Why Tony Blair isn't like clinton

...These limits call for a virtual freeze on real spending on welfare...

...But the omens are good...

...Then there is the question of privatization...

...And by an understanding that in this day of mobile capital and mobile people, taxes are a limited tool for transferring income from rich to poor...

...After a brief skirmish with his Left, which wanted to raise the top marginal rate to 50 percent, Blair announced that the top rate would stay at Thatcher's 40 percent...

...The desirability of work instead of welfare and the need to restore old values—"Victorian" to Lady Thatcher, "Christian" to Tony Blair—are now beyond dispute...

...Like the leader of "New Labour," the leader of the "New Democrats" has recreated his party by moving it from left to center...

...Thatcher couldn't have said it better...

...Cherie Blair was willing to expose her views to the electorate by running for parliament in 1983...

...this, in a country in which expansion of the welfare state was until very recently the stated goal of its Labour party and of complicit "One Nation" Tories...

...Blair has actually done it...

...There's more...

...Blair is well aware that financial constraints preclude any major expansion of welfare programs and that the funds he plans to snare through his one-time tax on "utility windfall profits" won't go very far...

...Clinton might think it great to flirt with a stewardess on Air Force One for the amusement of the press corps...

...There is a second reason liberal commentators find the analogy between Clinton and Blair so attractive...

...Recall that it was Thatcher who cut Britain's confiscatory marginal tax rate from 98 percent on some forms of income to 40 percent in an effort to restore the incentive to work and, in the case of entrepreneurs, to dare...

...This "contract," personally drafted and signed by Blair, contains promises of job training, improved educational standards, and such...

...Not content with a Bill-Tony analogy, the American press has come up with a Hillary-Cherie comparison...

...Whether that is true in the United States I leave to the experts...

...larity extends to their personal lives, say Clinton's hacks at the White House and in the media: Both are lawyers married to lawyers who are smarter and lefter than their husbands...

...After his first election, he deferred to the Old Democrat grandees in Congress and to the Left in his party on everything from tax increases to gays in the military...

...This in the face of a Labour party famous for its hatred of the rich (well-heeled champagne socialists of course excepted) and for a tax policy designed to squeeze the rich "until the pips squeak...

...Both, granted, are lawyers and have political leanings to the left of their husbands...

...Then there is the matter of macroeconomic policy...

...Blair and his chancellor, Gordon Brown, are pledged to live within the spending limits set by the outgoing Tories for at least the next two years...

...And Bill Clinton is no Tony Blair...

...Just as Tony is no Bill, Cherie is no Hillary...

...Indeed, the simiIrwin M. Stelzer, a frequent contributor, is director of regulatory policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Then there is the small matter of character...

...The new prime minister has promised to institute a teenage curfew, to cut in half the time between apprehension of young offenders and their sentencing, and to get tough on them in as many ways as his limited control of the courts will allow...

...As Blair put it on the stump, "We want to see people do well, we are not opposed to success...

...In a bruising battle with Labour's old guard, the new prime minister forced the repeal of Clause Four...

...In the hope of developing concrete plans to reform welfare, he has named Frank Fields, one of the most innovative thinkers in this field, to the position of Social Security minister...

...True, both men have stated that education is their highest priority (actually, Clinton has several highest priorities, depending on the audience...

...It is clearly not true in Blair's Britain...

...This has institutionalized and made permanent—or at least as permanent as these things can be in politics—the party's shift to the center...

...That practical fact reinforces his view that more is not better when it comes to welfare...

...Hillary has never risked such exposure and defeat...

...Vague, yes, but backed by a specific pledge to freeze marginal tax rates...

...None of the boldness of the Newt of yesteryear here...

...Tax-and-spend is no longer an acceptable political slogan or a viable economic policy...

...he may succumb to the siren song of the proponents of a single European currency and doom Britain to periodic bouts of high unemployment...

...instead, the debate is over how much further to carry privatization...

...Blair's campaign bus was a model of probity—not even the usual gender-conscious banter characteristic of close-knit groups working under pressure...

...Yet he told a Birmingham audience, "Cash transfers are no longer an option either politically or economically...

...If American commentators want to call this the defeat of conservatism, that is their privilege...

...To say that such actions—indeed, even the thought of such actions—by a Labour politician would have been inconceivable before Margaret Thatcher made her appearance on Britain's political stage is to understate the case by a wide margin...

