Likud planned anti-Obama campaign ad in 2015, scrapped it — report

During the 2015 election campaign, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud reportedly planned, and later scrapped, negative campaign ads against then-US president Barack Obama, based on internal Likud polls of Israeli voters indicating most were negatively predisposed toward the US leader, the Haaretz daily reports.

Likud commissioned 18 polls ahead of Netanyahu’s decision to call early elections, the paper says.

Three of the surveys included questions on public perceptions of Obama and then-US secretary of state John Kerry, on the heels of the failed US-led peace talks and as the US inched toward finalizing the nuclear deal with Iran.

In one, 54 percent held a negative view of Obama, including 22% of respondents who described their view as “very negative.”

Some 53% also described their opinion of Kerry as negative in the same survey. Another poll had 52% of respondents express a negative opinion of Obama, with 34% holding a positive view of the US president.

On the basis of these findings, Likud had reportedly planned a negative campaign ad on social media, focusing on an unflattering photo of Obama on the phone, with the tagline: “We aren’t interested in who answers the phone in the United States; we’re interested only in the security concerns of the State of Israel.”