"We just need to wait him out..... he is a one-term president he’s weak...”

Politico/ here

"When Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu faced off with President Barack Obama over housing in Jerusalem earlier this month, he was facing a distracted American leader whose presidency hung in the balance.

When he goes to the White House on Tuesday night, he’ll find Obama at the moment of his administration’s greatest success, a shift that may affect Obama’s negotiating power in ways both subtle and dramatic.

Obama’s health care victory may prove a decisive pivot point in the way he is viewed both domestically and abroad and in how powerful a negotiator he is perceived to be by foreign leaders. And nowhere is that true more than in Israel, a place obsessed with American politics.

“Every time I met with an Arab diplomat or anyone from the Middle East, including Israelis, they would invariably ask me, ‘How’s health care going?’” said former Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), who retired in December to become president of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace. “And the first couple [of] times, I didn’t really realize what they were actually asking. They were asking, ‘How strong is the president of the United States?’”

Netanyahu’s aides have recently confided that they see Obama as a weak leader whose tenure they can weather, but that calculus may now have to change. After his health care victory, says Wexler, “the president is now a much stronger president, and that will play out in a variety of ways in the Middle East, and also in his direct relations with the leaders in the region, especially Prime Minister Netanyahu.”.........

“Definitely Bibi’s inner circle ... their strategy has almost literally ... been to wait out Obama,” said one Washington Middle East hand who asked for anonymity. Even as recently as last month, Netanyahu’s advisers were saying, ‘We just need to wait him out.’ They [thought] he is a one-term president and that he’s weak.”

Asked about those reports, Wexler said he wasn’t “certain that was [Netanyahu’s] strategy. But if it was, I think that strategy today is dead.”

Administration officials indicated an empowered Obama would not press any new demands on the parties. “Neither our commitment nor our goal has changed,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference the morning after Obama’s health care victory. “The United States will continue to encourage all parties to take steps that advance the prospects for peace.”....