To the Editor:
Re "Obama campaign preparing to counter critics on Israel stance": The Obama political people are really missing the point. Countering "conservative" attacks on Obama will be irrelevant to those whose support the president is in great danger of losing.
Obama is on the verge of being abandoned by every Jewish voter who supported him in 2008 who does not consider himself or herself to be a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. We had many reasons to believe that Obama would continue the bipartisan support for Israel that had existed since the days of Jim Baker, and that the reasons for the failure of peace efforts would be seen, as had been the case since the failure of the Oslo process, as a failure of Palestinian will.
We now see that Obama has an inner circle that has accepted the Palestinian "narrative" and that their influence over the president’s thinking in this area outweighs his area experts. This man is a massive disappointment and is likely to receive a smaller percentage of the taken-for-granted Jewish votes of any Democrat since before FDR.
Countering conservative arguments will have no effect on this defection.
Mike Leavitt
Lansdowne, Va.
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