“Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel,” Obama told the AIPAC crowd on June 4, “and it must remain undivided.” He aimed to show his unequivocal support for Israel, and his remarks were received enthusiastically by the approximately 7,000 attendees at the powerful lobbying group’s event. But they also produced political blowback, including among Obama’s own dovish supporters, demonstrating just how thorny of an issue America’s relationship with Israel remains. Even the State Department sounded wary of Obama’s comments on Jerusalem, with a spokesman stating that the matter must ultimately be left up to the two sides in the conflict to resolve. In an interview with CNN the day after the speech, Obama reframed the issue in softer terms; inevitably, this led to accusations of flip-flopping and insincerity.

Obama’s views on Israel’s security, and the intractable conflict with the Palestinians, have met with uncertainty among some potentially key groups of voters — namely older Jewish Americans, as well as some Evangelical Christians and other foreign policy hard-liners. There are sizable Jewish populations in important swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, where there are also significant numbers of Evangelical supporters of Israel. With about three-quarters of a million Jews, though, Florida is the crucible when it comes to Israel, assuming the state will once again see a close contest in 2008. It has the third largest Jewish population in the country, and politically important southern Florida has one of the highest concentrations of Jews anywhere outside of Israel — many of them senior citizens. According to a recent report in the New York Times, half of the Jewish population in Broward County is over age 59, and half of the Jews in Palm Beach County are over 70.

The vast majority of American Jews don’t cast their votes based on considerations for Israel. Historically, they vote mostly on domestic issues, and they vote consistently and overwhelmingly Democratic. Obama has the support of many younger Jewish voters, amid strong support from youth voters in general, around the country. It is widely believed in political circles, however, that older Jewish voters in particular can be influenced to vote on the Israel issue — if they are motivated by fear or uncertainty.

It is especially with this demographic that there is a danger to Obama in the oft-repeated accusation that his thinking is murky on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and on Israel’s security situation vis-à-vis Iran. The doubts among some voters seem to have risen at least in part from legitimate concerns: the young senator’s relative lack of a voting record in the Senate on Israel-related matters, and what some see as a confusing message from Obama more broadly on the region. As one influential Middle East activist and Obama supporter recently told me, “Looking at it objectively, I’d say he sends mixed signals. One day he talks about meeting with Ahmadinejad. Then he recites the AIPAC talking points.”

But perhaps far more important, the doubts about Obama have been expanded and exacerbated for dubious reasons — including attacks by his political opponents, and smear campaigns that were first launched against Obama via the Internet many months ago.

Whatever the cause, the Obama campaign is taking the issue very seriously, as demonstrated by his AIPAC appearance and recent media efforts focused on highlighting his personal and policy views on Israel. (Hillary Clinton’s own comments before AIPAC the same day also reflected the issue’s importance; she had yet to concede the race, but her speech included her first powerful gesture of support for Obama as the presumptive nominee: “I know Senator Obama will be a good friend to Israel,” she said emphatically, to a constituency that has long viewed her as a steadfast ally.) In late June, the Obama campaign announced an upcoming trip abroad that will include a visit to Israel.

Representatives of AIPAC have affirmed repeatedly that they view Obama as a staunch friend of Israel, and that they would be comfortable with either him or John McCain as president.

Jeff Ballabon, a political strategist known as the architect of the 2004 Bush campaign’s outreach to orthodox Jews, describes an intriguing strategic battle taking shape. According to Ballabon, because McCain’s support from Evangelicals and the traditional conservative base of the Republican Party remains weak, McCain will have to use Israel to rally this crucial demographic in key battlegrounds like Florida. But if influential Jewish groups such as AIPAC continue to give their blessing to Obama, he says, Evangelicals and other worried supporters of Israel may take that as a sign that they don’t need to back McCain.

If this logic is sound, the McCain campaign either has to more aggressively paint Obama as detrimental to Israel’s security, or at least foster an impression of uncertainty as to how Obama would handle the Middle East.

That’s where Joe Lieberman comes in.

After Obama’s controversial remarks about Jerusalem, McCain himself said in a press conference, “I can’t react to every comment that Senator Obama makes, because it probably will change as it did on sitting down and talking unconditionally with Ahmadinejad and other dictators.” But it is Lieberman, a key surrogate for McCain, who has great sway on the topic. The hawkish Lieberman is tremendously popular among AIPAC’s membership, Evangelical supporters of Israel, and Florida’s Jewish retiree population. As one of America’s most high-profile Jewish politicians, who broke new ground as the first Jewish vice presidential nominee in 2000, Lieberman carries much weight.

