Israel Shows Hallmarks of New Style of Politicking

Ehud Barak, a mike on his lapel and pancake makeup on his cheeks, toured a food-processing factory here and then posed for pictures with the Bamba Baby, a man dressed in fuzzy blue diapers and fuzzy orange slippers.

“The Bamba Baby for Barak,” Israel’s most decorated soldier proclaimed, mugging for the cameras alongside the factory mascot.

And thus Barak, head of the Labor Party and its candidate for prime minister in May 17 elections, spent another day on the campaign trail, a place where he is struggling to apply the advice of American political consultants but where, sometimes, he still looks quite uncomfortable.

A brainy but stiff politician whom no one would ever call Mr. Charisma, Barak is being coached by none other than the irrepressible image-maker of high-profile American Democrats, James Carville. The candidate and former army commander is being told to “focus.” Sharpen the message. Simplify.

It is a work in progress.

For more than two decades, Israeli politicians have turned to U.S. consultants for election advice. But never before have American fingerprints been so visible as in this year’s race for prime minister.

From the use of U.S.-based advisors and the influx of American money to the campaigning via the Internet and the drafting of election reform legislation, Israelis are seeing a steady Americanization of their political system.

There’s even been a scandal befitting Washington: two mysterious break-ins at D.C. offices doing campaign work for the Labor Party--incidents that wags here immediately dubbed the Israeli Watergate.

The importance of the American role has grown, for good and for bad, as Israel’s political system has changed and evolved from a traditional parliamentary government dominated by one or two parties to its current hybrid.

Before 1996, Israelis voted for a party’s list of candidates to fill the parliament, or Knesset, and the party with the most votes usually appointed its leader prime minister. Since the passage of a “direct election” reform measure in 1992, Israelis have continued to vote for a party’s list of candidates for parliament, but they vote separately for a prime minister. The first direct election was held in 1996. The second will be next month’s.

The changes led to a proliferation of small parties but also forced the big parties to hold primaries, generally transforming the nature of the prime ministerial election campaign. In the past, party platforms and issues counted more than individual candidates; prime ministers, who were usually retired army generals, did not have to be charming, just tough.

Today, in a more superficial process, the personality, quirks and foibles of the candidate have taken center stage--providing fertile ground for Carvillian image-makers.

In fact, Israeli political experts say, having an American advisor has become an indispensable tool for candidates. It also helps psych out your opponent, they say.

Incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who raised the art of American-style politicking to new heights in Israel, is again relying on the high-paid Arthur Finkelstein, veteran of numerous conservative Republican campaigns, to wage his battle for reelection.

The two are credited with--or, depending on whose perspective, blamed for--introducing the first real American-style campaign in Netanyahu’s victorious 1996 bid for prime minister, a rambunctious fight notable for its negative ads and sound-bite packaging.

Barak and the Labor Party followed suit this year by hiring Carville and a pricey team of pollsters and advisors, including Stanley Greenberg and Robert Shrum. The Labor Party acknowledges privately that its 1996 campaign, in which former Prime Minister Shimon Peres was the candidate, took repeated sucker punches from the Netanyahu camp.

Peres allowed Netanyahu to cast him in an unfavorable light, as someone who would sacrifice the Jewish hold on the disputed city of Jerusalem, and he never recovered. It is a mistake that Carville, especially, counsels against, advocating a rapid-response game plan for any attack coming from Netanyahu and his Likud Party.

“In ‘96, Netanyahu understood the rules of the game much better than we did,” Isaac Herzog, senior advisor to Barak and son of Israel’s sixth president, said in an interview at his Tel Aviv law offices.

“Our campaign was tied to the old mechanisms of Labor. This year, we are much more focused, much more lean and mean. . . . The American participation has been very important. They understand what it means to adjust to a new society.”

On Carville’s instructions, Barak is inaugurating a War Room in a Tel Aviv office building. Off limits to all but a few party insiders, it is patterned after the secretive command-and-control center where Carville and a small group of strategists engineered the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton.

Outside influence in national elections in Israel--including the infusion of millions of dollars from American Jews--is a double-edged sword; Israelis are increasingly resentful of what they see as meddling. But the politicians welcome the money and, they say, the degree of discipline and professionalism that the seasoned advisors bring.

Carville, Finkelstein, et al. are reportedly paid princely sums for their efforts. In fact, in another imitation of their American counterparts, campaigns in Israel have become extremely expensive. Because they are underwritten in large part by U.S. money, numerous Israeli politicians are engaged in active fund-raising in the States.

