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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Media: The War Glut (February 3, 2003) When the question is war, the news trade's most essential job, after reporting facts, is making sense of them. By William Powers. Social Studies: Stop Whining, America, and Get Serious About Smallpox (February 3, 2003) America's strategic vulnerability to smallpox is clear and present, even if the virus itself is not. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: Do We Want Another 100 Years of Racial Preferences? (February 3, 2003) The hard question is whether the justices should ban all racial preferences in university admissions. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Wealth of Nations: The World Is Winning, Not Losing, the War on Poverty (January 28, 2003) New research rebuts the accepted notion that globalization is causing poverty to worsen. By Clive Crook Political Pulse: Political Facts of Life May Be Changing (January 28, 2003) The resentment of taxes has fallen to its lowest level in more than 40 years. By William Schneider. Legal Affairs: Racial Preferences in Admissions: The Real Choice We Face (January 28, 2003) The most repugnant aspect of the status quo is that it amounts to pervasive racial discrimination. By Stuart Taylor Jr. More from National Journal. |
Political Pulse 
Writing a How-To Textbook on LosingIsrael's venerable Labor Party went out of its way to do everything wrong by William Schneider .... TEL AVIV-Israel had a big winner and a big loser in its election this week. And neither one was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The big loser was Israel's venerable Labor Party, the party of David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin. In this campaign, Labor wrote the textbook on how to lose an election. Lesson 1: Choose a new, largely unknown leader and give voters just eight weeks to find out who he is. That's what Labor did when it chose Haifa Mayor Amram Mitzna to lead the party. In the United States, Democrats have sometimes sprung obscure candidates on the voters. Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 come to mind. But the voters had a yearlong campaign-not an eight-week campaign-to get to know them. Lesson 2: Choose a dove when a major war is looming. Although Mitzna was a general in the Israeli army, he was the candidate of the Left in the Labor Party. Many analysts here call Mitzna "Israel's George McGovern." Mitzna wanted Israel to withdraw from the Gaza strip and resume unconditional negotiations with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. Those positions are not unpopular with Israelis, but the timing for a peace message could not have been worse because the impending U.S. war on Iraq has everyone on edge. Lesson 3: Make sure the election is held at a time that puts your party at a disadvantage. That's what Labor did when it pulled out of the national unity government at the end of October, thereby forcing an election before the war with Iraq. Sharon is perfectly cast as a wartime leader. Israel's election could have been held as late as next October. Then, presumably, the war would be over, Saddam Hussein would be gone, there would be a big push for peace in Israel, and Sharon could very likely have been defeated. Lesson 4: Insult the prime minister and create sympathy for him. Labor's best issue against Sharon was a corruption scandal involving an illegal foreign loan. But the issue was badly mishandled. When Sharon held a press conference on January 9 to explain his position, an election official yanked him off the air for violating a law that prohibits broadcasting campaign propaganda within a month of an election. That law exempts official party ads. And Labor ran an ad attacking the prime minister and his sons, using theme music from The Godfather. Many Israelis found the ad offensive. Then shortly before the election, it was revealed that the Sharon scandal originated with a leak from an opponent who may be charged with a crime. Lesson 5: Refuse to give the voters what they want. Polls show that Israeli voters want a government of national unity at a time of national crisis. Mitzna firmly ruled out any collaboration with Sharon and then started sinking in the polls. The betting now is that, under a new leader, Labor will soon be back in Sharon's government. Lesson 6: Scheme to replace your candidate at the last minute. One week before the election, a poll came out showing that Labor would do better if 79-year-old former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, not Mitzna, were its leader. So panicky Labor candidates called for Mitzna to step down. The Labor Party ended up bitterly divided. Meanwhile, Sharon and his primary rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, were making a display of sweet unity. The future doesn't look good for Labor. A poll in the newspaper Ha'aretz found that, among first-time voters in this election, Labor's support stood at precisely zero. The big winner in the Israeli election? Tommy Lapid and his militantly secular Shinui, or "Change," Party. Lapid campaigned on what is for Israel a revolutionary concept, separation of synagogue and state. "We need a liberal, open-minded, Western civilization, not a medieval ghetto state," he declared. He challenged Israel's long-standing system of special privileges and subsidies for ultra-orthodox Jews. Many of them live on public welfare. They're not required to serve in the army. And they control Israel's religious life. "I want a secular government of national unity," Lapid said. The fact is, the ultra-orthodox are only 7 percent of Israel's population. "I am picking a fight with a minority that is not living by the rules of the majority," Lapid said. "That doesn't make me a divisive figure. It makes them divisive." Secularism unites Israel's nonorthodox majority. What divides it is ideology. Lapid used secularism to bridge the gap between Israel's Left and Right. Professor Shmuel Sandler, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, put it this way: "A person who could not bring himself to vote for Sharon or any other right-wing party, and who could not forgive Labor and the Left for the Oslo accords, would probably go to Shinui." "Shinui is the result of the vacuum left because the Right and the Left have collapsed," columnist Ari Shavit said. "People are going for a third option, even though it doesn't really offer a third way." Shinui's strong showing-he won some 15 of 120 seats in the Knesset-was more than a vote against the ultra-orthodox. It was also a vote against Israel's established order-against cozy political deals and special privileges for religious Israelis. Shinui aims to change Israeli politics. Isn't that what its name means?
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Schneider is the Cable News Network's senior political analyst. He is also a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times, National Journal, and The Atlantic Monthly. His column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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