Finally, there was Rudy Giuliani's speech. Terrorism started, he said, with the attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972—and the German government released the terrorists after two months. It continued, he went on, with the attack on the Achille Lauro in 1985 and the murder of American Leon Klinghoffer "solely because he was Jewish"—with the terrorists released or allowed to escape by the Italian government. "Terrorist attacks became like a ticket to the international bargaining table," he said. "How else to explain Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize." A chorus of boos. Later, in his attack on John Kerry, he quoted Kerry's statement in October 2003 that Israel's security barrier was a "barrier to peace" and his interview a few months later with the Jerusalem Post when he said, "Israel's security fence is a legitimate act of self-defense." Giuliani was carefully interweaving terrorism against Israel with terrorism against the United States, making the point that we share common enemies and the argument that George W. Bush can be counted to stand up to them and John Kerry cannot.
advertisement
Browse through an archive of columns by Michael Barone.
Pretty powerful stuff. As former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick said to me, as we met after leaving Madison Square Garden, Giuliani was Mayor of New York, and in that position argued for excluding Arafat from U.N. proceedings: such interweaving is not new to him. But it is new to Republicans. There have been varying results in polls of Jews; Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg recently released a poll showing few gains for Bush among Jewish voters. But Jews are a hard group to sample: they are only 2.2 percent of the electorate, and they are no longer easy to locate by residential address or surname. And those Americans highly sympathetic to Israel, as the responses from the Texas and Ohio delegations suggest, are even more difficult to isolate and count. The broadcast networks were not covering the convention Monday night, refusing to broadcast the ordinarily newsworthy McCain and Giuliani in favor of their usual entertainment programs. But the session was covered by cable news and C-SPAN, and a fair amount of the target audience of such appeals may have been tuned in. We are not, perhaps, talking about great numbers here. But in what everyone thinks is likely to be a very close election even small numbers count. And the Republicans spoke effectively to those small numbers Monday.
Previous Page