...in Britain, Blair has destroyed the party of inequality and privilege...

...Hillary operated out of an Arkansas law firm that had as its main claim to fame its access to her husband...

...Clinton, meanwhile, has just suckered the Republicans into a budget deal that at best contains and quite possibly expands the existing welfare state...

...Nationalization of the means of production and distribution, the accepted policy of the pre-Thatcher Labour party, is now a ludicrous phrase in a nation that not so long ago did just that...

...But he has yet to articulate a coherent view of just how he plans to create the "better Britain" that he promised at every stop in our daylong whirl through the hinterland...

...I know Tony Blair...

...Nor much that is different from what Lady Thatcher might have done had her party colleagues not assassinated her, at a cost last week's election has now made clear to them...

...Enter Blair...

...True, too, neither man has expressed much interest in school vouchers, the only instrument that can transfer power from the producers of education services (teachers' unions) to the consumers (parents and students...

...But he can never again move his country to where it was before Margaret Thatcher handbagged it into its present condition...

...Taxation high enough to produce "howls of anguish" from the rich, proposed when Labour last ruled, has been replaced by an all-party realization of the devastating effects of marginal tax rates in excess of 40 percent...

...The British have a word for this: rubbish...

...He comes as close to being a Charles Murray disciple—get the incentives right—as a Labour leader dares...

...he may unwittingly adopt so many "little" programs to appease his Left that the British economy, made competitive by the Thatcher reforms, once again becomes ossified...

...And I think he knows it...

...Education is another area where Clinton supporters claim to see a remarkable similarity between their man and the new British prime minister...

...Conservatives are, so the claim goes, everywhere in retreat before triumphant, compassionate left-of-center politicians...

...The age of big government, it seems, is back in America...

...The voting procedures that permitted the trade unions to dominate policy and select candidates are gone, replaced by a one-member, one-vote rule...

...Tony Blair is indeed one of Thatcher's children...

...Instead, he offered what appeared at first to be a truly Newt-onian idea, a contract with Britain...

...Blair's emphasis on law and order—modified, it is true, by a Left-pleasing reference to attacking the causes of crime as well as crime itself—is truly revolutionary for a party that has historically tended to side with the crooks against the good guys...

...Lady Thatcher, as she now is, sold off the overmanned, inefficient electric, gas, telephone, airline, steel, and other companies, to a chorus of boos from a Labour party organized to keep those commanding heights of the economy in public ownership...

...not a word from the president about denying federal funds to schools that don't teach children to read, write, and do sums...

...But Blair has at least been willing to threaten the teachers with closure of under-performing schools...

...First, it enhances the prestige of the various Clinton advisers who attached themselves to the Blair campaign...

...Labour polled fewer votes than did the Tories when they won the 1992 general election, partly because voter turnout dropped from 78 percent to 71 percent as disgusted Tories stayed home in droves...

...Hillary campaigned with her husband and stood by him through what must have been difficult times for her because she has a political agenda and Bill is the instrument for its realization...

...Whether Blair has sold his colleagues on this view is hard to say...

...In America, Clinton has neutered Gingrich...

...But, given his pledge to live within the spending limits set by the Tories for the next two years, Blair had no choice but to keep his commitments extraordinarily limited...

...Never mind that in truth it was no American Clintonista, but Britain's very own Peter Mandelson, Blair's enormously talented spin doctor, who crafted the techniques and imposed the discipline that allowed Blair to capitalize on the Tories' massive and well-deserved unpopularity...

...For example, David Blunkett, the new education and employment secretary, has deep roots on the Labour left: He is "one of Labour's old socialist soldiers," according to the Economist...

...All good conservative stuff, and it comes mixed with compassion (a word not yet stripped of meaning in Britain) for the truly unfortunate...

...When Bill Clinton leaves office he will leave having had no enduring effect on the structure or direction of his party...

...Blair has pledged to crack down on the young hoodlums who are increasingly terrorizing British shopkeepers and the public with burglaries and muggings...

...Clinton, meanwhile, has tacked this way and that...

...Margaret Thatcher has dragged the center of gravity of British politics so far to the right as to make the Labour party of today virtually indistinguishable from the Tory party as it was when she inherited it...

...Like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton has discovered the virtue of fiscal probity...

...Everyone in the Blair entourage seems to have read Primary Colors and the tabloid press's extensive coverage of the president's less-than-complete devotion to family values...

