"No Confidence Vote" For Obama

President Obama has already proven unable to move public opinion in favor of his health-care bill—in fact, the more he speaks, the more the people hate it. And Dick Morris explains what Obama's drop in public opinion polls implies for his political power in general.

Superficially, the United States appears to have a presidential system, but in fact it more and more resembles a parliamentary form of government. When a president loses the approval of the majority of the voters and polls reflect that his ratings have fallen substantially below 50 percent, he loses his power. In this context, polls are like parliamentary votes of no confidence in European systems. While the government does not fall if it loses in the polling, it limps on until either its ratings improve or it is voted out of office at the next election.

Under normal circumstances, such a loss of political power would have a deleterious effect on US interests overseas, since foreign adversaries would feel free to ignore a weakened president. (It was the collapse of George Bush's political power in 2006, for example, which emboldened Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf to negotiate a truce with the Taliban.) Unfortunately, such a weakening is impossible in this case, since Obama's foreign policy cannot possibly get any weaker. He is already committed, on principle, to reducing America's influence in the world.

But there is one area where Obama's dwindling political power will have a beneficial influence. It is already emboldening Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to vigorously resist pressure from the Obama administration to sacrifice Israeli interests to the Palestinians. And according to an op-ed in the New York Times by the editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, "no Israeli political figure has stood up to Mr. Netanyahu and begged him to support Mr. Obama; not even the Israeli left, desperate for a new agenda, has adopted Mr. Obama as its icon."

"US Warns Israel: Don't Build Up West Bank Corridor,

Aluf Benn, Haaretz, July 24 The US administration has issued a stiff warning to Israel not to build in the area known as E-1, which lies between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim. Any change in the status quo in E-1 would be "extremely damaging," even "corrosive," the message said….

The plans for E-1 call for building 3,500 housing units, along with commercial areas and tourism sites, to create a single urban expanse stretching from Jerusalem to Ma'aleh Adumim and strengthen Israel's hold on East Jerusalem, which would then be completely surrounded by Jewish neighborhoods.

At Sunday's cabinet meeting, however, Netanyahu rejected this American stance. "United Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Our sovereignty in it is not subject to appeal, and among other things, this means that Jerusalem residents can buy apartments anywhere in the city," he said. "We cannot accept the idea that Jews should not have the right to live and buy anywhere in Jerusalem."