Arizona Senator John McCain criticized President Barack Obama’s record on Israel in Little Havana Thursday, while Weston Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz defended it at an event in Tamarac.
The Republican who was Obama’s opponent four years ago said that proof of the president’s failed relationship with Israel can be seen in the region’s most volatile issue.
“We know there that’s there been no progress in the Palestinian-Israeli issue because Obama started out by demanding a freeze of Israeli settlements. That’s just a fact,” McCain told NBC 6 South Florida in Little Havana, where the Republicans brought a bus to focus on the Hispanic vote.
Meantime, the Democrats rolled into Tamarac on their own bus to court seniors at the Kings Point Clubhouse. That’s where Wasserman Schultz, who represents the 20th Congressional District in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, touted Obama’s handling of U.S.-Israel relations.
“Ehud Barak, the defense minister, the most decorated military veteran in Israel, has said that Israel has no greater friend than Barack Obama, so President Obama has been there in word and deed,” she said.
The 2012 candidates are squarely focused on the swing states. Republican nominee and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney politicked at a café in Cincinnati, Ohio on Thursday, while Obama campaigned in Tampa, where he didn’t kiss a baby but danced with one. Later in the day he cast an early vote in his hometown of Chicago.
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McCain condemned the administration’s handling of the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. He said that it was either a cover-up – “or massive incompetency that makes the president not qualified to be commander-in-chief.”
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The assault on Sept. 11 that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans and its aftermath has become a major issue in the presidential campaign, focused on the evolving Obama administration explanations.
For her part, Wasserman Schultz went on the offensive by emphasizing that Romney is out of touch with everyday Americans.
“Mitt Romney’s campaign, they have a handful of billionaires trying to buy him the White House – and we have a people-powered, people-fueled campaign,” she said. “We have stood up the largest, most dynamic grassroots presidential campaign our state has ever seen and the country has ever seen.”
