From a profile of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the current issue of Vanity Fair:
“Israel’s current prime minister is not just a friend, he’s an old friend,” Mitt Romney, with whom Netanyahu worked at the Boston Consulting Group in the 1970s, told AIPAC in March. (Romney, Netanyahu suggests, may have overstated the tie. “I remember him for sure, but I don’t think we had any particular connections,” he tells me. “I knew him and he knew me, I suppose.”)
Netanyahu’s encounters with President Obama have been marked by slights, misunderstandings, mutual suspicion, and downright distaste. One Obama aide says they keep hearing Netanyahu has evolved but have yet to see any signs of it. At home, Netanyahu scores points with his every slight of Obama, to whom the Israelis have never warmed. But Netanyahu insists his relationship with Obama is friendlier than it has been portrayed. They are, he tells me, “two people who appreciate the savviness and strength of the other.”
What’s interesting here isn’t that Romney appears to have exaggerated his relationship with Netanyahu. That’s a political misdemeanor. What’s interesting is that Netanyahu seems to be thoroughly uninterested in backing up Romney even a little bit. Mitt Romney? Yeah, I guess I’d recognize him if we passed on the street. He’s the one with the good hair, right?
At the same time, he insists that his relationship with Obama is better than we think. This is probably just normal politics — why diss the American president in public, after all? — but it’s still an interesting juxtaposition. The interview took place in March, when Romney hadn’t quite locked up the Republican nomination, but even then he was the pretty obvious frontrunner. And Netanyahu is too savvy a politician to say this kind of thing by accident, even given the famous Israeli reputation for bluntness. So why throw him under the bus like that? Is it because Netanyahu has decided Romney has no chance of winning, so there’s no point in sucking up to him? Or what?
