And there’s no place on earth that can use a makeover more than Israel. So Israel is launching a rebranding effort, starting in Toronto:

Residents of Toronto shouldn’t be surprised if they soon start hearing and seeing a lot of references to Israeli wine, art and music in the next year or so. The city has been selected by the Foreign Ministry as a North American test city for its rebranding project.

Lest this be thought of as just a snow job, one of the principals behind the project explains:

“There’s a lot of confusion about branding,” said Aharoni. “People hear it and they think of advertising campaigns and PR. But it’s mainly it’s an attempt to change the mindset of people when it comes to Israel - it’s not putting on a spin. It’s about communicating through more than one channel. Right now we only communicate through the conflict.”

As for why Israel is undertaking such an effort:

[T]he hope-for result is a change in peoples’ perception of Israel, explained Aharoni.

“That’s the whole point - people don’t understand that Israel has a wonderful brand, and we need that opportunity to communicate that brand on more than just that one conflict channel,” he said.

“There are experts who have told us, ‘first you have to resolve the conflict.’ Well, thank you very much, that’s very nice. We don’t need an expert to tell us that.

But what we’re saying is that given there’s a conflict - or despite the conflict - we can still improve Israel’s performance on these other fronts of trade, tourism and cultural connections.”

Yes indeed, there’s a lot of room for improvement. And every little bit helps.

Rasmussen polled people to find out what they thought of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Here are some of the findings (out of the order in which the article lists them, and in the order in which they interest me, since I’ve been following this mostly as a media story rather than as a political story). The highlighting is mine:

Sixty-six percent (66%) of voters say they have read, seen, or heard news stories about Wright’s comments.

Pastor Jeremiah Wright, who has become part of the national political dialogue in recent days, is viewed favorably by 8% of voters nationwide. … 58% have an unfavorable view of the Pastor

Last Thursday, 52% of voters nationwide had a favorable opinion of Obama. That figure has fallen to 47% on Monday (see recent daily results).

Seventy-three percent (73%) of voters say that Wright’s comments are racially divisive. That opinion is held by 77% of White voters and 58% of African-American voters.

Most voters, 56%, said Wright’s comments made them less likely to vote for Obama.

In recent days, Obama has also lost ground to John McCain in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

I didn’t need this poll to tell me that the revelations about Wright would lead to revulsion on the part of most people who heard about it.

Derbyshire puts it best today at The Corner:

I repeat: Obama’s toast. He may yet get the Democratic nomination, but tens of millions of Americans who are neither (a) black nor (b) guilty white liberals are simply appalled that Obama would revere a guy like Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, whatever the particularities of which services he did and didn’t attend. It defies belief thatObama knew this man for all that time, intimately enough to have him supervise at the Obama wedding and the children’s baptisms, yet did not know that Wright is a white-hating, America-hating crank. Who on earth believes this?

In brief, fairly or not, this long, close Obama family association with the Reverend makes people doubt the Magic Negro image, which, in turn, is what drove the Obama “movement.”

The range of opinions in the blogosphere is nothing short of astonishing. The prize for nonchalant cluelessness goes to Ana Marie Cox [emphasis is mine]:

At first, I thought the Rev. Wright story might sour people on Obama. When it first [re-]broke last week, all an Obama adviser could offer as spin was, “It will give the senator a chance to talk about the role of religion in his life.” At the time, it seemed very optimistic to think that Obama’s smooth eloquence could complete — and win — against Wright’s fiery rhetoric. Now, after the assist they got from John McCain (who may have been thinking about how the MSM interpreted his own, much less intimate relationship with Rev. Hagee), the mangled coverage of Wright could raise enough doubts about the Reverend’s role in Obama’s beliefs* that Obama will not be too bruised by the media dust-up – and maybe even can use it as an opportunity to talk about his faith.

One of her commenters set her straight:

As far as people “souring” on Obama, I can’t see how mainstream, non-Ward Churchill-type Democrats, much less “Independents and some Republicans” won’t be shocked and offended–once it’s blanketing the airwaves in key states courtesy of Republican 527’s. And then there’s the “Israel is being attacked!” folks who are moderate and conservative Jews sensitive to anti-semitism, and extremely pro-Israel conservative church-going Christians who will be newly energized against Democrats in the fall–just what the McCain campaign would love. … “God Damn America”? How does that square with the 50 State Strategy, I wonder?

