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struck by how different the approach was from our campaign for Peres. As I filled
my notebook with the details, Philip added a final bit of advice. “If you want to
win, have it run by the best professionals you can find. Not politicians. They
always have personal agendas. Focus is everything. Distractions and arguments
and infighting can be fatal.”

Philip recommended one professional, in particular, to get us started: Stanley
Greenberg, the pollster who had advised not only Blair’s campaign, but Clinton’s.
Doron used his contacts in New York to put us in touch not only with Greenberg
but the strategist behind the Clinton victory, James Carville, and another leading
Democratic Party consultant and speechwriter, Bob Shrum. We began working
with all of them well before the no-confidence vote in the Knesset. Philip had a
wonderfully British understatement and reserve. Stanley, with his eyeglasses and
demeanor too, came over as slightly professorial. With Bob, it didn’t take long to
understand why he was such a gifted speechwriter. He loved words, especially the
way they could be used to inspire a connection with important campaign themes:
above all with the idea of hope, and new beginnings. Carville was the human
equivalent of a volcano. If he hadn’t been a campaign strategist, he could have
made a living as a hybrid of a cowboy and a stand-up comedian. But they all
shared the easy, infectious self-confidence of people who were very good at what
they did, and knew it.

When I went to New York with Doron to meet Carville in Feburary 1988, my
confidence as Labor leader was taking some fairly hard knocks. But from the
moment he walked through our hotel-room door, it was impossible not to like him.
He showed up in a T-shirt and tennis sneakers, walked straight across the room,
slouched into a chair and said: “General Barak, I don’t get it. You’re a known
public figure, with a great mind and a great military record. It’s already been a
year-and-a-half since Israel got Netanyahu. What have you done to go after him?
Why haven’t you gone on the attack?” He said it was time for me to wake up, and
change tack. “Can you run through your stump speech for me,” he asked,
motioning me toward the center of the room like a film director.

“I don’t have one,” I said. To which he replied briskly that I should have had
one months ago.

When Stanley paid a preliminary visit with Philip to Israel, they, too, urged me
to sharpen my message and pay more attention to my image with the public.

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