Obama, of course, was also an introvert. As David Axelrod, his former chief strategist, told me, Obama meant it back in 2004 when he said he wasn’t planning to run for president. After his blockbuster speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama was the subject of public fascination, and feared his new Senate colleagues wouldn’t take him seriously if they thought he was using the office as a launching pad. “We made a big effort to stay out of the national spotlight,” said Axelrod. “We stayed off the Sunday shows.”
But Democrats, including Harry Reid, then leader of the Senate Democratic caucus, kept urging Obama into the race. “That thing was as close to a draft as I have ever witnessed,” Axelrod said. Obama was in demand because of his biography, but also because, unlike most Democrats, he’d had the courage and foresight to oppose the Iraq war.
Here, too, there’s a parallel with Ossoff. In 2024, Ossoff was one of only 19 senators to sign on to Bernie Sanders’s resolution calling for an embargo on certain arms to Israel, bucking pressure from Biden’s White House. In a sober floor speech, he said, “The American people are rightly horrified by the lack of sufficient concern for innocent Palestinian life that has left so many children unnecessarily dead in Gaza, without limbs or riddled with shrapnel.” A few moments later, he added, “We seem to have forgotten that we have the power to influence our ally’s conduct.”
At the time, Ossoff’s stance seemed politically risky. “His chances of getting re-elected in 2026 just became that much harder,” said the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. But today, much of the Democratic Party’s mainstream is where Ossoff was two years ago, with even the ur-centrist Rahm Emanuel, who once volunteered with the Israeli Defense Forces, calling for a cutoff of military aid. The moral position, in retrospect, was also the savvy one. Voters “want to believe that there are leaders out there who are willing to draw lines and who aren’t so obsessed with their own perpetuation in office that they’re willing to sacrifice all principles to get there,” said Axelrod.
Ossoff, who was sworn into office on the Hebrew Bible of Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, an ally of Martin Luther King Jr., is not an anti-Zionist. “I want the Israeli people to be safe and secure,” he told me. “I make no apology for opposing the reckless killing of noncombatants.” This position will not satisfy either AIPAC or the Democratic Socialists of America. But it would be hard for Ossoff’s opponents to tar him as either an antisemite or as someone who was complicit in the atrocities that occurred while Biden was president.
