Benjamin Netanyahu is fond of encouraging comparisons of himself with his political idol, Winston Churchill.
But with his stunning win in Tuesday’s national election, the Israeli prime minister stole a page from the biography of another outspoken political leader — Harry Truman.
Both Truman and Netanyahu were expected by the pollsters and journalists covering the race to go down to defeat. Voters, went the refrain, were weary of the antics of both men and their perceived inability to govern.
In 1948, when Truman faced Thomas E. Dewey, the experts wrote him off long before the voting booths even opened. In the end, he scored the biggest electoral upset in US political history.
The one difference is that Truman was always certain he would win and campaigned with confidence in the results. Netanyahu, on the other hand, seemed to believe the media and the polls, which claimed growing momentum against him.
In the end, what everyone insisted would be a neck-and-neck battle turned into a decisive victory for Netanyahu. His Likud party is projected to have won the most seats — 30 — in the 120-member Knesset, to just 24 for the rival Zionist Union.
He’s on track to form a governing coalition with at least 67 seats.
That’s prompted a post-election narrative from the profoundly disappointed Left, which wants to question the legitimacy of Netanyahu’s convincing win.
That includes The New York Times editorial page, which yesterday said a “desperate and craven” Netanyahu won only because of last-minute “duplicity” and a “racist rant” designed to spur right-wing voters to the polls.
That’s based on the final days of the race, during which Netanyahu warned in somewhat desperate and overheated tones that a large vote by Israeli Arabs would put a left-wing government in power.
It was a blatant appeal to core rightist voters, and it worked, drawing many of them away from smaller parties and back into the Likud fold.
The Obama administration, not surprisingly, was quick to pick up this line.
Having anticipated (and gleefully awaited) Netanyahu’s ouster and now stung by his solid win, the White House yesterday used the kind of language normally reserved for Republicans, saying it was “deeply concerned about rhetoric that seeks to marginalize Arab-Israeli citizens” and undermines “values and democratic ideals.”
Spokesman Josh Earnest added that President Obama would get around to personally congratulating Netanyahu only in the coming days.
In sharp contrast, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper were quick to phone their colleague in Jerusalem.
But the size of Netanyahu’s win suggests that his last-minute appeal alone didn’t turn the race around.
On the contrary, it reinforces the fact that most Israelis share his fears about the dangers of a nuclear Iran and the steady rise of Islamist extremism in Syria and Lebanon, as well as his wariness of Palestinian intentions and distrust of Obama.
Because they do, they were willing to re-elect a prime minister who is far less popular than he once was, who has been embroiled in personal scandals and who has antagonized many former allies.
But they preferred that known quantity over Isaac “Buji” Herzog, leader of the leftist Zionist Union and son of a former president but a relative political neophyte.
For all the furor over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, most Israelis obviously prefer a tarnished leader of whom they may be tired but who’s willing to be in-your-face, even with allies, on the issues that matter the most — like a rogue nation hell-bent on their destruction not being fully prevented from obtaining weapons of mass destruction.
And for all Netanyahu’s much-publicized late disavowal of a two-state policy, it’s unlikely Herzog would have been able to create a Palestinian state that would allay Israelis’ genuine fears of Hamas.
Like Netanyahu, Harry Truman spoke his mind; you always knew where he stood, and he, too, often engaged in over-the-top rhetoric.
He took a tough, uncompromising line against those whom he thought endangered America’s interests.
His supporters loved him (though he sometimes embarrassed them), and his foes hated him — but also underestimated him.
That’s why Truman won against all the odds in 1948. And that’s why Israeli voters just re-elected Bibi Netanyahu.