Israelis still prefer McCain
Since Israelis absorbed intense media coverage of Barack Obama’s visit to their nation late last month, their opinion of him has improved, but only slightly.
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A new poll finds 38 percent of Israelis still would rather see Obama’s Republican rival John McCain elected U.S. president, compared to 31 percent for Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
That’s slightly narrower than the 9-point edge held by McCain in a poll conducted in late June.
The new poll surveyed 499 Jewish Israeli respondents in Hebrew by phone on July 30 and 31.
That was one week after Obama’s whirlwind overseas tour swept through Israel, bringing saturation Israeli media coverage of his meetings with top politicians, his visit to the Kotel – one of the most important Jewish religious sites – and, perhaps most significantly, his outlining a more hawkish stance on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“He was received well and said all the things he needed to say from an Israeli perspective,” said Mitchell Barak, director of KEEVOON Research, Strategy & Communications, the independent Jerusalem-based firm that conducted the poll. Barak, who was raised in the U.S. and worked briefly for the Republican Jewish Coalition, said Obama “got the same level of attention that Axel Rose got when he came here,” but that Obama “was really taken seriously.”
Obama got rock-star welcomes during many of the other stops on his trip, most notably in Germany, where an estimated 200,000 turned out to hear him deliver a speech near where the Berlin Wall once stood.
The Illinois Senator is wildly popular in Europe, and a spring Pew poll of 23 foreign nations – not including Israel – on six continents found respondents in all but two countries (Jordan and Pakistan) had more confidence in Obama than McCain to do the right thing in world affairs.
Of course, the impact of global public opinion on U.S. elections is debatable.
But stateside Obama’s trip was seen as an effort to bolster his foreign affairs bona fides and to solidify the potentially critical votes of Jews and evangelicals unconvinced by his repeated efforts to assure them of his commitment to Israel.
McCain has gotten mostly positive Israeli coverage for his hard-line on Iran, said Barak, the pollster. He asserted Israelis also look fondly on McCain’s military service, including his time as a prisoner of war in a North Vietnam, perhaps because Israelis are required to serve in the country’s armed forces.
Interestingly, though, the poll found Israeli soldiers preferred Obama over McCain, 55 to 35 percent. That may be partly a function of age, since the poll found 18- to 24-year olds preferred Obama 49-percent to 30 percent.
Among respondents aged 55 or older, 46 percent favored McCain with only 23 percent preferring Obama.
Overall, 31 percent of respondents had no opinion or refused to answer – a high number given the intense Israeli media coverage of the U.S. presidential race. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent.