...Enter Blair and "New Labour...

...No reliance on the mush that is the communitarianism he finds so attractive, no appeal for "a unified society,...a civic society," is going to help Blair solve the social problems created by the voluntarily unemployed, what in her more Victorian moments Margaret Thatcher might have called "the undeserving poor...

...She lost...

...Worse, from the point of view of his still-not-inconsiderable left wing, he has hinted at the possibility of out-Thatchering Thatcher...

...And it is no campaign ploy, to be forgotten now that office has been won...

...Labour voters reciprocated to elect 46 Liberal Democrats...

...In this they may be naive, and indeed may find themselves eating a healthy portion of crow should allegations concerning the sex lives of several leading Labour figures prove well founded—an appetizing prospect for Britain's ever-alert tabloids...

...Stan Greenberg can now claim to have been an architect of the Blair triumph, and George Stephanopoulos can let drop stories of his frequent telephone calls to the Blair campaign team...

...Of course, Blair may in the end prove unable to control the left wing of his party, now that he has won the election for them...

...A crackdown on crime, once favored only by what seemed to be slightly loony "flog-'em-and-hang-'em" blue-haired ladies who attend Tory party conferences, is now considered de rigueur by Labour and Tories alike...

...The international money markets . . . and the aspirations of a massively growing middle class make the realities very different from a bygone era...

...Cherie campaigns with her husband, although she has no discernible ambition to be assistant prime minister (there's no "two for the price of one" talk) and will now return to the practice of law...

...Which brings us to the welfare state...

...All of this misplaced analogizing seems to serve two purposes...

...But they are wrong...

...This comparatively modest popular vote translated into a huge parliamentary majority because of tactical voting by Liberal Democratic voters, who voted for Labour in constituencies in which their votes, combined with those of true Labour supporters, would ensure the defeat of Tory candidates...

...To the strait-laced Blairites such behavior is incomprehensible, something characteristic of Tory ministers too long in power and of French politicians, but unacceptable in serious public men...

...Indeed, Clause Four, a feature of the party's constitution since 1918, pledged it to the nationalization of those industries—and others...

...And in order to assure his reelection he signed an Old Democrat pact with the trade unions, promising, among other things, to deny jobs to workers who choose not to join unions, in return for a $35 million trade-union television campaign attacking the Republicans...

...But Blair has a lot to learn about the hard-core underclass and its deep-rooted disinclination to prefer work to the dole, or honest work at low wages to dishonest work at rewards that buy Nikes and flashy clothes...

...For one thing, the magnitude of Labour's victory has been overstated...

...It allows them to argue that both Britain and America now have leaders who have slain the conservative dragon...

...Start with the efforts of the two leaders to rebuild their parties...

...like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton has made education his number-one priority...

...It is no longer deemed safe to wear a Rolex watch on the busiest streets of London, and drivers of Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, and Range Rovers caught in traffic jams now must be on the alert to foil smash-and-grab jewelry thefts by young thugs...

...He sees such handouts (though he is too much the politician to use that word) as debilitating and as promoting anti-social behavior damaging to both the recipient and the society that makes such largesse available...

...But Blair himself is clearly beyond reproach—a churchgoer even when television cameras are not present and, by today's standards, prudish in his attitudes toward his familial responsibilities...

...He may be offended to the depths of his soul by Lady Thatcher's famous remark that there is no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women, and there are families...

...whether she would have succeeded in a different environment we will never know, as she never chose to risk finding out...

...Cherie has made a success of the practice of law quite on her own...

...More important, it is no stretch to say that the real winner of Britain's general election is Margaret Thatcher...

...For it stems from a sincere belief that there is right and wrong, that wrong should be punished, and that individuals should be responsible for their actions...

...But the analogy stops there...

...The party's election manifesto—its platform—was approved directly by the membership, rather than by a small group of left-wing ideologues...

...In part out of a desire to increase the flow of revenues to the treasury (the government's budget is far out of balance for this stage of the business cycle), and in part out of a recognition that there are many things that private-sector managers can do better than public-sector bureaucrats, Blair is considering privatizing still more public-sector assets, perhaps including the air traffic control system...

...The result is that the Democratic party remains in thrall to its unreconstructed wing on trade policy, environmental policy, abortion, and a host of other issues...

...So he wants to make work more attractive than staying at home and to deny benefits to anyone who refuses to participate in training and seek a job...