Campaign reform legislation in 1994 made it illegal for non-Israelis to contribute directly to Israeli candidates and parties. It also set caps on how much candidates may receive. But, as in the U.S., donors can skirt the rules with so-called soft money, contributions that go to nonprofit organizations that, in reality, work on behalf of a campaign.

The question on the minds of many here is whether all these trappings are a sign that Israel’s system is becoming more democratic and sophisticated--or are Israelis witnessing a further deterioration in which glitz replaces substance, and ads supplant ideas? Is there a new level of jaded cynicism and phoniness?

“Those politicians who came into their own before the invasion of American spin doctors actually had pet causes,” veteran political commentator Sarah Honig of the Jerusalem Post lamented. “Incredible as it may sound, they considered more than polls and catchy sound bites.”

Elections have always been bare-knuckle battles in Israel, but in the past, candidates, backed by well-oiled party machinery, might stake out ideas and clear-cut positions. The current race, by contrast, has scarcely an issue to speak of, and political stances are blurred as the major candidates seek what they see as a centrist constituency.

“In the past, there was at least the facade of [working for] the good of the party and the nation. Now it’s ‘What is good for me?’ ” said Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “People running the campaigns are superficial. Sex appeal is deciding how you vote and how you run.”

But as Carville and his associates would probably have to admit, what works in Peoria, Ill., doesn’t always translate in the Galilee.

Carville was ridiculed in the local press for reportedly suggesting to Barak that he advocate religious equality for Reform Jews as a way to capitalize on the resentment of Israel’s secular majority toward the politically powerful ultra-Orthodox. In fact, while Reform Jewry is a large movement in the United States, it is so minuscule in Israel as to be irrelevant.

Similarly, taking his cue from his American advisors and their polling data, Barak lashes out vigorously at generally right-wing Jewish settlers in the West Bank and at ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students who are exempt from the military draft. Accusing Netanyahu of being held hostage to such “extremist” groups, he vows to cut off their funding.

The idea appeals to Barak’s natural constituency but has enabled Netanyahu to paint Barak as divisive.

Reeling from suggestions that Carville and company lack knowledge of the “Israeli context,” Barak and his Israeli associates are quick to insist that the American role is limited. The Carville team, the Israelis say, is responsible not for what is said but for how it is said--not the substance but the style.

The team’s formidable task has been to get Barak to fine-tune his message and present it in a simple and accessible form. A Stanford-educated engineer, Barak has a tendency to intellectualize when he should get to the point. On television, he usually gets trounced by the smooth Netanyahu.

As Carville himself put it: “Netanyahu is a better politician, better at the art of communications.”

By most accounts, Barak has improved and is more forceful. He told The Times that he believes he is getting his message across to voters. But he seems to have ceded the television battle in a country obsessed with TV.

“You need real leadership, not television leadership,” Barak told a school gymnasium full of students during a campaign swing through Petah Tikva, an industrial suburb of Tel Aviv. Half the crowd shouted, “Ehud! Ehud!” And the other half screamed Netanyahu’s nickname: “Bibi, let’s go, Bibi!”

Whether Labor is in fact limiting the role played by Carville, it is in marked contrast to the participation that Finkelstein has had in Netanyahu’s political evolution.

Finkelstein has become something of a cult figure in Israel, cloaked in an air of mystery because he does not talk to the press and is said to have occasionally checked into Jerusalem’s King David Hotel under one of various assumed names.

He took Netanyahu to victory in 1996 against all odds, and his stature grew further because of reports that he continues to serve as an ad-hoc policy advisor to the prime minister.

In a rare interview, Finkelstein told the Maariv newspaper in February that speculation about his considerable power was greatly exaggerated.

“I think that the idea that Netanyahu and the Likud succeeded because of Finkelstein is scandalous,” he said. “Maybe I contributed in some way or the other, but the truth is that every campaign revolves around the candidate and his ideas.”

But Finkelstein would have trouble getting many election observers to agree with that point.

In a letter published in the New York-based Jewish Week and reprinted in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, two leaders of the American Jewish Congress warned of the “degrading effect” that reliance on American spin doctors and excessive marketing could have in Israel.

“There is something unpalatable and wrong,” they wrote, “about campaigns for office in Israel being fought out on American soil. . . . Unfortunately, American dollars have come to play an increasingly significant and debilitating role in Israeli political campaigns.”