Conventional wisdom held that Netanyahu was Israel's most adept politician, articulate and charismatic, while Barak was a stiff who would flounder in front of the TV cameras.
"There was a sense that Netanyahu was a magician, who would win no matter what the polls showed," said Stan Greenberg, President Clinton's pollster in 1992 and one of three American consultants who helped defeat Netanyahu.
If the Israeli elections had a "Made in Washington" feel, there was good reason. Clinton spin-master James Carville, political advertising guru Bob Shrum, and Greenberg shaped much of the campaign that was capped by Barak's landslide victory Monday night.
The team brought with it not only a can-do confidence, so typically American, but also a knack for brevity and simplicity in political advertising. It also created a U.S.-style "war room" in which to conjure up instantaneous reactions to the events of the campaign.
Even though Carville was sufficiently sure of winning that he flew home last week, Greenberg and Shrum remained to savor their victory. Yesterday, in the same hotel conference room where 36 hours earlier Barak had delivered a victory speech, they shared some of the secrets of their success.
They said they realized early on that Barak, a former general and army chief of staff who favored a further withdrawal from the West Bank, would have a hard time going head-to-head with Netanyahu on the question of who was tougher on the Palestinians.
So they took an indirect approach, relying not on argument, but simply on Barak's celebrated military record. Their first television commercial was a straightforward biography celebrating Barak's exploits battling terrorists and hijackers.
When Netanyahu, as predicted, rolled out attack ads charging that Barak would capitulate to the Palestinians, he ran straight into an ambush.
"It made him [Netanyahu] look unpatriotic to be attacking this genuine war hero," Shrum said yesterday. Instead of answering Netanyahu's charges, the Barak campaign simply aired more stirring footage of Barak in military uniform - the message being that Barak was an extraordinary warrior to whom Israelis could trust their security.
"If we had engaged in Netanyahu's argument about security, we would have lost," Shrum said. "This is the art of the unanswered question."
The Barak campaign anticipated that Netanyahu would capitalize on one of Barak's biggest faux pas; in 1998, he had candidly told a television interviewer that he might have become a terrorist had he been born Palestinian. Barak's consultants prepared a trial attack ad against Barak to try out on focus groups. Persuaded by the focus groups' response that the ad did not hurt Barak, they remained calm when the Netanyahu campaign aired such an ad.
The focus groups also told the consultants that voters were fed up with the divisiveness of Israeli politics, so the campaign shied away from direct attacks on Netanyahu. Instead, it let proxies dirty their hands.
Barak did not deign to appear at the one debate of the campaign, held in mid-April, leaving it to Center Party candidate Yitzhak Mordechai, the former defense minister, to assail Netanyahu as immoral and dishonest. In fact, the public perception was that Mordechai badly battered Netanyahu. However, within days afterward, Mordechai and Netanyahu dropped in the polls - while Barak advanced.
The team of American consultants came to Barak with sterling international references; British Prime Minister Tony Blair personally recommended Greenberg and Carville to Barak.
An intellectual by nature, an army general by profession, Barak initially found it difficult to take the advice of the hired hands, who had limited experience in Israel. "He likes to test ideas, to make an intellectual case. He is constantly talking things through," Shrum said. "But at the end, he always held the message."
Barak, however, often pushed his own strategy, to the betterment of the campaign, the consultants said. For example, the candidate was keen from the beginning to make the economy and education major issues.
The consultants were initially reluctant, having been told repeatedly by Israeli strategists that the economy was always secondary to security in Israeli politics. But Carville, who coined the saying "It's the economy, stupid" in Clinton's 1992 campaign, and the others concluded that Barak was right. Israeli voters were not really all that different from American voters.
"Voters anywhere care about their jobs and their children's future," Greenberg said. "Once we had crossed the threshold on the security issue, we released people to vote on other issues. . . . Barak won himself the opportunity to push the economy."
Netanyahu had his own American consultant on the campaign, Arthur Finkelstein, who works with Republicans in U.S. races and who advised Netanyahu so successfully in his 1996 victory against Shimon Peres.
What went wrong for him this time?
Among Israeli political commentators, the sense is that Netanyahu lost the election more decisively than Barak won it. Political strategists believe that Netanyahu's campaign too closely followed the road map of 1996, with its constant invocation of the Arab menace. While the elections three years ago came after a string of bus bombings that left Israelis scared and angry, this campaign was preceded by a period of relative quiet.
"He was like George Bush in 1992 at the end of the Cold War," Greenberg said. "It was hard to make security an issue when the voters simply weren't as concerned about security. By election day, he was offering Israel a bleak future. He had security, but he had no prospects for peace, no plan for the economy and education."
