Minority report

It seems these days everybody is obsessed with what’s happening in the US, and it’s hard not to be, what with the most wackadoodle election season in recent memory racing to a finish.

The Hebrew press is no exception Thursday, though some of its coverage is just as screwy, like an Israel Hayom front page headline trumpeting the fact that Trump rallies “have many women — and even Hispanics.”

The headline was roundly guffawed at across the interwebs Thursday morning, but it’s written by the Trump-pumping tabloid with serious-as-cancer sobriety to accompany a story crowing about the Republican candidate’s “new supporters.”

The basis for the story? Editor Boaz Bismuth attended a Trump rally, saw people of color, and celebrated by penning an overjoyed shedding of any pretense he may have maintained on not being an unabashed supporter of the Republican candidate.

“Last time I was at one of his rallies in Florida it was in March, an hour after he won the primaries, in his luxury club in Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. At his victory party were 800 people, including myself. They were almost all white. White and rich. Yesterday at his rally in Miami where I was as well there were still whites. Standing out were Hispanics, blacks and women, lots of women,” he writes. “The Trump phenomenon is seemingly an infectious ‘disease.'”

Trump isn’t the only one with festively colored minorities in his camp. Black person of interest Barack Obama’s drive to stump for Hillary Clinton is the focus of the lead stories in both Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth.

The latter festoons its front page with a picture of Obama holding a crying baby as his uncaring parents (likely Cubs fans) take a selfie, over the headline “Battle over every vote.”

In Haaretz, Chemi Shalev, camped out in North Carolina, becomes the latest person to posit that Obama could actually end up hurting Clinton as he reminds voters that she doesn’t have nearly the charisma he does.

“Obama and the First Lady have enlisted as loyal soldiers in the Clinton campaign, but they are also its undisputed superstars, and perhaps that’s also a problem. Hundreds of University of North Carolina students lined up patiently for hours and then baked themselves under a hot November sun to be able to participate in Obama’s rally. They cheered him like a rock star on a farewell tour, even though the weak sound system left most of them guessing what was being said,” he writes. “If Clinton came to town, it’s doubtful if half of them would have gone to the trouble, and that’s being generous. In this regard, Obama’s electrifying campaign speeches, like his wife’s, only accentuate the fact that, as far as oratory and charisma are concerned, Clinton n’est pas lui. Not by a long shot.

Haaretz’s real big news, though, has less to do with a future US election and more with the past Israeli one. The paper unleashes with an expose reporting that as Israelis readied to head to the polls, a paranoid Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made like an Indians fan who thinks the world is out to get him and told an unnamed reporter that the US was to blame for attempting to cause him to lose the election.

The tantalizing preview for a weekend expose about Netanyahu’s reported whining when he thought he lost the election he ended up winning includes the prime minister claiming a conspiracy involving “Washington, espionage agencies, the V15 movement that sought to unseat him, opposition leader Isaac Herzog and the Israeli media,” according to the report.

“I want to tell you that what’s happening today is election stealing,” he’s quoted telling the reporter angrily. “Nothing like this has ever happened in any democracy anywhere. Because you’re in the press, you didn’t report on this scandal here. I’m about to lose the election.”

Aside from giving a window into Netanyahu’s thought processes, the story also exposes what the prime minister really thinks about the media, as he fights a battle in the Knesset over the future of a new public broadcasting agency he wants to gut.

Yedioth, which has made clear its opposition to Netanyahu on the issue, elatedly exults over a deal between Netanyahu and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon that pushes off a vote on dismantling the corporation and may save the station, with the headline “Kahlon changes the channel.”

Analyst Sima Kadmon, upping the volume instead, sees Netanyahu’s folding on the issue after Kahlon put his foot down as yet more proof that the decider in chief only understands sticks, and not carrots.

“The prime minister has already proven in the past that he only understands force, Kahlon has already proven that he is able to take something to the end, and he’s done that again. At least for now,” she writes. “The true test will be in another three weeks when another fateful decision moment comes along.”