Bibi Survives / A Delectable Cheesecake Factory Fight

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0:38Israel headed to the polls this week, and no candidate for prime minister has yet managed to win enough seats in parliament to form a government. Did Benjamin Netanyahu manage to survive the political fight of his life? And how to read the early tabs and results for the U.S. relationship with Israel. Meanwhile, an ugly anti-Semitic ad appears in the Michigan Senate race that blames Israel that America doesn't have single-payer health care. And later, Barack Obama takes a shot at the beloved U.S. institution known as the Cheesecake Factory. Welcome to Potomac Watch. Those are our subjects for today.

1:13I'm Kate O'Dell, your host, and joining me today, I have Matt Continetti, who is a columnist for our pages and contributes to our Free Expression daily newsletter. And we also have Jack Butler, who edits that same newsletter and covers national politics and a number of other things across our many platforms. So thanks, gentlemen, for joining me this Wednesday. We're going to open up by talking about the Israeli election. As we recorded on Wednesday afternoon, it looked like neither contender for Israeli prime minister had won enough seats in parliament to form a government. Benjamin Netanyahu's party will lose seats in the parliament.

1:50But the big story on Wednesday to my eye, Matt, was Bibi looks like he is going to hang on. That an election that was turning really on Bibi and his performance before and after October 7th and had become very personal about himself, it looks as though he overperformed the polls. And this, to me, I mean, it does underscore what a singular figure Bibi is in world politics in the 21st century. So Matt, distill for us what we know so far and what this says about Bibi and his political surviving powers. Well, Kate, I think there are a few lessons from the Israeli election. The first is there was an election.

2:28And I think just important to know that in the Middle East, in this extremely dangerous territory and region, Israel is really the only country that holds regular open elections to all of its citizens, including its Arab citizens, who are about 20 % of the population and who turned out at a record rate in the other day's election. And that's something, of course, a voting privilege that most Arabs in the Arab world do not enjoy. And so that's important. Number two is, you're right, it looks like Netanyahu will remain as prime minister, at least for the time being. You know, the election in Israel is not really the election.

3:04The real decision point comes after the election when the various parties of whom there are a countless number have to basically barter and trade to form a coalition, a coalition that would get to 61 seats. It's not clear to me that Netanyahu will have that outright, even though his party, Likud, is doing better than many people expected. So we may be in a situation where Netanyahu remains the caretaker prime minister until the next round of elections, which would be sometime early next year. Regardless, I think the third lesson we can take from the election is that despite all of the messages in the media that somehow the fate of the U.S.-Israel relationship depended on Netanyahu leaving office, despite all of the terrible propaganda and calumnies that had been leveled at Israel since it began its response to the October 7th terrorist atrocities, Israelis still recognize that Bibi Netanyahu, despite all of his faults, despite the fact that he was prime minister on October 7th, 2023, can still be trusted with pursuing Israel security above all.

4:14And while Netanyahu is prime minister on October 7th, his strategy and his leadership in the years since October 7th have really changed the game, the nature of the game in the Middle East in ways that benefit Israel's security in the future of the Jewish state. And I think that was reflected in the vote yesterday. And I want to ask you, Matt, too, about your describing this narrowly divided result. It may take weeks or months to fully resolve. And while that's specific to Israel, we also are seeing narrowly divided, very polarized electorates across democracies across the world. And so it's always tempting to try too much to map American politics onto other countries.

4:53But I am curious your view of, you know, is Israeli politics polarized? And is that does that term even apply when really, you know, Netanyahu's main challenger, Isenot, agreed with Bibi on a lot of the fundamental security issues. And he lost a son in the war in Gaza. So there seems, you know, we hear that Israeli politics generally is going right wing, said roughly. But what are the issues that are really dividing the electorate if there's that fundamental agreement on security? I think you're absolutely right. Israel is not polarized on the issue of security. No one is playing games with Israel's security.

5:28And no one is in the mainstream of Israeli politics open to a Palestinian state. They went through the Oslo process in the 90s that resulted in the second intifada. Hundreds of Israelis dead from terrorist attacks. The consensus in Israel is firmly on the hardline national security positions. Where there's polarization in Israel is on cultural issues. The divide in Israel can be seen in the very polarized arguments over Netanyahu's judicial reform, which you might recall really drove the country apart in the months before October 7th. And there's a considerable polarization in Israel about the role of the Haredi, that is the ultra-Orthodox population, who derive benefits from the government but do not serve in Israel's conscript armed forces.

