A Letter to America: Obama vs. Blair

Ames at one of my favourite must-read blogs, "Submitted to A Candid World", recently wrote an article comparing the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour before his election in 1997, with the victory of Obama and what he called the "New Democrats" in 2008. Indeed, the similarities are uncanny. Both came to power after deeply unpopular opposition governments, both achieves stunning victories, both campaigned the simply but effective mantra "time for a change". But not long after Tony Blair took power things began to unravel, and it turned out that under the glossy sheen and behind the 100 watt smile, things were not what they seemed. What had seemed like the greatest victory for the left in a generation began to turn sour. Could the same happen with Obama?

"You Americans, you love your American dream, but us Brits, we don’t have a dream, no there is no British dream, and you know why that is? It's because we're awake!!" (Al Murray)

I'm British, and like most British people I don't really get presidential campaigns. In America, you build these people up to be superstar celebrities, flying around in private jets and holding rallies that are more like rock concerts. In Britain, our party leaders tour the country on buses, and shout at town centres with megaphones while people mill around in a state of disinterest and mild annoyance at all the noise and fuss.

The reason for this is two-fold. Partly it's because British politics hasn't quite descended into the culture wars we see in America. Yes, there are loony lefties and raging right-wingers, but they're the oddities, while most people in the middle really aren't that bothered, because frankly in Britain at the moment it makes little difference who gets in. Mostly though, it's because we're just too cynical. We wouldn't trust an Obama-like figure, we'd just assume it was all spin.

We don't even have big issues really, aside from the economy, and occasional murmurings about Scottish independence. Even our membership of the E.U. has faded into the background now that both parties have realized that suggesting we switch currencies from the Pound Sterling does as much for your political career as announcing you're a paedophile. Islamic terrorism isn't a big deal either, in a country that suffered the obliteration of much of London in The Blitz following by decades of (largely American-sponsored) IRA terrorism.

But 1997 was different from all of that, and it was largely down to the previous government. Aside from the obvious, the defining characteristic of the 2008 U.S. election for me was the sheer desperation of people to get rid of Bush, and by extension the Republicans. And that was after you'd had him for just 8 years. Margaret Thatcher and her successor Major had been in power for 18 years by 1997, and the calls for change had become screams, even though at the time the country was actually in pretty good shape. Blair - young, fresh-faced, media-savvy - epitomized that change. And so he won by a landslide, gaining a total control over Parliament that he would maintain for the next decade.

At this point the Blair story runs parallel with Obama's. Both were very privileged young men who grew up to be excellent orators, media-friendly smooth operators, and built their campaigns around change - or as I like to call it, "not being the opposition." What happened next was unexpected to many.

One of Tony Blair's achievements prior to the election was to bring a number of newspapers onside - notable the typically Conservative-supporting organs The Sun and The Times, both owned by Rupert Murdoch. He was able to do this because he was able to reassure Murdoch over his economic policies, and these policies came as something of a surprise to the wider public once the implications became clear. It turned out that Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown were basically neoliberal Thatcherites - spin doctor Peter Mandelson even admitted it outright. To put this another way, New Labour were economically more right wing than the Conservative party had been before Thatcher.

Ames makes a mistake when he suggests that "In a very real way, gay rights may be to Barack Obama what nationalization was to Tony Blair: the farther-left issue that the middle-left party simply cannot touch." Blair was an active supporter of privatization, and committed to PFIs from the moment he took office.

On foreign policy, Blair was hawkish, pushing for NATO intervention in Kosovo, building international support for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and later for the Iraq War in 2003. In doing so, he became a firm ally of Bush's administration, and promoted their deeply unpopular neo-conservative foreign policy. Even on domestic policy, while Blair made some good initial progress on rights for homosexuals, and implementing a minimum wage, he gradually became bogged down by scandals and allegations of corruption.

It was at this point that many on the left-wing finally realized what had been increasingly evident for a few years - Blair wasn't what they'd hoped for at all. He wasn't one of them. Back in 1997, on the night of the election victory, parties up and down the country celebrated while at the official Labour celebration they danced to D:Ream's "Things Can Only Get Better." Well they didn't.

While Americans can blame the right-wing anti-regulation Bush administration for the current economic crisis, we have to face up to the fact that it was the left-wing party that deregulated our economy, and there's precious little alternative for us now.

And with that we come back to Obama.

I believe in the power of irony, specifically in the ability of irony to define people and things. The irony of Conservapedia for example is that a site set up to counter "liberal bias" is so obsessed with and overwhelming dedicated to liberalism. The irony of Pharyngula is that a site by an atheist campaign is populated by an army of Pharyngulistas who at times seem to treat Atheism as a religion. The irony of Framing Science is that a blog about getting messages across to people is written by somebody so poor at doing it. You get the idea.

The irony of Obama's election victory is that even as Democrats and liberals were celebrating, gay rights were being rolled back in several states. It was a moment that demonstrated the inferiority of hope compared to action, and if things go badly it could go down in history as a moment that defines Obama's presidency.

Obama will not meet expectations - he can't possibly do that because they're so ridiculously high. And the chances are he will continue to occupy the centre ground rather than swing to the left as some people seem to thing. This is the man who contemplated bringing an anti-vaccine night onto a science advisory committee, and who said that he would happily defy international law in order to invade a nuclear-armed country in pursuit of the myth that is the War on Terror. He will make many decisions that liberals will find hard to stomach - indeed, it's his job to make tough, unpopular choices.

I guess what I'm saying is that American liberals need to realize that getting Obama into office did not represent a victory, however much it felt like one. On the ground, where the real battles are fought, liberals lost in the first week of November. What happened on November 4th was not the end of a struggle, but the beginning. Americans now have a window of opportunity that will last for the next four years, and perhaps for eight, and in that time they need to be prepared to fight tooth and nail to gain ground in a country that still sits far to the right of Europe. Obama is not a panacaea, Obama is not in himself change, the change must come from you.