In the British version of the 2008 US election, Gordon Brown is Hillary Clinton: the less talented half of a tempestuous political marriage who attempts to make up for shortcomings with a Stakhanovite work ethic. David Cameron is Barack Obama: the supremely confident speaker who has risen to the top in record time and who is, to his critics, all froth and no latte. Indeed, if successful, Obama’s ascent will have been even more meteoric than Cameron’s (Cameron took just over four and a half years from entering national politics to become party leader).
To some, this comparison with British politics is absurd, proof of our infatuation with all things American. After all, the four candidates who triumphed in Iowa and New Hampshire are all exceptionally American figures: Obama offers the country a chance to overcome its founding sin and salve its partisan wounds; Mike Huckabee represents a Christian populism that is entirely absent in British politics; the spouse of a former Prime Minister running for the top job is inconceivable here; and no current British politician can match John McCain’s tale of heroic wartime service.
But this will not stop either Brown or Cameron trying desperately to draw lessons from America. Brownites will take a Hillary victory as evidence that however much voters flirt with a charismatic ‘change candidate’, what they really want is a hardened politician in charge in these troubled times. If Obama’s rhetoric of change sweeps Hillary away, the Cameron-inclined will see it as proof that the torch has passed to a new generation.
But these are not the lessons that either party should draw from the results in Iowa and New Hampshire. In fact the four winners in the two early contests all had one thing in common: in the crucial final 72 hours of the campaign they appeared the most authentic.
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