6:20And that polarization is really ultra-religious versus the rest of the country, which wants them to actually take a larger role in the public life of the Jewish state. So I'd say that Israel, like the United States, is polarized on cultural issues, but less so on national security issues. It is very hard to map another country's politics onto our own. especially a country like Israel, which, you know, has no written constitution. And in my mind has a crazy electoral system. You don't vote for candidates, you vote for party lists, and there is just one constituency. So it's all proportional representation.

6:59And it takes a while to count the votes because you have to figure out how many seats in the Knesset, their parliament are going to be distributed among all these various parties. It's not California, right, where it takes weeks to count the votes simply. Well, actually, no one really knows why it takes weeks to count the votes in California, but that just seems to happen every two years and we have to get used to it. But I would say this is that we're seeing a couple of things in global politics this year. The first is an anti-incumbent tendency that seems to kind of run aground, though, in the last week, which points to the second trend I've noticed, which is that the polls and prediction markets aren't right.

7:36They're not getting it right. And, you know, the polls and the predictions said that Lula Inacio da Silva was going to lose in Brazil. He ends up winning. Right. Not only does he win, the opposition flees the country. And in Israel, the exit polls, as well as the pre-election polls, were pointing to a Netanyahu defeat. And yet, as we said, it was a much better performance for Netanyahu than anyone expected. If there's a lesson we can draw to our country, it might be to take the polls with a little bit of skepticism ahead of our midterm election on Tuesday. That's a great point. Yes. I mean, that's another kind of global implication there that the polls were so off once more.

8:18Hang tight. We have to take one quick break on Potomac Watch. A T-shirt and jeans, mac and cheese, oceans and sunsets. Some things in life are an obvious match, like RIAs and Schwab Advisor Services, the number one choice for independent advisors looking for a custodian who can help them go further. With all the wealth services, technology, and support an RIA firm needs, the difference is so obvious, it's Schwabvius. Find your match and learn why custody is just the beginning at schwabvius.com. This is Matthew Hennessey, the editor of Free Expression. I want to personally invite you to come check out what we're doing.

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9:40Welcome back. Before we bring in Jack here, I want to ask you one more particular question about the Israeli election, and that is about the issue you brought up, the draft exemption for ultra-Orthodox Jews. My understanding is that this dispensation started as a relatively small number of exemptions, But over time, as the share of the population that is ultra-Orthodox has grown, it's come to represent just a significant portion of society that's not serving in a military that otherwise has national conscription. And again, this is another story that I think has some global implications because lots of democracies are having to rethink how they do national military service and conscription as threats are growing all over the world.

10:20And so I just want to ask at a basic level how this gets resolved, because Bibi is allied with the ultra-Orthodox parties that want the exemption from military service. But in Eisenkot to form a government, I'm not sure who he's going to have to work with to do that. But how does this substantive issue get resolved in Israeli society? It does seem to have become a major source of public concern as the Israeli forces take casualties in Gaza and simply can't continue to sustain a military force, exempting a large portion of the population. Well, Israel is a society that values children very highly.

10:54And I can think of no Israeli parent who has seen their child serve in either the North in the war against Hezbollah or in the South in the war against Hamas and not feel justified anger at the Haredi, at the ultra-Orthodox, who do not participate in this, who are not part in the main of the defense of the Jewish home. And so it's a live issue. And I think it affects the future of the country, not only for the security aspects, but there's also the welfare state aspect, which is that this community derives great welfare benefits, but it's not actually contribute much in the form of economic productivity or taxation because they are devoted to their religious study.

11:35And so this is a hugely important issue. And it speaks to kind of how middle Israel, if you will, like the majority of the population has to deal with two sizable minority communities. One is these ultra-Orthodox, but the other is the Arab-Israeli population, which voted in great numbers and is going to be overrepresented, if anything, in the next Knesset. So they're going to have to figure out how to reconcile, how to navigate both of these shoals. I do think with the Haredi in particular, that's going to probably have to wait until after Netanyahu departs the stage for some new reconfiguration, some new alignment of Israeli politics, which has been dominated now for basically 30 years by this major figure of Benjamin Netanyahu.

12:22But as we've been saying, he's not about to leave the stage soon. Jack, I want to spin the globe over to the United States briefly, because Donald Trump did endorse Netanyahu ahead of the election. Do you think that paid? And then kind of related to that, a lot of discussion about how this election affects the U.S. relationship with Israel. I'm curious, as the U.S. enters its own midterms, how much change could a Democratic Congress really drive toward the U.S.-Israel relationships over the next two years while Donald Trump is still president? What do you see on the horizon there as you cover the campaigns?