I could be wrong, though. This guy may be bulletproof–”I didn’t inhale” seemed to work, too.

Andrew Sullivan is still making a valiant effort to defend his candidate, and for good PC measure he asks us to be fair to the Rev. Wright too, to see the good things he has done with his ministry. (Sullivan is way less than convincing about another Obama “scandal”; he links to a piece in the ChiTrib that’s supposed to exonerate our candidate of corruption; apparently a thorough reporting indicates that the “scandal” reveals “just poor judgment” on Obama’s part. I remind Sullivan that Obama has been trying to sell us on his superior judgment about Iraq. A Google search indicates that, as of this writing, Obama’s judgment is being called into question all over the place.)

Ross Douthat highlighted Ezra Klein’s “liberal cluelessness” here:

As to Ezra’s larger point, of course it’s “fine” to be a white Christian extremist in America; it’s also fine to be a black Christian extremist like Jeremiah Wright. This is a free country, after all. … Wright isn’t just Obama’s supporter; he’s his pastor, his friend, and his spiritual mentor, which makes him exactly the kind of person whose views ought to be of interest to a public that’s considering electing Barack Obama President of the United States. And as to the substance of those views, well, if Ezra really thinks that Wright’s sermons have sparked controversy because he broke a taboo against getting angry over the fact that “blacks have suffered a long history of oppression in this country” and “still face deep institutional discrimination,” I would suggest that he take another look at them, paying particular attention to Wright’s remarks about 9/11, as well as what appears to be his suggestion that the U.S. government created not only the crack epidemic, but the AIDS epidemic as well.

TigerHawk parses the situation dispassionately. And his commenters offer interesting detail:

TUCC is part of the Liberation Theology movement, which attempts to and does do a lot of good work in underserved communities. It has a quasi-Marxist philosohy that emphasizes the exploitation of the weak by the powerful, and that the teachings of Jesus call on Christians not only to help the weak, but to deal with the power structures that unjustly created their situations in the first place. In the sense that Jesus was a rebel against the status quo of 2000 years ago, these churches want to significantly change the culture today.

Obama is a smart man and might be a capable POTUS, but he would clearly be the most “progressive” person ever elected to that position, more so than FDR. He “came to” Jesus becasue of the appeal to him of Liberation Theology, and how it fit with his desire to do good works in the community, notwithstanding the other more mainstream churches that also had extensive community involvement (almost any AME church).

Here’s the comment that struck me:

Barak [sic; please apply to all misspellings --ed.] is associated with that. It is as if there is a public Barak, and a down home Barak. He has become an equivocal figure. He is not longer a man with a simple and appealing message. He is a man with a complex message and part of it is in code and not suitable for the general public.

Barak has now been revealed as not really having found a way to bridge the gap between the black community and the rest of America. It seemed like maybe he had found a way, but now it is clear he is multilingual and has different phrases for different constituencies.

When people talk about a dialogue between the races, as if that would be transforming, they usually suggest that the dialogue should be open, candid and honest. Barak, with one foot firmly planted on each side of the chasm, is neutralized. He can’t take sides. He also can’t facilitate because each side would want to see him champion their cause. So at the end of the day he can’t even talk about race honestly to the American public. What an astonishing situation.

At TAPPED, someone concedes that the Wright story is sticky, but blames racism and a Bill Kristol error, not Obama or his pastor, for the mess.

And what a fine mess it is.

I understand (and you will too, if you read this article from 2000, for example) that in order to build his credibility in the black community in Chicago, Obama had to choose where to put down roots. Many in that community thought he wasn’t black enough, that he was uppity; so it was an uphill struggle for him. Still, he made it.

When he knew he was going to take the leap to run for office, though, he should have distanced himself from Wright. That’s the bottom line.

Oprah was smart enough to do that (according to an article from 2002 that Tom Maguire links to here). Obama should have done the same.]

Finis.