Bibi's Sour Grapes

For a man who has been around the electoral block as many times as Binyamin Netanyahu has I would have thought he would know better than to come out with statement like this (taken from the Jerusalem Post:

Incumbent Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu attacked his competition in Tuesday's Likud primary for the first time on Wednesday night, telling supporters in Kiryat Motzkin that the heads of Kadima and Labor want Moshe Feiglin to win the race.

Netanyahu had refrained until now from criticizing Feiglin and acknowledging third candidate Danny Danon. He has focused most of his public statements on criticizing his expected competition in the next general election, Labor chairman Ehud Barak and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. "If Olmert or Barak were asked who you should vote for, they would say 'vote Feiglin or stay home,'" Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu's campaign has become more worried recently that with an extremely low turnout, Zo Artzeinu co-founder Feiglin could end up winning more than 40 percent of the vote. A significant achievement for Feiglin could allow Barak and Kadima to portray the Likud as extremist.

But Feiglin's associates said that if Netanyahu was so afraid of Feiglin staining the Likud, he should leave the attacks on him to other parties and not add to them. They said that if Feiglin was the Likud's biggest burden, it would not make sense that Netanyahu brought the party only 12 mandates when Feiglin wasn't on its list for the Knesset.

I am not too sure being known as an extremist party in Israeli politics is a political kiss of death. If it is - how come Meretz isn’t dead and buried? In fact, in the last election Meretz garnished 5 mandates. Then there is everyone’s fun extremist, Avigdor Lieberman. He received 11 mandates for his Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel, Our Home) party which is just one less than Bibi did with the “non-extremist” Likud party.

Even more astonishing are the polls which suggest Feiglin’s support has grown from 24% to around 40% in the space of one week. But I bet things like this don’t help Bibi’s campaign any:

An internal Likud court was expected to decide on Friday whether to block Feiglin from running in the race. The petition to the court, which was the fifth in two weeks, was filed by supporters of Netanyahu, but his campaign denied any connection to them.

Yeah right. Anyway… if Feiglin does manage to pull off a miracle and win the leadership of the Likud party I know just the campaign slogan Likud can use against Barak and Olmert – Do Something Different - Vote to put a Jew in Charge.