If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, “Bibi” Netanyahu knows the language of political seduction better than most.
Whether employing strong handshakes, delivering loose-shouldered speeches peppered with colloquial American phrases or laying a carefully placed arm on the back of the president, Israel’s new prime minister presents a study in political savvy.
Benjamin Netanyahu also represents a phenomenon that is drawing both praise and suspicion in other capitals–the export of American political culture and its tactics.
For sure, he exploited a peculiarly American conceit that whoever looks and talks like us must also think like us, and so he wooed Congress with words straight out of Ronald Reagan’s mouth, danced around issues that contradict American policy and lured investors to what is still one of the world’s most active socialist economies.
It all made a Wall Street Journal columnist wish Republican Bob Dole was half as smooth.
“He’d be a terrific American politician,” offered Netanyahu’s friend, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who added, “We’re all very lucky that he’s not running against us.”
Netanyahu may be unique among foreign leaders in his mastery of the American accent and idioms. He complimented President Clinton for “hitting the nail on the head.” He insisted he does not like punishing the Palestinians by closing off the West Bank and Gaza Strip: “I am not a closure freak;” and he remarked about how unusual it was for an Israeli leader to come to Washington without seeking “a bag of goodies.”
Such familiarity comes easy to the right-wing premier who was educated in the United States (high school and MIT) and honed his public speaking skills during too many television interviews to count CNN and other American networks.
Yet, whether the politician is Croatian or Canadian, there is danger and folly in thinking that well-crafted images and sound bites, even those engineered by American political consultants, are evidence of fundamental shifts in political thinking:
It takes more than new suits and family photo ops to turn a demagogue into a democrat.
When former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev jumped out of a limousine on Connecticut Avenue in Washington to press the flesh of bystanders, it electrified the U.S. political establishment. But his tough negotiating position on nuclear missiles did not change quite as fast.
And the victory of his successor, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who had the help of four American political consultants, did not stop him from sending attack helicopters over the villages of Chechnya a week later. Though the importance of the consultants is disputed by Yeltsin’s aides, their role was image not policy.
Since the end of World War II, nations around the world have embraced or endured the export of American culture–movies, music, fast food and language.
For every patriot who complained that such export of style and goods constituted “cultural imperialism,” dozens of his countrymen paid premium prices for blue jeans, rock ‘n’ roll and a view of Sly Stallone’s pectorals.
American movies made Marilyn Monroe a global sex symbol, but it was the advent of satellite television in the last 15 years that guided the global village and the transformation of political campaigns.
From Yeltsin electioneering in Moscow’s suburbs to Lee Teng-hui’s unopposed victory in Taiwan, the advent of American-style politics and the campaigns of personality, of attack ads and warm, fuzzy images, and of special interest money, is finding fertile ground.
After observing Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign on television, South African President Nelson Mandela recruited Frank Greer, one of Washington’s best-known media consultants and a Clinton adviser, to help structure his campaign debates and “listening forums” to gather public
opinion.
Reflecting on that experience Friday, Greer said Mandela understood he was moving from a liberation struggle to a less familiar democratic election. “Mandela wanted us because he perceived that Clinton ran a good, modern, clean campaign.”
A century ago, Americans loved to ape the styles of European royalty. No matter how artificial and counter-cultural, it was important to the Victorians to have proper china, suitable dress and to mimic the sophisticated manners of the Continent.
For all that, it didn’t mean Americans wanted to restore a monarchy.
At the end of what some have called the American Century, the U.S. is more confident and now its citizens are delighted when Europeans and others mimic the political manners of America, the polling, the advertising, the entire public persona that is expected from every candidate.
With the advice of New York consultant Arthur Finkelstein, who has worked for top Republican candidates, Netanyahu paraded his family American-style in the campaign to become Israel’s first popularly elected prime minister.
While the Israeli campaign may be similar to the U.S., Jerusalem’s domestic politics are far different from those in Washington. In Israel, Cabinet officials, for instance, are individually much more powerful than members of the White House Cabinet. Witness Ariel Sharon’s threat to bring down Netanyahu’s government within the first two weeks if he wasn’t given more control.
The dynamics and flavor of U.S. politicking goes only so far in determining how leaders, whether they are Hungarian Communists or Chilean opposition leaders, will govern.
Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman retained a U.S. consultant but that didn’t dissuade him from threatening to widen the war in the former Yugoslavia. Nor did it stop his campaign from using a picture of the leader standing with the pope and airbrushing out the third figure, Catholic Cardinal Franjo Kuharic, who was opposed to Tudjman.
While Greer worked on campaigns for Mandela and Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel, two California consultants, Sal Russo and Tony Marsh, helped frame television commercials for Ukrainian independence in 1991 and helped Violeta Chamorro become president of Nicaragua the year before.
British election campaigns have had a strong American flavor in the last several years. For a 1992 pre-election broadcast, the Conservatives hired John Schlesinger, a Hollywood director whose many credits include “Midnight Cowboy,” to manage their show, while Labor worked with Hugh Hudson, who directed “Chariots of Fire.”
Occasionally, using American talent also can create nationalist embarrassment.
When Phil Noble, a Democratic consultant in Charleston, S.C., and an expert on “opposition research,” worked for a conservative Canadian candidate, the opponent decried, “We don’t want any American image-makers getting their mitts on our party or our leader.”
In another Canadian election, Glen Clark, the premier of British Colombia, shouted at his opponent, “Do not engage in this low-level American-style politics.”
That reputation is widespread, and with good reason: Greer, for instance, recalls an American colleague boasting about having run the first negative ad in Peruvian presidential history.
He also noted that, after his South Africa experience, he realized there is one element of American-style politics that is not universally adopted.
“When I saw South Africans waiting 48 hours in line to vote, and having a 99 percent turnout,” he recalled, “I knew we had not yet exported the cynicism created in this country where the turnout in the 1994 congressional elections was 38 percent.”
