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Lessons on losing from Israel's Labor Party
By Bill Schneider
(CNN) -- I've been in Israel all week, watching the campaign leading up to Tuesday's election. Have I seen a Play of the Week? Not exactly, but I've seen a good lesson in how not to win the Play of the Week. This year, Israel's Labor Party -- the party of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin -- has written the textbook on how to lose an election. Here's ''How to Lose an Election'' by the Israeli Labor Party. Lesson 1: Choose a new, largely unknown leader and give the voters eight weeks to find out who he is. That's what Labor did when it chose Haifa Mayor Amram Mitzna as its leader November 19. In the United States, Democrats have sometimes sprung previously unknown candidates on the voters -- Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton come to mind -- but voters had a year to get to know them, not eight weeks. 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 wants Israel to withdraw from Gaza and resume unconditional negotiations with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Those positions are not unpopular with Israelis, but the timing could not be more wrong. Lesson 3: Insult the prime minister and run an ad suggesting that, because of corruption allegations, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is like "The Godfather." Lesson 4: Refuse to give the voters what they want. Polls show that what Israeli voters want is a government of national unity in which Labor works together with Prime Minister Sharon at a time of national crisis. But Mitzna ruled out any collaboration with Sharon. After this refusal, he immediately started sinking in the polls. Lesson 5: Try to replace your candidate at the last minute. Last week, a poll came out showing that the Labor Party would do a lot better if former Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, not Mitzna, were its leader. So some panicky Labor leaders called for Mitzna to step down -- one week before the election. The Labor Party is now bitterly divided. Meanwhile, Sharon and his primary rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, have been making a show of sweet unity. Follow all those lessons and -- just like Israel's Labor Party -- you will be sure to lose the election. Not to mention the political Play of the Week. The future doesn't look too good for Israel's Labor Party either. A poll last week in an Israeli newspaper shows that, among first-time voters in this election, Labor's support is exactly zero.
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