He is grappling with the Republican Party’s prickly and demanding ideological blocs, particularly evangelical leaders and pro-Israel hawks.
.. Other wealthy donors, mindful of their power to reshape the Republican race with “super PAC” donations, have been more direct: The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson recently made what two people briefed on it described as an “animated” call to one of Mr. Bush’s top supporters after former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Bush adviser, criticizedPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in a speech in March.
In January, Mr. Bush’s allies started using the phrase “shock and awe” to describe his plan to lock up as many of the party’s major donors and policy experts as possible. The intent was to make him the sole credible contender for the blessing of the Republican establishment.
Israel Election Result Complicates Life for Clinton
Support for the government is strong among what people close to Mrs. Clinton estimate to be about a 10 percent sliver of wealthy and influential moderate Democratic Jews for whom Israel is a priority, and could be a reason to withhold their financial backing, if not support a Republican candidate.
.. This is the stuff of dreams for Republicans. For them, and especially the party’s neoconservatives, Mr. Netanyahu’s victory was a good omen.
Is It Sheldon Adelson’s World?
At this same conference Adelson was quoted as saying that Israel would not be able to survive as a democracy: “So Israel won’t be a democratic state,” he added. “So what?”
.. I’m sure Adelson cares deeply about Israel, but he lacks any sense of limits in how he exercises his extraordinary financial power — power he is using to simultaneously push Israel and America toward eliminating any two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians, toward defunding the Palestinian Authority and toward a confrontation with Iran, not a diplomatic solution. People need to know this.
Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and Fund-Raising for the 2016 Presidential Race
But we discuss the damage being done to Chris Christie’s presidential dreams by the defection of potential donors without digressing to underscore the perversity of a small circle of people having so much consequence.
We report, as we did in January, on how well or poorly Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz performed when they spoke at a gathering put together by the Kochs in Southern California. But we don’t flag the oddity of these auditions, the chilling bizarreness of the way the road to the White House winds not only through the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary but also through plutocrats’ posh retreats.
An astonishing bounty of the comments and developments that make headlines emanate from the arena of fund-raising. We learned that Mitt Romney might enter the 2016 race because he was telling donors as much, and we learned that he had decided otherwise because he was letting donors know.