The Obama Effect in Israel

The Israeli elections are looming, and the latest polls suggest a victory for the Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu. It would be hard to imagine politicians more different than Netanyahu and Barack Obama, but a reader who clicks on the English-language Likud site might be forgiven for assuming otherwise: anyone who spent time on Barackobama.com would find the Likud site designed in almost the same way--down to a "mynetanyahu" social networking site, modeled on mybarackobama.com.

Likud isn't the only Israeli party to have imitated Obama's tactics (although Likud seems to have managed it more successfully--Ha'aretz reported that 50 percent of its campaign budget went to online material). Ha'aretz also reported that at the start of the campaign, the left-leaning Meretz Party invited to Israel Obama campaign consultants David Fenton and Tom Mazzei. The party's campaign chair said that"we intend to wage a massive campaign on the Internet, and we see the social networking sites and blogs as a serious tool that we intend to use widely."

As the Israeli elections have shown, Obama's tactics aren't ideology-specific.