Bibi the King of comeback

(Yossi Verter -Haaretz)A few days after he was defeated in the 1999 election, two of Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu's close aides paid him a visit at the Prime Minister's Residence in Jerusalem. Netanyahu was sitting there alone, engrossed in the newspapers. He looked up at them and said, "Nu, we need to start thinking about what to do." "About what?" they asked. "About how to come back," Netanyahu said impatiently. "How to come back to power. We need to start working on it." Aside from Yitzhak Shamir, all of Israel's prime ministers during the past couple of decades have followed the dictum: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. History teaches us that making a political comeback could take more time than that. It took Rabin 15 years to return for a second, successful term; 8 years on and Barak is still trying and will certainly try again; Shimon Peres - well, his case hardly needs mentioning. And Netanyahu, 10 years later, is still running around, imploring and paying. And this is child's play compared to what awaits him on the job. Livni claims that the public largely saw these elections as a choice between individual candidates and hence, as the one who won the highest number of seats, she should become prime minister. No, argues Netanyahu, my personal achievement is just as great - first off, the right-wing parties, which won a solid majority over the center-left bloc, were all saying: Netanyahu will be the prime minister. Give us your votes so we will join him, Second, asserts Netanyahu, my electoral achievement significantly dwarfs Livni's: I brought the Likud's Knesset representation from 12 all the way up to 27 - I more than doubled it, and that's before counting the soldiers' votes. Livni won one seat less for Kadima than the party had had in the outgoing Knesset. Therefore, I deserve the top job.