12:54So my understanding is that Donald Trump is actually quite popular in Israel, more popular than he is in the United States. This has been borne out in polls. It's been borne out when President Trump visits Israel. And I find that interesting. It seems to be driven primarily by the relationship between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, who are very similar figures, at the very least in terms of their political durability. I was trying to think, as you two were talking earlier in referencing the long career that Netanyahu has had in Israel, I think there is probably no one – if someone were to compete, someone in, loosely speaking, the Western world were to compete with President Trump in terms of survivability after electoral setback, it would have to be Netanyahu, who has been in and out of the head of government in Israel many times after prior setbacks, after seeming to have lost his handle on power.

13:50He keeps coming back, and here he is staying in power. As for the way that this may affect U.S. domestic politics and how U.S. domestic politics could affect international politics, there's a potentially, I'll say, grimmer, not grim future for U.S.-Israel relations. If Democrats have a successful midterm, which, as Matt pointed out, is not a guarantee we should be skeptical of polls, even though they're the only things we have to go on a lot of the time. If that does happen, there are a lot of Democrats, especially the new DSA contingent, who basically, this is their animating issue, is really strong antipathy toward what they say.

14:34Some of them say the person of Netanyahu, but I strongly suspect that should Netanyahu at some point or when Netanyahu leaves the political scene, such people will find a new reason to dislike Israel because it's really dislike of Israel that's motivating them, not the person who has dominated Israeli politics for the past 30 years. As we'll discuss later, there are all sorts of tropes that indicate that it's not just Israel that is the source of their antipathy, but the Jewish people themselves. So this is a stronger element among Democrats. That party is well on its way toward being transformed in this regard.

15:08Some of what I've written and some of the reporting I've done suggests that at least among an incipient form in some parts of the right, broadly speaking, there is a parallel anti-Israel sentiment starting to emerge. I talked to Senator Ted Cruz about this recently, and he is very worried about this tendency. He thinks it's small but real, and basically that the Republican Party could be, if no one does anything about this, if this problem is not addressed, it could be at the very beginning of the process that the Democratic Party is now in the middle of. So if that comes to fruition, that could be a sign of a real change in U.S.-Israel relations over the next decade or so.

15:50Before we dive into that dissent in the Democratic Party, my last question for Matt on this particular topic is just about the Iran war. Bibi Netanyahu's explicitly made on his campaign platform that, you know, I'm the guy you want to finish the job against the existential threat from Iran and give me another lease on power to work with Trump to do that. Do you think that Bibi's apparent survival here, at least for, you know, we don't know how long, will influence the president's strategy in Iran and whether to re-engage before or after the midterms? Well, I think Trump has a trusted partner in Bibi Netanyahu.

16:26That doesn't mean that's frictionless. And I think Trump often complains to people sometimes about dealing with Netanyahu. But in the end of the day, they have performed as an incredible team and have really achieved quite significant goals in reshaping the Middle East and in delaying, demolishing the Iranian nuclear program, which of course has been Netanyahu's main mission, at least for the past 20 years, to stop the Iranian nuclear program. What will happen after the midterm, because I think any U.S. action is unlikely before the election, I really don't know. You know, Trump is making the preparations that would allow him to strike Iran, possibly in concert with Israel.

17:08But we don't know what duration that operation would be, at least on the American side. It might be different objectives. I think Israel's objective is to bring down the regime. I happen to think that's the only way to get to a situation where we see oil prices come down, where we are finally rid of the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon, and where, of course, the Iranian people can exercise their rights to self-government and self-determination. But Trump has, I think, more limited objectives. And I think Trump's main objective is to increase the pressure on the regime to get them to the negotiating table and also to degrade their ability to harass traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, which the attacks have been increasing in the run-up to the election.

17:55So I'm very curious to see, one, if any action does take place. I still and somewhat skeptical that Trump will decide to start shooting things up again. And two, if it does, is Israel involved? And is Israel given a permission slip to do what it wants to do, which is not just degrade and destroy the Iranian military capacity, but is to also set the conditions for the fall of the Iranian regime. And you do that by targeting the pillars of that regime, which is the security apparatus, the IRGC and the political leadership, which has shown itself to be pretty resilient since the onset of the conflict in February 28th.

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19:08From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome back to the show. I'm chatting with my colleagues, Matt Cottonetti and Jack Butler. Switching gears, now we'll talk about the U.S. midterms that are only days away, but it's related to our past conversation, including the U.S. relationship with Israel. We're going to take a quick listen to an ad that's running in Michigan by a political group that's supporting Abdul El-Sayed for Michigan's Senate seat. You're going to have to put those eggs back. They don't like eggs anymore? No, they like eggs. But we have to set that$7 aside for killing Palestinians.

