I’ve seen Frank Luntz on TV a bunch of times and I’ve always found him to be a pretty interesting guy.  He’s definitely passionate about what he does.  Last week, I participated in a focus group with Frank at his office in Old Town Alexandria.  I was one of about 30 participants who showed up for the 3-hour session.  The subject of the evening was Israel.  It was a pretty interesting experience.  Before we started, they gave us sandwiches from Panera.  I had the smoked turkey, which was pretty solid.  Then we filled out a pretty lengthy questionnaire, watched a series of informational videos, news clips, and speeches.  We got to use those cool dials, or “Perception Analyzers,” Frank uses on TV when he’s doing a live focus group.  The dial knob goes from 0 to 100.  You start at 50–which is neutral.  When you hear something you like, you turn the dial up closer to 100.  When you don’t like what you hear, you turn the dial toward 0.  We’d watch a short clip and react.  Then his assistant would tell us, “Back to 50.”

The group seemed to be pretty evenly split between McCain and Obama voters.  Frank was pretty funny, cracking jokes here and there, but he also seemed a little stressed.  Even most of the conservatives in the group seemed to dislike Benjamin Netanyahu.  By my count, it was just myself and another guy who liked Netanyahu.  I told the group that Netanyahu strikes me as a decisive leader who’d protect my family and follow the terrorists to the gates of hell.  Others called him arrogant.  All and all the group struck me as being pretty slanted toward the Palestinian side.  The operation to stop the blockade runners definitely hurt Israel in the public relations department.  I think that Israel’s response to the blockade running was perfectly reasonable, but I was certainly in the minority.

The group overwhelmingly believed that Washington should cut foreign aid to Israel and seemed to indicate a general dissatisfaction with current U.S. foreign disbursements.  I think we should cut foreign aid across the board.  We hand out free money and frequently get nothing in return.  The entire point of foreign aid is to provide a return on investment.  Our aid disbursements are meant to advance the national interest and it seems like the vast majority of our aid programs simply don’t achieve that objective.  I think we could certainly look at reducing our foreign aid package to Israel.  They have nuclear weapons and an impressive conventional military and an economy capable of sustaining its military power and modernizing its forces, as necessary.

You can sign up to participate in a focus group with Frank Luntz here.  It’s a pretty good time, if you like politics and current events.  Plus they feed you and pay you for your time.