A Tale of Two Elections

...But shuddering as he looks at the fate of George Bush, few think he will dare...

...seemed to herald an era of calm, of consolidation, and less of that restless reforming zeal, tearing things up by the roots and standing things on their head which characterized his predecessor's reign...

...That is the question Labourites are now asking as they sift through the ingredients of the Clinton victory, searching for clues to their own future...

...Major's campaign was low and base, appealing almost exclusively to crude pocket-book instincts...

...Opinion polls showed that by the end of the campaign, half of all voters believed they'd be worse off under Labour...

...John Major is now under intense pressure to raise income taxes to ease the debt burden...

...A curious poster showing two boxing gloves headlined Labour's "Double Whammy" of "More Taxes, Higher Prices...

...Chatham House, $25How did it happen...

...Clintonism has also become a code word for those who wish they hadn't elected the staid John Smith as leader, but had skipped a generation and opted for the young, bright, radical, and far more interesting Tony Blair...

...Labour suddenly hopes that what happens on one side of the Atlantic can be mirrored on the other next time around...

...The Labour Party, much reformed, was riding high in the polls, though that lead was narrowing sharply as the election approached...

...why did he win...

...No one quite knew what the American phrase "Double Whammy" meant, and the words themselves caused a useful controversy...

...If you have the issue and are willing to part with it, please send it to our publisher, Mary Beiro, at The Washington Monthly, 1611 Connecticut Ave...

...But does the Clinton experience suggest that this need be an iron rule...

...Clinton won his election, and Kinnock lost his while Bush and Major fought almost identical campaigns...

...Is it possible, some in the Labour Party are asking, that a powerful leader with a coherent and attractive vision and a sense of mission can overwhelm a negative campaign from the opposition and win, even when spending plans may mean higher taxes in the end...

...One thing this book makes clear is that John Major did almost as much to lose the election as George Bush did to lose his...

...Ferocious blasts of negative advertising in the last few weeks hammered home one message, and one alone—Labour would tax the voters more...

...20009...

...YOU CAN HELP The Washington Monthly is seeking copies of our December 1991 publication for archive purposes...

...Sweeteners were attempted, but none of them were enough to sway the mortgage-stricken voters, overburdened with high interest debts from the wild-borrowing eighties...

...So the Tories sent over advisers to the Bush campaign, and they duly turned out the same low and monotonous theme, but to very different effect...

...That Polly Toynbee is the social affairs editor of the British Broadcasting Corporation...

...If the Conservative party could win with such a message in the eye of an economic storm, couldn't the Republicans do likewise...

...Labour pains Why were the results so different...

...They shouldn't by Polly Toynbee Britain at the Polls 1992 Anthony King, Ivor Crewe, David Denver, Kenneth Newton, Philip Norton, David Sanders, Patrick Seyd...

...That success didn't go unnoticed by the Bush operatives...

...Washington D .C...

...After each election since 1945, Oxford's Nuffield College has sponsored a study of extraordinary detail...

...It was a campaign which Labour hoped to win by default if they made no mistakes...

...But for those who wish to study British politics for their own sake, this book is comprehensive, intelligent, and readable...

...The British experience over recent elections leads many to suppose that no one can win an election now if they look as though they might tax anyone any more, even the top few highest earners...

...Anthony King and Ivor Crewe are among the most serious and interesting of Britain's academic political commentators, and together with others have produced a pen portrait of British politics, from the last election in 1987 to the election of 1992, that is both elegant and illuminating...

...Wary about Kinnock's second outing, his strategists kept him on a tight leash...

...Britain entered the 1992 election in the midst of a long and deepening recession, with virtually every economic indicator plunging...

...His main asset was that he was not her, and his virtues were the ones she lacked...

...Where Clinton's carefully crafted package of welfare proposals looked tough, yet tender and innovative, Labour's looked like warmed-over and watered-down remnants of past policies...

...They thought neat suits, respectable policies, promises to spend no more than they could earn in growth, and only raising taxes for a small top income group would cause the recession election to fall to them...

...It offered no inspiration, not even a fig leaf of an honorable or exciting reason for voting Conservative...

...Margaret Thatcher (like Ronald Reagan in this country), though departed, was a ghost at the banquet, her malevolent presence and the remains of her policies still breathing icily down the neck of John Major...

...There was no clear program and, after Thatcherism, there was no mission or direction...

...Clintonism has become a code word in Britain for a number of reforms the Labour radicals support, but Labour's interpretation of Clinton is probably about as close to the actual man and his politics as the Church of England's idea of Jesus is to the historical Christ...

...But Major had trouble with the "vision thing" —his language was impoverished, his vocabulary limited...

...His televised interviews were interminably boring, his speeches lackluster...

...The left of the party was vanquished, a spent force, and no one could run a successful red-peril smear campaign against them this time...

...The policy advocated by Labour's Clintonites is electoral and constitutional reform of a system groaning with institutional corruption and decrepitude...

...Or did Bush lose on that very issue, with the voters never forgiving him after reading his lying lips...

...The election was his bid to break free, to be his own man...

...There was no positive message about Conservative policies, no message of hope, no boasts about past achievements...

...In desperation, his handlers put him on soap boxes in the middle of crowds—Honest John, the man who was at least physically closest to the people...

...The only economic success of the last decade that is left intact is that commitment...

...The Chancellor of the Exchequer rashly spoke of glimpses of green shoots of growth, but they were only a mirage in a desert wasteland...

...The great issues of the day—Europe, unemployment, and the long-term economy—had been subsumed in a squabble over Labour's hypothetical spending proposals...

...Looking back, the political scene in Britain at the time was quite similar to that in the United States around August of 1992...

...They too had no vision, no message...

...These transatlantic comparisons are all voodoo politics, each side drawing what hope and comfort they choose from systems and nations too radically different to make much sense...

...The campaign Major ran was sharply counter to his nice-guy image...

...Where she brought the sword and flamboyance, his small colorless presence seemed to promise a time of quiet competence and getting on with the dull and technical job of good government...

...But the chasm between British and American politics is so colossal that crude comparisons are almost meaningless...

...Emollient by nature, a consensual leader, Major (like Bush) had spoken of wanting a "nation at ease with itself...

...58 The Washington Monthly/March 1993...

...Another showed munitions labeled "Labour's Tax Bombshell," and a third featured a locust devouring all in its path...

...But once on his soap box, he never had a bright or punchy phrase, no sound bite worth the name...

...If he struggled to find an image or a metaphor it was invariably weak and, by the time he'd finished with it, utterly exhausted...

...The British Conservative party has cut income taxes consistently...

...March 1993/The Washington Monthly 57 The strategy worked...

...The electoral and the economic cycle was badly out of kilter...

...So deep was the recession that there was no chance for the government to generate a little spending boom, a mini-miracle...

...So Partly because Neil Kinnock was no Bill Clinton...

...This book is designed as the first of a permanent series to run alongside the Nuffield studies, complementing dry facts with a series of interpretations...