19:46What? I mean, don't we give Israel$4 billion a year anyways? Yeah. And now we're giving them another$26 billion. Do you know how much that is per American taxpayer? No. It's like$161 per person. Apparently it's costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza. That's terrible. Yeah. Don't they get universal health care, too? Yeah, they do. We're paying for that, too, probably. Might as well put the bananas back. Why the f*** do we have to pay for all this? Don't cuss at me. Why does Mike Rogers care so much about what Israelis want and so little about what you want? Mike Rogers is for they, them.

20:32Abdul and Syed is for you. Jack, I mean, the 2026 election season won't be remembered for its high-minded dialogue in general or its good advertisements. There's been a number of scandals around low blow political ads, including in Ohio. But this represents a real new low in U.S. political advertising. I mean, how did we get to the point that the Overton window has moved so much that a political action committee has no second thoughts about running an ad blaming Israel for why the United States doesn't have single payer health care? Well, I hope the Overton window is not actually there yet. And the fact that Abdul El-Sayed has not really, he's essentially said, only I speak for my campaign.

21:14And he's not exactly disavowing the ad, but he seems not to want to be directly associated with it. For all of the strange things he said, I guess he wants to preserve, at the very least, his positional maneuverability and flexibility. But yeah, this is a terrible ad. Also, it's a terrible ad simply on the level of, let's go to the facts if we can. It's out of date. And that's because it's a sort of rerun or retread of an ad released two years ago when inflation was a more serious concern, when eggs did cost that much. They're much cheaper now, fortunately. So go ahead and buy them and use them in your various cooking products.

21:50But yeah, this is a disgusting ad. This is, as I was saying earlier, it is putting lie to this notion you will sometimes hear that it's just the Netanyahu government or what have you that is the problem that some people on the left have with Israel. Because this is a direct invocation of anti-Semitic tropes that go back hundreds if not thousands of years. That there's some nefarious puppet masters who are pulling strings, making it more difficult for you to buy the things that you need. The they them is, at least on the surface, a sort of coy, playful reference to the they them ad that was so successful for Trump in 2024.

22:28But they them is a classic linguistic way of describing the shadowy forces that I was referring to earlier, this malevolent presence that's responsible for everything that's going wrong in your life. Oh, and by the way, it just happens to be Jews, according to this ad. So, Abdul El-Sayed, he's trying to make sure that this ad isn't speaking for him, but he and his public persona has demonstrated a preoccupation with Israel that I think goes beyond the legitimate parameters of a foreign policy debate and gives a lot of hints as to what kind of foreign policy he actually has and what kind of foreign policy he would demonstrate as a U.S.

23:04senator were he to get elected. And this ad is, in that sense, a kind of indicative of that, even if it's not something you can directly tie to him. And Jack, I mean, I share your premise that we should start from a basic factual pattern. And on that point, I mean, the$26 billion figure that is cited in the ad is just so outrageous. I mean, that is from a supplemental package that Congress passed that included billions of dollars for restocking U.S. weapons, for extending production lines. It was part of this package, a bigger package for Ukraine and Taiwan. it basically was passed on the theory that, look, the world is getting dangerous.

23:35We have a war in Europe, a war in the Middle East, and the United States needs to take its defenses more seriously. And so to just slander that as a cash transfer to Israel, to your point, is just outrageous on the facts. Also, I have never seen a conversation like that in any grocery store anywhere. Sure. Matt, my question for you is really, is it going to backfire? Because it seems to me like El Saeed's path to victory is convincing the Michigan electorate that he's not really too radical for Michigan. And this to me seems to just, yes, he's trying to distance himself from the ad, as Jack says.

24:08But I mean, how credible is that? I don't believe he's trying to distance himself with the ad. I disagree with that premise. The response from El-Sayed's campaign to the ad was a statement by a spokesman saying that only Abdul El-Sayed speaks for his campaign. It didn't question the anti-Semitic content of the ad. It didn't demand that the ad be taken down. It didn't say anything except that only El Syed speaks for his campaign. OK, well, thanks for clearing that up. You know, you have a lot of other people speaking for your campaign. Maybe you can comment on what they're saying. The fact that he didn't distance himself from the ad is because the ad is totally in line with everything else he's been saying.