One of his roles in the McCain campaign clearly is to raise doubts about Obama regarding Israel and the Middle East. “I appreciate many of the very good intentions toward Israel that Senator Obama expressed today,” Lieberman told reporters in a conference call following Obama’s appearance before AIPAC, “but I also thought, respectfully, that there was a disconnect between what he said today, particularly in regard to Iran, and things he has said and done earlier.”

In March, Lieberman accompanied McCain on a trip to Israel, a fact McCain highlighted in his own speech at the AIPAC convention. More recently, Lieberman launched an initiative called “Citizens for McCain,” whose goal is to lure centrist Democratic voters into the McCain camp. A key focus for the group is foreign policy, and it has reportedly helped to attract Jewish Democratic donors to McCain. Although Lieberman is not a Republican, he also has offered to speak at the Republican National Convention at the end of the summer, a key moment for McCain to present his case for the White House to the national electorate.

Obama has his own high-profile Jewish lawmaker fighting on the front lines. Florida congressman Robert Wexler, who is co-chairman of Obama’s campaign there, has been stumping for Obama in key areas of the state and working to counter the sway of Lieberman. He has been appealing in particular to older Jewish voters who, according to a recent article in the Miami Herald, see Wexler “more like a son than a congressman.” In late May, Wexler brought Obama to speak at the synagogue in Boca Raton where he got married.

Looking ahead to November, Wexler told Salon in a phone interview that Obama’s “steadfast and unequivocal support for Israel will be a major issue for Senator Obama in Florida and throughout the country, because it’s a primary plank of his foreign policy.”

Views on Obama and the Middle East continue to cut sharply in both directions, depending on who you talk to. Gidon Remba, president of an advocacy organization now sponsoring an initiative called “Jews for Obama” — which is not affiliated with the Obama campaign — says the idea that Obama has been vague on Israel is simply “what those who are trying to sow fear and doubt about Obama want the American Jewish community to believe.” According to Remba, Obama has been “crystal clear” on the Middle East. “Obama would provide full economic, political, and diplomatic support for Israel, and stand by Israel’s right to self-defense,” Remba said. “But he would also clear a layer of rot that President Bush has dressed up in a way that appeals to some in the Jewish community. Sometimes a military policy is the worst thing for U.S. national security or Israel’s security. We learned that in Iraq, and Israel learned that in Lebanon.”

A political strategist close to the Obama campaign offered a similar view. On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular, he told Salon that Obama “has every intention, from the beginning of his presidency, of making a concerted effort to help Israelis and Palestinians reach an agreement. This requires early commitment, and a sustained top-level diplomatic team working regularly both in the region and in Washington.”

From the other end of the political spectrum, Jeff Ballabon agrees about the clarity, at least, of Obama’s views on Middle East policy. He calls them “fantastically obvious.” Obama would push the Israeli government to make concessions, he said, adding that “Israel is under enough pressure as it is, and doesn’t need more from its best friend.”

The particularly incendiary issue of whether to share Jerusalem, as well as the question of how best to deal with a rising Iran, are central to the debate. Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J-Street, a new, dovish lobbying group in Washington, said that Obama’s comment about an undivided Jerusalem at AIPAC was “distinctly unhelpful.” “There has got to be a way to share the city,” he said, “and an American president’s role has to be to facilitate discussion between the parties, rather than have a foregone conclusion.” (Ben-Ami said he was pleased when the Obama campaign softened its position on the Jerusalem issue.)

On the Iran front, J-Street applauds Obama’s emphasis on diplomacy. “From day one,” Ben-Ami says, “the next president has to send a completely different set of signals to Iran and the rest of the world. He has to put some carrots on the table, making it a carrot and stick approach.”

In a tidy inversion of the Bush-McCain doctrine for Iran, the political strategist close to the Obama campaign said that Obama would “not tie his hands by taking certain tools that we have at our disposal off the table — including diplomacy.” He said that Obama would be willing “to meet with Iran at a time of his choosing,” and, in addition to stating U.S. requirements, would offer the Iranians real incentives for their cooperation.

Ballabon’s response is that “Obama’s whole approach to Iran seems absolutely vapid and clueless. America doesn’t need a touchy-feely leader.”

