http://lobelog.com/aipacs-democrat-problems-go-beyond-obama/#more-31134

AIPAC’s Democrat Problems Go Beyond Obama

by Ali Gharib
Last week, journalists Josh Rogin and Eli Lake published a piece at Bloomberg Businessweek explaining how the influential pro-Israel lobby AIPAC came to be defeated in the biggest fight in a generation. The story holds important truths. It’s essentially about the tough spot AIPAC was put in by the Obama administration’s hardball tactics to protect the achievement of the nuclear deal with Iran, hardly a surprise given the stakes at hand. “The unprecedented level of personal engagement by the president, his senior staff, and several top cabinet officials and the amount of pressure from the administration plus its allies dwarfed whatever effort AIPAC could mount,” Rogin and Lake wrote. In contrast to the Obama administration’s aggressive outreach, they wrote, AIPAC tried to perform a delicate dance of encouraging Democrats to peel off from their party without declaring a scorched-earth war against those who held firm—which ended up being huge majorities of Democrats in both houses of Congress. As Lake succinctly put it with regard to AIPAC in a tweet, “They weren’t nasty enough.”http://lobelog.com/aipacs-democrat-problems-go-beyond-obama/#more-31134