Here's one readers' complaint that should be thrown out of the window: The Israel Factor panel is not nearly as "hawkish" as many readers who wrote to us and commented on the Israel Factor have come to believe.
The readers saw that Rudy Giuliani has topped the list of candidates for many months, followed by other Republicans (although this changed a couple of weeks ago) and made the assumption that the panelists prefer the Republican candidates to Democrats because they are "conservative," "biased," "crazy" (I'll spare you the real derogatory epithets, as well as the comments of the very few readers who argued that the panel is too far to the left).
Well, those readers, as I argued in the introduction to this project, are plain wrong. The panel still likes Giuliani better than any other candidate, but on some matters of policy it shows dovish - or at the very least centrist - tendencies. The week after the Annapolis conference provided us with an opportunity to test not just the candidates, but also the beliefs of the panel.
We asked, To what extent do you want the U.S. administration to be involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Here's what the panelists said (the number reflects the number of panelists voting for each option:
Given that the panel generally prefers a level of involvement in the style of the Bill Clinton administration, we asked the panelists to rate each candidate on his or her views and prospective policy on the Israeli-Palestinian issue (1 being the worst policy and 5 the best).
But here's the interesting thing: The candidate who's less likely to be a Clintonesque policy-maker on this issue (as I showed here) is actually the most trusted by the most panelists. Either they don't believe Giuliani will act the way in he says he will, or they consider the other qualities they see in him so important that they are willing to pay the price of his possible un-involvement in Mideast peacemaking.
Of the four panelists who voted for a Bill Clinton-like involvement in the peace process, only one gave Hillary Clinton a higher mark (4) than he gave Giuliani (3); two gave them the same mark (4) and one gave Giuliani (5) more than Hillary Clinton (4). Again, either the panelists do not believe that Hillary Clinton will be the one adapting her husband's former policies, or they think that considerations other than "involvement" play a more important role when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Here are the average scores for each of the ranked candidates:
Note: Hillary Clinton, McCain and Bloomberg have the same average. I would argue that these three will have, more or less, the same (Clintonian) approach to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As good as this gets, it is not enough as to make them more appealing than Giuliani - not even on a question in which there is a difference between what Giuliani is promising and what the panel seems to want.
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