The efforts by the McCain campaign and its surrogates to discredit Obama on the Middle East have been bolstered by the continuing smear campaigns directed against Obama by shadowy right-wing activists. (There is no evidence that these operatives are in any way connected with the McCain campaign.) The libelous emails, some of which even attempt to link Obama with Islamic terrorists, have spread virally since he emerged as a viable presidential candidate in 2007. By some accounts they have been targeted specifically at the American Jewish community using organized e-mail lists, although those rumors have not been proven.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the e-mails have had an effect — especially among the older Jewish voters in Florida who could end up being influential in a close contest. “There was no other evidence, so I believed the e-mails,” Elizabeth Sadwith, a 90-year-old Jewish Floridian told the New York Times recently, adding that even though her children had assured her that the e-mails contained misinformation, “I still have doubts about him.”

Both the Obama campaign and the unaffiliated Jews for Obama have rolled out websites to counter the smear campaign by rebutting assertions made in the e-mails. Jews for Obama is even planning to send Orthodox Jewish supporters of Obama to Florida to go door to door and persuade their co-religionists that the candidate would serve their interests.

The libelous attacks are unlikely to stop. “We’re seeing as many smears every day as before,” Remba, of Jews for Obama, says. “I fully expect that it will continue as quickly as whoever is coming up with them dishes them out.”

“The right wing never gets exhausted of smear campaigns,” agrees J-Street’s Ben-Ami. “They would be falling down on their job if they did.”

The net effect of widespread efforts to tarnish Obama’s reputation in the eyes of pro-Israel voters — and how important these voters actually will be in the overall electoral results — will only be fully known in November. What is clear already, though, is that both campaigns, as well as their surrogates and proxies, are treating the Israel issue with great seriousness. They can’t afford not to.

So Wallace, following a 92nd Street Y panel last night, said this:

“There will be pressure to elevate a woman but there will be an equal amount of pressure to pick someone who is prepared,” Wallace said.

And then she said this:

Wallace flagged one female official in particular who she thinks would be a good choice this year.

“Nikki Haley — she’s great,” she said. “She’s the most effective surrogate Romney has.”

If the Sarah Palin problem was a problem of preparation and vetting, Haley … might present some issues? Specifically an odd and mostly unsubstantiated sex scandal and also these rumors that she might at any moment be indicted on tax charges. The tax thing might be bullshit and the affair story was the product of a self-promoting creep but they’re “out there,” as they say.

More important, Haley has been governor of South Carolina since January of 2011. As in very slightly longer than one year. And slightly less time being a governor than Sarah Palin had in 2008. It’s almost as if Wallace is making a pick not based on the principle of Who Would Be Best For the Nation but on demographics and optics?

Wallace also apparently suggested Carly Fiorina, which, lol. Romney/Ex-CEO who famously received a giant golden parachute when she was forced out of her company 2012, everyone! Just the ticket for the new economy.

That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it’s unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments of YouTube campaign ephemera very well — remember when that old white lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it takes us behind closed doors, it’s to witness scenes any moderately close observer of the election and its aftermath could’ve dreamed up him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.

Instead, McCain has won the nomination three-and-a-half minutes into the film. Soon we’re watching Julianne Moore watch Tina Fey on TV. You remember the “SNL” sketches making fun of Palin, right? In case you don’t, “Game Change” airs lengthy chunks from most of them. It also has tons of actual footage from CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, and it re-creates debates and speeches and the Couric interview and the Charlie Gibson interview and a bunch of other things you saw either live or on YouTube when they happened.

Moore’s performance is not just fair but maybe even flattering. (For one thing, she doesn’t hit those flat upper Midwest vowels as gratingly as the real Palin.) Woody Harrelson plays strategist Steve Schmidt — the film’s protagonist — as a grizzled, “too old for this shit” campaign veteran called back to the trail against his better judgment. Jamey Sheridan is given barely anything to do as Mark Salter, McCain’s “conscience.” Salter, the primary author of his “Maverick” mythos, is limited, after the Palin selection, to making a hilariously over-telegraphed face of concern as everyone else in the war room applauds her first speech.

But the film is about Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace because they were pretty clearly Halperin and Heilemann’s primary sources, and we watch them become horrified by the depths of Sarah Palin’s ignorance at exactly the same time as everyone else in America became horrified by her ignorance.

