Gridlock will make it very difficult, if not impossible, for the President to advance his domestic agenda. You might like that. You might be saying, “And I’m happy!” However, what this means is that for the next two years, the President can almost solely affect foreign policy and foreign trade. Guess what he thinks are two of the primary problems facing the world? Israel-Palestinian peace and Nuclear Arms Control. Guess where much of President Obama’s attention is going to be focused over the next two years? On a tiny sliver of land in the Eastern Mediterranean.

You may say, “Yes, but the country has spoken. The country rejects the Obama Administration’s policies!” That may well be true, but look at the choices presented to President Obama at this point. The first option is that he could admit defeat and alter his policies to please the bulk of the American population, assuming that he believes that the bulk of the population disagrees with him on those issues. To alter his path could displease his own party, actually it almost certainly would. It might please those on the political right, but will any of them vote for him in 2012 if he changes his policies over the next two years? Probably not enough to matter. He may be able to win over some centrist independents by changing his policies, but he cannot count on that. To put it bluntly, changing his policies will likely not help him at all in 2012.

The President’s other options are to try to prove himself correct on foreign policy, potentially, if he is in fact correct, swaying voters to come back to his side, or he can attempt to accomplish the things that he wishes to see accomplished as long as he has the ability to do so regardless of what may or may not happen to please the bulk of the voters or even his party. In other words, he can admit, if he believes it, that his policies are unpopular and alter them while likely accomplishing little to help him in 2012 or he can forge more strongly ahead. This last option may or may not make things better for him in 2012, but might make him feel better.

I think he’s going to choose the latter option, especially if he feels that his policies are correct. He may even believe that he has nothing to lose that has not already been lost, including the 2012 Presidential election. If so, should his actions upset a few voters more than they please, it will not matter.

So not to bring you celebrants down a notch, but for those of you who are not big fans of the President’s foreign policy positions and who are cheering Republican victories in Senatorial, Congressional, and Gubernatorial elections, things might not be great for the next two years.

This means that an additional terror attack in 1992 could have killed the Oslo process-which makes one think about the strange ways of terror, and the deranged ways in which it serves to destroy both victim and aggressor alike.

Another terror attack in 1992 may well have helped Rabin even more. Shortly before the elections, a fifteen year old girl, Helena Rapp was killed. Rabin used her death to argue that Shamir’s policies made Israel less safe. A year after the killing this is what Clyde Haberman of the NY Times wrote:

One reason Yitzhak Rabin is Israel’s Prime Minister is a teen-age girl named Helena Rapp.

Helena Rapp was viciously stabbed to death by a Palestinian a year ago as she waited for a bus near Tel Aviv, and Mr. Rabin invoked her killing again and again during his election campaign last summer. Install me as leader, he told Israelis, and you will have someone flexible enough to forge peace with the Arabs but also tough enough to stop Arabs who think they can get their way by knifing Jewish girls. As the final vote proved, it was a winning strategy.

However progress on negotiations did not lead to a reduction of terror. As Haberman later noted:

Whatever the reason, the bloodshed was ample and sustained, diverting Mr. Rabin from peace negotiations and forcing him to deal with rolling thunder on his right. The opposition Likud Party, reborn under a dynamic new leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, ran hard with the terrorism issue. So did disaffected Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, whose anti-Government demonstrations have grown bigger and more violent.

It did the Prime Minister little good to complain, as he did, that the right was trying to capitalize on tragedy, which indeed seems to be the case but is little different from what he himself did last year. Nor did it improve his standing to point out that stabbings pose no existential threat to Israel, or to lash out at young Israelis for being too passive in the face of knife-wielders.

The point is that Rosner’s premise is wrong. Another terror attack probably would have helped Rabin and Labor even more..

HIs befuddlement at the end is also strange. In 1992, yes, it appears that terror helped bring Labor to power, which, in turn brought about the Oslo Accords. But in 1996, terror brought Likud to power, even though Likud opposed the unconditional implementation of Oslo with no regard to Palestinian compliance. But the violence of early 1996, showed that Oslo wasn’t working. In late 1995, after Yigall Amir assassinated Yitzchak Rabin, Shimon Peres’s government withdrew from six Arab cities. It was the Palestinian Authority’s job to secure those cities and ensure that no terrorists were allowed to operate there. Of course Arafat allowed Hamas to operate in areas under his control, so the resulting terror took advantage of Arafat’s connivance. Unlike the terror of 1992, it showed that the peace process wasn’t working. When terror declined under Netanyahu, Israelis relaxed and voted him out of office.

Terror may affect election results. But terrorists are more opportunistic.The effects of terror on an election will be related to how the electorate views the government. I don’t think that there is enough data to draw consistent conclusions whether terror makes an electorate more hawkish or more dovish.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Nor is the poll particularly good news for John McCain, showing as it does overwhelming European and Russian support for his Democrat rival Mr Obama.

It is to laugh. Americans have never given a damn what Europeans think about our presidential choices. Wait, that’s not true. We get very contrary when Europe tries to mess with us. Does anyone remember the Guardian’s attempt to defeat George W. Bush in the last election? The backlash was so high, it may actually have helped Bush win in the Guardian’s chosen battleground. The Brits still haven’t gotten it: We’re not their colony any longer.

Even the director of Clark County’s board of elections got into the debate. She was widely quoted as saying: “The American Revolution was fought for a reason.”

The Telegraph goes on:

Regardless of who wins, there will be a need to project a more positive light of the United States in Europe, but without ditching America’s vital global role.

Well, in order to do that, the European media would have to stop slanting so many stories anti-American. Sorry, boys and girls, but we have no control over what Europeans think. Nor do we want to have that kind of control. This isn’t a matter of Americans cozying up to Europeans. It doesn’t matter if our president is Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Europeans have never really cared for Americans, overall. Well, the ones that stay in Europe, anyway. The ones that come here like us just fine, and so do their children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren….

What I find most strange about that fact is that so many Americans have European ancestry. It’s like Europe hates its own descendants.

There’s a longer essay in there. I think I’ll work on it for July 4th.