosing a president:

unless and until Americans feel their security is endangered or America is faltering on the international stage, domestic issues usually dominate. However, when events spin out of control, foreign policy failures can help bring down a president (as in the case of Jimmy Carter) or severely hurt his and his party's standing (as in the case of George Bush in 2006).

And that is where Libya comes in.

Libya may therefore become a critical issue in one of two circumstances. First, if -- as some conservatives fear -- it devolves into a bloody, prolonged civil war and casualties mount, this foreign policy debacle could well become a stunning example of President Obama's foreign policy ineptitude and of the perils of excessive reliance on multilateralism. We have to get a credible casualty count or see vivid depictions of the violence, but when those inevitably surface, the outrage over American passivity may well heighten.

Even if the Libya situation does not devolve into genocidal war, Libya may simply become one more item in the growing list of foreign policy failures. When viewed in conjunction with Obama's fixation on Israel's settlements, attempts at Iran engagement, his backing of Hugo Chavez's crony in Honduras and his deferential stance toward a wide array of autocrats (from Bashar al-Assad to Vladimir Putin), voters may come to see that Obama's foreign policy is hastening the decline of American influence.

What I take out of this: come 2012, Jewish voters may be swayed into voting Republican more by what Obama does about Libya than by what he does to Israel.

Technorati Tag: Obama and Israel and Libya.