It’s easy enough to look at Governors Perry and Romney, on the one hand, and President Obama, on the other hand, and reckon which one is better on Israel. We say that even though these columns have stood apart from those who are prepared to assert that Mr. Obama is anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic. We don’t believe he is either. We understand he has done some important, unheralded things for Israel. Yet we also believe his public diplomacy in the Mideast has been exactly what Mr. Perry said it was — “naïve, arrogant, misguided and dangerous.” That’s plain even to the voters in such a Democratic Party redoubt as the 9th Congressional District in New York, whose new congressman, Robert “Bob” Turner was standing with Mr. Perry when he made his remarks in New York today.

The harder question is where Messrs. Perry and Romney are going to be in respect of the United States Congress. We started covering this facet of the Middle East struggle at the urging of Senator Moynihan in the 1990s, when America decided to bring in the Republicans to run the Congress and the Congress decided to assert itself on Israel. Its demarche was a law that had bi-partisan support and was designed to get the American embassy in Israel moved to the country’s capital at Jerusalem. It passed the measure in 1995, but, at the motion of one of the Democrats, Senator Feinstein, it inserted at the last moment a way for the president to dodge the issue through the use of a waiver. President Clinton promptly availed himself of the waiver, and used it until George W. Bush acceded to the presidency.

One of the promises on which Mr. Bush had campaigned was that were he elected he would start the process of moving the American embassy to Jerusalem on the first day of his administration. In the event, he started signing the same waiver of which Mr. Clinton had made use. The process continued all through Mr. Bush’s otherwise heroic presidency. In 2002, Congress, to underscore its intentions on Jerusalem, passed a law requiring the State Department to issue to any American born in Jerusalem a document, if the parents wanted it, recording the birth as being in Israel. Mr. Bush issued a signing statement saying he wouldn’t enforce the law.

Many were inclined to give Mr. Bush a pass on these points, particularly after September 11, 2001, when he had become a wartime leader and had so much on his plate. Americans sensed his heart was in the right place, a point that was underscored by his relationship with Prime Minister Sharon, who had once hosted Mr. Bush when, as governor of Texas, he made an early visit to the Jewish state. As his presidency was drawing to a close, Mr. Bush made his view clear with a speech to the Knesset that may never be equaled by an American president in its fervor and passion. He grounded his understanding of Israel’s own standing in God’s promise to Abraham.

Mr. Bush’s waivers — the ones started by President Clinton — are now being continued by President Obama, and he, too, is refusing to issue the birth documents Congress wants issued to Americans born in Jerusalem. Carrying out Mr. Obama’s policies is now a state secretary, Hillary Clinton, who, when she was a senator, actually voted for the law she is refusing to obey. The matter is now before the Supreme Court, which has ordered the lawyers briefing the case to focus on whether the law “impermissibly infringes the President’s power to recognize foreign sovereigns.”

The thing that strikes us is that the best way to solve this problem would be to elevate to the presidency a candidate who agrees with the Congress on the underlying substance — and who has the mettle to face down an recalcitrant department of state. Jerusalem is important not only in its own right but because it is a so-called final status issue, the knottiest of the problems. There are those who reckon the maneuvering of the issue to the end of the peace process rather than the start is one reason the whole matter has dragged on so long.

We are in this extraordinary moment where, as the New York Times reports this morning, an American president, in Mr. Obama, is enlisting an Israeli premier, in Mr. Netanyahu, to lobby a Congress that is more hard-line — more principled we would argue — than either of them. The topic on which Messrs. Obama and Netanyahu reportedly agree turns out to be aid to the Palestinian Arabs. We’ll see how that sits with the new chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Wouldn’t the logical course be to seek a president — a Perry? a Romney? a Palin? — who was prepared to credit a role for the Congress and stand with it at the water’s edge.