Bret Stephens: What Obama Could Learn From Tony Blair
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
Every political party has its kamikaze squadrons. This year, Republicans have Colorado's Tom Tancredo and Delaware's Christine O'Donnell, the inexhaustible fountain of liberal mirth. Too bad for Democrats that their kamikazes are the Senate majority leader, the Speaker of the House, and the Obamakaze himself.
I've been thinking about this theme for several months, as Democrats launched successive waves of politically suicidal legislation and then struggled, amusingly, to explain their political collapse to themselves. But it took reading Tony Blair's recent memoir, and later interviewing him in person, to bring some thoughts into focus. It's a book Mr. Obama might want to read himself, come the first Wednesday in November.
In the 1980s, Britain's Labour Party wasn't merely led by kamikaze pilots: The party was a kamikaze unto itself. Its informal motto was "No Compromise With the Electorate." The party had as its base a dwindling number of trade-union activists mainly interested in their own political perquisites, and an intellectual wing that fetishized a working class whose everyday lives and views they knew next to nothing about. Between 1979 and 1997 it lost four successive elections, even through sharp recessions and even, in the last round, against the hapless John Major. And it had no idea why.
In Mr. Blair's analysis, the party's problems were of four kinds. Politically, it had convinced itself that Britain kept voting for Margaret Thatcher not because Labour was out of touch, but because it was insufficiently left-wing. Ideologically, it failed to see that the public sector was far from synonymous with, and often profoundly hostile to, the public interest. Culturally, it didn't grasp the concept of aspiration: The idea that what the working class wants above all is to get out of the working class, just as what the middle class wants above all is to become rich.
Then, too, there was the peculiar psychology of the left:
"Progressive parties are always in love with their own emotional impulses. They have a feeling, however, that the electorate may not be of the same mind, so they are prepared to loosen them. Deep down, they wish it weren't so, and hope against hope that maybe one day, in one possibly unique circumstance, the public will share them. It's a delusion. They won't. But, though progressives know that, the longing is acute and the temptation to rebind themselves to such impulses strong."
Today, the Democratic excuse-machine sounds eerily like Labour's under Neil Kinnock. (Joe Biden is a long-time admirer.) Americans aren't happy with ObamaCare? It's because it lacks the public option. Americans don't like super-size-me government? It's because they fail to appreciate the horrors from which only the federal behemoth could rescue them. Americans aren't responding well to the administration's populist overtures, the tightness with organized labor, the rhetorical volleys against the modern malefactors of wealth? You can fill in the rest...
Read entire article at WSJ
Every political party has its kamikaze squadrons. This year, Republicans have Colorado's Tom Tancredo and Delaware's Christine O'Donnell, the inexhaustible fountain of liberal mirth. Too bad for Democrats that their kamikazes are the Senate majority leader, the Speaker of the House, and the Obamakaze himself.
I've been thinking about this theme for several months, as Democrats launched successive waves of politically suicidal legislation and then struggled, amusingly, to explain their political collapse to themselves. But it took reading Tony Blair's recent memoir, and later interviewing him in person, to bring some thoughts into focus. It's a book Mr. Obama might want to read himself, come the first Wednesday in November.
In the 1980s, Britain's Labour Party wasn't merely led by kamikaze pilots: The party was a kamikaze unto itself. Its informal motto was "No Compromise With the Electorate." The party had as its base a dwindling number of trade-union activists mainly interested in their own political perquisites, and an intellectual wing that fetishized a working class whose everyday lives and views they knew next to nothing about. Between 1979 and 1997 it lost four successive elections, even through sharp recessions and even, in the last round, against the hapless John Major. And it had no idea why.
In Mr. Blair's analysis, the party's problems were of four kinds. Politically, it had convinced itself that Britain kept voting for Margaret Thatcher not because Labour was out of touch, but because it was insufficiently left-wing. Ideologically, it failed to see that the public sector was far from synonymous with, and often profoundly hostile to, the public interest. Culturally, it didn't grasp the concept of aspiration: The idea that what the working class wants above all is to get out of the working class, just as what the middle class wants above all is to become rich.
Then, too, there was the peculiar psychology of the left:
"Progressive parties are always in love with their own emotional impulses. They have a feeling, however, that the electorate may not be of the same mind, so they are prepared to loosen them. Deep down, they wish it weren't so, and hope against hope that maybe one day, in one possibly unique circumstance, the public will share them. It's a delusion. They won't. But, though progressives know that, the longing is acute and the temptation to rebind themselves to such impulses strong."
Today, the Democratic excuse-machine sounds eerily like Labour's under Neil Kinnock. (Joe Biden is a long-time admirer.) Americans aren't happy with ObamaCare? It's because it lacks the public option. Americans don't like super-size-me government? It's because they fail to appreciate the horrors from which only the federal behemoth could rescue them. Americans aren't responding well to the administration's populist overtures, the tightness with organized labor, the rhetorical volleys against the modern malefactors of wealth? You can fill in the rest...