24:44Right. It's totally in line. He's been arguing this entire year that AIPAC, the Israel lobby, is manipulating American politics in order to send money to and fuel the Israeli war machine and perpetrate a so-called genocide against the Palestinian people. That is his cause, right? And that's essentially what the ad is saying as well. And I also don't think El-Sayed believes that his route to power is by somehow mollifying Mishengunders, that he's a moderate. Everything we see is quite the opposite. This is a man who went on a debate and said that Israel and Iran pose equal threats to the United States of America.

25:21That's lunacy. In fact, the only reason you would say that is if you were trying to motivate an anti-Israel, anti-Semitic base to come out and vote for you. So I do think that he's doing some type of damage control, in particular with black voters in Michigan. And I think that that electorate has always been skeptical of him, as we saw in the primary in August. And I think it's a possible real challenge to his success. But he's simply the most radical candidate we've ever seen. You know, 90 percent of his candidacy is based on opposition to the state of Israel. The other 10 percent is based on his effort to eliminate private health insurance in this country and also restructure Medicare as seniors have benefited from it for 60 years.

26:05And quite frankly, I felt slightly ill even having to listen to that ad on this program. Yes. And to move on from this dispiriting topic, before we close out, we're going to do one quick lightning round on the Cheesecake Factory drama of 2026. So this is a story, we admit, listeners, not the hardest-hitting story of the day, but nonetheless a notable one. So let's take a quick listen to what Barack Obama had to say in a speech he gave on the campaign trail over the weekend. I don't know if you've noticed, but he is very focused on home renovation. He should be on HGTV. Guys building a ballroom that is bigger than the White House.

26:46Paved over the Rose Garden. Paved it over. Put a helicopter pad on the sidewalk. And then there is just gold everywhere. What's up with the gold?

27:04And then he's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a cheesecake factory.

27:13Matt, I'm an HGTV watcher myself, so I could see some of the audience he's trying to reach for. But is this a winning political line? It's produced, you know, three days of Republican indignation at vilifying their beloved Cheesecake Factory. So I'm curious on whether you think this was a wise move by the former president of the United States. Look, the line reeked of condescension. The Cheesecake Factory, it's a place Americans go to. It's ranked ninth among the 10 most favorable food service chains. So it's very popular. It was just odd that that was the part that Obama seemed to introduce into the equation.

27:50I mean, I've been to Cheesecake Factories. They do not actually look like the Oval Office at all. And I thought it was an interesting contrast between Obama's line and a line delivered by former President Bill Clinton. And Bill Clinton's joke about the Oval Office was that he's making the Rose Garden look like the entryway to Liberace's bathroom. And that Clinton line, I thought, was very, well, Clintonian, because there was no class involved. Everyone, if you have if you're of a certain age, you know who Liberace was and you knew kind of his extravagance and everything. And it's funny, but somehow bringing up the Cheesecake Factory just was odd.

28:28And it was very Obama-esque and speaks to kind of the elite condescension that has characterized Barack Obama's politics. I should also add Democrats, or maybe it's Obama himself, insist that he be the center of their campaigns every two years. And I have no idea why. The man has not won an election in over a decade, right? And the returns on Obama's involvement in campaigns, I'd say, are pretty sketchy. You got 2018 and 2020 in the Trump era. But otherwise, MAGA populism has been a much more powerful force than Obama elitism. And so I would also take his words and his involvement with some skepticism in these final days.

29:09All right, Jack, very briefly here is the Cheesecake Factory back in style in the Republican Party. We've had Scott Besson visit a Cheesecake Factory and have lunch and say everybody should try it. But to me, most of the Republican politics has been moving away from simple American pleasures like going to the Cheesecake Factory. So is this a sign that Republicans are going back to their roots in that regard? It may be, but a warning for the sudden Cheesecake Factory fans, it will be easy to suss out the posers from the OGs. So better know what you actually like to order there if you're going to become a fan suddenly.

29:45I'm very partial to the bread myself, but that's just me. I'm a carbohydrate connoisseur. Matt and Jack, thanks so much for joining us today. That's all for Potomac Watch. You can send us your own Cheesecake Factory orders at pwpodcasts at wsj.com. We hope you'll join us again on Thursday. A t-shirt and jeans, mac and cheese, oceans and sunsets. Some things in life are an obvious match, like RIAs and Schwab Advisor Services, the number one choice for independent advisors looking for a custodian who can help them go further. With all the wealth services, technology, and support an RIA firm needs, the difference is so obvious, it's Schwabvius.

30:28Find your match and learn why custody is just the beginning at schwabvius.com.