Because it’s Hollywood, there’s very little politics in the film’s depiction of politics. Policies are simply things for Sarah Palin to write on note cards and not memorize. Operatives confidently declare, in faux Sorkin-ese patter, that if this or that meaningless decision is made, it means “we’ll lose by five.”

There is a sheen of faux cynicism (McCain swears like a sailor!) but it masks complete naiveté: Everyone is basically honorable and decent. Nicolle Wallace — a member of the Bush administration communications team — is sincerely alarmed at the prospect of someone as dangerously ignorant as Sarah Palin in the White House. On election night, she breaks down in tears as she admits to Schmidt that … she didn’t vote. They embrace.

The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to “unfair” — Sarah Palin doesn’t know that the head of Great Britain’s government is the prime minister, not the queen — are basically plausible. This isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It’s an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed to “the base” because of Palin’s heartfelt commitment to special-needs children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the film has her take a major heel turn — “if I am single-handedly carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!” — after “winning” her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up crowds and national attention. (Todd Palin barely does anything.)

The constant use of actual news footage adds a bit of verisimilitude but also constantly raises the question of why this lightly fictionalized version of the election actually needs to exist. “Game Change” is not really for serious political junkies, who remember all the stuff that did happen and will scoff at the stuff that didn’t. (At one point, John McCain answers his ringing iPhone in the middle of the night. He used a BlackBerry, HBO.) But if casually politically involved people want to see their assumptions about Sarah Palin reinforced, well, there are still those “SNL” sketches.

In the end, the Republican operatives who foisted Sarah Palin on an unprepared nation are rightly horrified that they created a monster, but at no point does anyone act concerned that their actual candidate was himself an angry, warmongering old crank with extremely fungible principles. Sure, Sarah Palin didn’t know what the Fed did. Do we have any proof John McCain knew what it should’ve done? Maybe everyone actually was totally unfair to poor Sarah Palin.

Rice, the national security advisor in George W. Bush’s first presidential term and secretary of state in his second, is currently a professor at Stanford with the requisite right-wing think tank fellowship. She has not said or done anything “political” in years. But Curl has been hearing things!

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Oh, a month-long tour in support of her book about her time in the Bush administration! She must be running for vice president, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan and George W. Bush.

There’s more. (And not just the part where Curl calls Rice “a spicy Rice dish” and waxes fetishistic about “her guns” being “a match for those of our first lady Michelle Obama.”)

Plus, her selection would be a giant chess move to counter the expected replacement of Vice President Joseph R. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure, the White House denies and denies, but that should really make any political watcher more suspicious. One White House insider even told me that the position swap was the only reason Mrs. Clinton joined the administration in the first place.

Curl has so many inside scoops packed into this column! I had no idea that our first presidential running mate swap since Ford’s 1976 campaign was basically a foregone conclusion and not just a weird Beltway journalist fantasy! But yes, I can see why the still  un-chosen GOP candidate would definitely be looking pretty closely at Rice — who’s been strongly making the case for her selection by not explicitly denying interest in the position — in case Obama replaces Biden with Clinton, which he will surely do.

The column gets worse (“Funny thing is, she is, unlike Barack Obama, an ‘American black’”) but that’s not really important. What’s important is exploring how someone like Condoleezza Rice ends up a perennial name on the fantasy ticket list.

Rice has been a subject of these columns since 2005, when she became Bush’s second secretary of state, and the White House tasked communications operative Jim Wilkinson — previously known best for inventing the false story of Jessica Lynch* — with getting Rice (and her boss) some much-needed positive press. Wilkinson did his job beautifully (remember when Rice’s knee-high boots were a topic of actual serious news coverage for weeks?) and Rice began receiving the “rock star” treatment.

In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, author of the 2007 Rice bio “The Confidante,” summarized the exact moment of the birth of the presidential speculation:

In March 2005, before Rice sat for an interview with the Washington Times, Wilkinson slipped a note to the editorial page editor, Tony Blankley, suggesting that she be asked whether she would consider running for president. It was an audacious proposal — she had been secretary for only six weeks — but such speculation would bolster Rice’s image as a leader. (Wilkinson and Blankley said they do not recall the incident, but others present said they saw Wilkinson’s note.)

Oh, the Washington Times.

Shortly thereafter, Dick Morris wrote a book claiming — nay, insisting — that 2008 would be “Condi vs. Hillary.”

