Significantly, in their presidential campaigns Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry also spoke in favor of relocating the embassy to Jerusalem in line with the 1995 law as did candidate George W. Bush.
Moreover, we still remember presidential candidate Barack Obama declaring to AIPAC in June 2008 that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” So it does seem a little cheeky to call Gov. Romney out for saying the very same thing.
Yes, Mr. Obama soon backtracked after making that statement to AIPAC, saying, “The point we were simply making was [sic] is that we don’t want barbed wire running through Jerusalem, similar to the way it was prior to the ’67 war, that it is possible for us to create a Jerusalem that is cohesive and coherent.”
All right, but the fact is that candidate Obama, literally hours before his little flip-flop, did declare, as Gov. Romney did this week, that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel.”
So Mr. Romney seems to have the better of the argument about U.S. policy regarding Israel. To be sure, Mr. Obama, as we have noted, is not the first president to flout the Embassy Law. But at least President Bush was embarrassed when doing so. Not this president, who has lately made a habit of ignoring or unilaterally modifying Congressional enactments. And he is not above sending out his spokesmen to create an alternative reality to justify it.