How Dan Senor became the GOP candidate’s key emissary to Israel’s intelligentsia and the Washington policy scene Four years ago, then-Sen. Barack Obama embarked on a whistle-stop tour that included stops in Baghdad, Kabul, Amman, Jerusalem, Berlin, and London. It wasn’t the first quasi-diplomatic mission by an aspiring leader of the free world—Ronald Reagan, for one, traveled to Tehran in 1978 in anticipation of the 1980 campaign—but Obama’s trip created a new template for candidates wishing to project authority and gravitas in the foreign-policy arena. Obama, of course, had spent considerable time living abroad as a child, but the trip showcased him doing the kinds of things the American people like to imagine presidents can credibly do, like playing basketball with grinning soldiers in Baghdad or electrifying a capacity crowd from an outdoor podium in Berlin. In Israel, a country he had already visited once as a sitting senator, Obama had another objective: putting to rest the persistent notion, prevalent among Florida voters, that he didn’t have sufficient feeling for the Jewish state in his kishkes. Hence the indelible image of the senator standing in front of a bank of spent rocket casings, brandishing a T-shirt emblazoned “I ♥ Sderot.”
The goal for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, when he lands in Jerusalem this weekend, is precisely the opposite. Rather than showing how much he really, really likes Israelis, the presumptive Republican nominee is going to the Promised Land to give its Jews the opportunity to demonstrate how much they really, really like him. Romney will engage in meetings with leaders from across Israel’s political spectrum and hold a $50,000-a-head fundraiser for visiting and expat Americans at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. But the visual highlight of the trip will come Sunday night, when Romney is scheduled to join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in breaking the ritual fast of Tisha b’Av, a holiday commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples that lends itself to assertions of modern Zionist pride. The point, plainly, is to advertise Romney’s ability to elicit from Netanyahu a degree of personal warmth that has eluded the president through his first term—the kind of spontaneous, unstudied closeness last seen between the legendary chaverim Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin.
Romney’s visit is the brainchild of two other men: Ron Dermer, the American-born political operative who is Netanyahu’s chief strategist and speechwriter and, more importantly, Dan Senor, a Republican politico-turned-investor who is a close adviser to the Romney campaign. Senor—who is famous in pro-Israel circles as the author of the best-selling 2009 book Start-Up Nation—has taken Romney to Israel twice before, once in 2007, before the governor’s first presidential bid, and again last year. This spring, he accompanied New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who has endorsed Romney, to the prime minister’s office in Givat Ram to meet with Netanyahu and Dermer. But the current trip, coming so late in the campaign season, was planned quietly, for fear of provoking a possible last-minute visit by President Obama, who has been criticized by some Jewish groups for failing to return to Jerusalem since his inauguration. Late last month, while Senor was in Jerusalem for his niece’s bat mitzvah, he met Dermer for breakfast at the King David Hotel; a few days later, with the Romney campaign’s blessing, Dermer gave the scoop to the New York Times.
To some, Senor remains best known as the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority, a role that made him a regular television fixture in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion. In the years since, he’s reinvented himself as a cable news commentator and Israel advocate and has simultaneously amassed his own fortune working on Wall Street. He is, even among people who vehemently disagree with his politics, a popular guy who moves with equal ease in New York and Washington. He arrived in the governor’s camp with his own celebrity, and, in a sense, he offers the socially awkward candidate the thing his campaign most craves: an easy ability to make people like him. More importantly, Senor has been a vital emissary over the past six years for Romney not just to the Israelis and the American Jewish community, but to a Republican foreign-policy establishment that, even today, remains somewhat alien territory.
“Dan was hugely helpful in introducing the governor to his friends and colleagues,” said Beth Myers, Romney’s longtime aide-de-camp and a top campaign adviser. “He’s a huge validator.”
Senor arrived at his current role by way of an itinerant and mostly accidental career that has afforded him access to a wide range of very powerful, very famous, and very rich people. As an ambitious college intern on the Hill, he caught the attention of William Kristol, the editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard, who gave him entree into the neoconservative circle surrounding George W. Bush. Senor eventually became the face of the Bush Administration’s efforts in Iraq, both during his time in Baghdad and later as a television pundit; while he was in Baghdad, he met his future wife, Campbell Brown, then a reporter for NBC. In between he went to Harvard Business School, worked for the Carlyle Group, and started a private-equity firm with his classmate and friend Chris Heinz, stepson of former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry.
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Poster Comment:
More vomit at the link: the usual suspects Bill Kristol/AIPAC/etc.