As Iraq descended into a violent civil war in 2006, Rice-for-president buzz bizarrely grew. There was enough of a false grass-roots movement for a paint-by-numbers AP trend piece with a silly nickname and everything. Tim Russert asked her point blank. As always, she said no in no uncertain terms.

Then, of course, everyone began to speculate that she’d be McCain’s running mate. Robert Novak claimed as much on Fox. Dan Senor said she was pushing for the pick on some Sunday show. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a Talk of the Town piece on the subject! McCain and Rice both finally denied “reports” that she was angling for the spot on the ticket.

Now, I guess, it’s time to start up the rumor mill anew.

But before you put pen to paper on that column about how a Gingrich-Rice ticket would surely win moderate women in Ohio, consider this: In addition to the fact that she’s always denied wanting the job, and in addition to the fact that she was an unmitigated failure in the Bush administration, downplaying terrorism as a priority prior to 9/11 and selling the public on the Iraq invasion with untruths, Condi Rice is pro-choice.

*Update: Jon Krakauer recently rescinded his claim that Wilkinson, then a communications aide to General Tommy Franks, was responsible for the initial false Washington Post report on Lynch’s apparent heroics before her capture. Though Wilkinson was obviously involved in the PR campaign surrounding Lynch’s rescue and return to the U.S., he apparently isn’t responsible for falsifying her actions or leaking that false story to the press.

The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play “’60s radical” dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.

So Breitbart “proves” something or other about the essential anti-white racistness of the Obama campaign by noting that members of the inane New Black Panther Party were spotted by cameras near Obama, at various times, and also NBPP head Malik Zulu Shabazz spoke at the event.

(Brietbart goes on to publish two pictures of the event despite the photographer withholding permission, because “The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day.” Good luck with that argument in court?)

Andrew C. McCarthy gleefully endorses Breitbart’s story in a breathless post at the National Review’s The Corner:

This is a shocking story, and a breathtaking indictment of the mainstream media which went out of its way to avoid vetting Obama as a candidate — and to make sure anyone who tried to do due diligence got no sunshine. A candidate who chose to appeared in the company of, say, the KKK, would have provoked relentlessly hostile media coverage and, in short order, have been marginalized as disqualified to hold responsible elective office.

If only the media had reported that some fringe weirdos also participated in this event that both Democratic candidates and thousands of other people participated in, and then the fringe weirdos sort of followed Obama around for a while. That would’ve opened America’s eyes! (I mean the media besides NPR, which did report that the NBPP was there.)

Here’s the bit of this sad, desperate reach that is the saddest and most desperate: “Andrew further reminds us that, in March 2008, the Obama campaign website posted an endorsement of Obama by the New Black Panther Party.” Whoa, did they really? Shocking if true! It is, of course, not true. It was a user-generated blog post on the Obama campaign site that the campaign removed as soon as they became aware of its existence. Because websites do not “post” things to themselves, generally, McCarthy’s statement can’t even be charitably described as technically accurate. It’s just a lie.

A random stupid incorrect Breitbart smear is worth paying attention to only to the extent that the smear threatens to bubble up to the more reputable conservative press, or Fox, or Republican elected officials. The McCarthy endorsement means keep an eye on this one!

Here’s my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She’s done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she’d dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody’s perfect, laugh off the “gossip,” and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he’d finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was … giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book’s release.

Now that the book’s rollout is underway, the Palins might as well get paid for their marketing efforts. Todd Palin angrily denounced it, again accusing McGinniss of having a “creepy obsession” with Sarah Palin. Oooh, it’s so creeeepy to write an unauthorized biography of a prominent public figure, right?

How bad did the Palins allowed themselves to be trolled? Sarah Palin’s people released a statement on behalf of Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s former business partner, with whom Sarah Palin is alleged to have carried on an extramarital affair, some years back. The statement is a blanket denial, but what does having the supposed beau directly address the press accomplish, exactly? It just drives more interest in the book’s salacious, shocking revelations about the secret life of Sarah Palin. This guy, of all guys, should be kept out of it.

I am sure that Todd and everyone else is very personally pissed off that McGinniss went to Wasilla, talked to a bunch of people who hate them, and published a book full of stories about how bad and awful they are, but blowing up publicly just sends the message that there’s stuff in the book worth getting worked up about.