Washington Post columnist George Will on Sunday excoriated Democrats for initially failing to acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in their official party platform, only to reverse course and amend the platform at last week’s national convention despite a chorus of booing from delegates.
In his regular appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Will did cut Democrats some slack for excising the word “God” from the platform, which he said could be excused as a simple oversight.
“[Taking] God out may have been an act of omission,” Will said. “God will take care of [himself]. But removing the capital of Israel was an act of commission. You go out on the street of any American city — you go out in Newark, stop someone and say, ‘What is the capital of Delaware, Vermont and Israel?’ Some people are going to know, Dover. Some people are going to know Montpelier. Everyone except the American State Department knows that the capital of Israel is Jerusalem.”
Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who served as Democratic platform committee co-chair when the platform was drafted, emphasized that President Barack Obama was quick to ask party officials to reinsert both God and Jerusalem into the platform.
“When the president of the United States found out about it, he could have just let it be,” Booker said. “He intervened.”
Booker then took aim at Mitt Romney, whose views on certain issues, including abortion rights, differ from the Republican Party platform.
“What Romney has done, he found out about differences between he and his platform — he simply just tried to stiff-arm them like a football game and distanced him from his platform that doesn’t agree with him,” Booker said. “We have a party right now, where our president [and] our platform are beautifully aligned, and when we found changes we went through the process of changing them. Let’s talk about substantive differences now between platforms, not this rhetorical stuff that’s being used to bash and distract them.”