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(May 20) - James Carville, Prime Minister-elect Ehud Barak's famous campaign consultant, flew home to his Virginia farm on Friday. He missed his kids, he said last week, and anyway, he already knew who was going to win the race. For Carville, as for Barak's two other American advisers, consultant Bob Shrum and pollster Stanley Greenberg, the victory party came days before Monday's 10 p.m. exit polls flashed up on our TV screens. Long before Barak got up on the roof overlooking Kikar Rabin in the wee hours of Tuesday morning to give his two-armed wave and vow to be a "prime minister for all of Israel," the Americans were at the beach raising their glasses in a festive toast to their sure success. It was just after midnight last Wednesday, and the three men, together with their two other partners - Jim Gerstein and Tad Devine - were sitting outside at the newly opened Turquoise restaurant in Tel Baruch, drinking red wine, looking out at the sea, and animatedly jumping from one subject to another. There had been an heated argument earlier in the day over whether or not to air a controversial ad on the last night of TV campaigning, and now, in calmer tones, the group debated the pros and cons of the decision ultimately taken - not to air. The conversation - interrupted at points by strangers coming over, slapping the recognizable Carville on the back and wishing the group good luck with the campaign - soon slid into other topics, ranging from the upcoming elections in South Africa, where Greenberg is doing the polling, to a certain dinner party they were missing back home. Then, right after the seafood pasta plates had been collected, and before the peach sorbet arrived, Greenberg's phone rang. It was one of his assistants from the office in DC, calling with the latest polling analysis. "Give me a pen, who has a pen?" he called out as he pressed the cell phone onto his ear. Everyone set to thumping their breast pockets and rummaging through briefcases, and in a moment, Greenberg began scribbling numbers on his oil-stained paper place mat. Carville and Shrum, sitting across the table, craned their necks to try and decipher the upside-down statistics and smiles began spreading across their faces. With Greenberg still on the phone, waving his hands at the boisterous gang to quiet down so he could hear the rest of the numbers, Carville called it a wrap. "This game is over. O-v-e-r," he announced in his southern drawl. "And I am outta here." While all the opinion polls which came out last week showed Barak leading Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in both rounds, but not quite surpassing the 50 percent mark in the first round, Greenberg - considered to be one of the foremost pollsters in the business - had been saying the reality was even rosier for weeks. Greenberg's polls, done meticulously almost every night during the long months of the campaign, had been showing Barak with a steadily growing percentage of the overall vote from the start. The real change however, came at the start of the second week of the TV commercials, when one poll came back showing Barak forging from four to 14 points ahead. "Stan was in South Africa," recounted Gerstein, "and he called me and said, 'There is something wrong with this poll... we should not use [these data] or base any decisions on them.'" The next day's polling, however, came out with the same results. "We were ecstatic," recalled Gerstein, "and right then and there Bob said, 'We are going to win in the first round.'" However, while excitement was building at One Israel, the fear of a repeat of the 1996 disappointment, along with the concern that activists and voters could become complacent stopped any thought of early public celebrations in its tracks. Until Wednesday. That was the night when Greenberg's polls finally hit their peak. The numbers showed conclusively that Barak had close to 48% of the Jewish vote, even if all the five candidates stayed in the race. Adding the Arab votes to that - and assuming that people generally don't lie to pollsters, and that nothing drastic happened in the remaining four days - Barak was headed to a sure victory. As it turned out, with the pullout of Balad leader Azmi Bishara, Center Party leader Yitzhak Mordechai, and National Union leader Ze'ev (Benny) Begin, Barak ended up with a majority in the Jewish population and an overall 56% of the vote. With all the talk of smart planning in the Russian immigrant community, behind-the-scenes work in getting out the Arab vote, and intensive efforts among disappointed Likud voters, the American consultants prefer to explain the swing that took place in the electorate in simpler terms. "Barak was a very strong candidate and the more the public got to know him, the better they felt about him," seemed to be the most oft-repeated explanation on hand. "Especially in comparison to the competition." "In the polling," said Gerstein, "we do something called a thermometer rating, to see, on a rating of one to 100, how warm people feel about the candidate. Barak's thermometer kept rising and rising as people got to see him on TV more, got to see his biography... see what a hero he is." Late Monday night, when the real results became clear, and Barak took the stage at Kikar Rabin, Amir Tamari, Barak's long-standing bureau chief, and David Ziso, his spokesman these past three months, sat together on a concrete stoop slightly away from the crowds, chain-smoking. Ziso, looking completely drained, managed a wry smile. "I've got to hand it to those Americans, they were right on the money with their numbers," he said. "I never," replied Tamari, "doubted it for a moment." The image of Barak marking his victory in front of the tens of thousands in Kikar Rabin will forever be imprinted on our minds. So too, will be the image of Netanyahu standing tall in the gloom of the Tel Aviv Hilton ballroom, his eyes glazed, telling the nation that he believes it is time for him to go home. This is the stuff of history, of sweeping, dramatic change, and the sort of lore one is supposedly going to remember and tell grandchildren about. But, then again, it is often the smaller, more personal and more random moments that come back to haunt, or that sum up, in one way or another, the feeling, and the sense of the times. Such a moment, for those few people having dinner at the Tel Baruch beach Wednesday, will always be the one when Carville put down his dinner fork, picked up the wine glass and said: "Game o-v-e-r."
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