Some History

When it rains, it pours. The New Republic Online has a really excellent pair of pieces, by Zachary Roth and Arik Ben-Zvi respectively, exploring historical analogies for the coming US presidential election. Because the pieces may well be behind a subscriber firewall, I urge you to (a) subscribe (it’s worth it) and, failing that, (b) wheedle a copy out of your good-natured, ingenuous, easily-exploited friend (I think that’s me …). Roth cites John Major’s narrow win over Neil Kinnock in 1992:

Polls indicated that Britain was ready for change. And under Kinnock, Labour seemed to have transformed itself into an acceptable alternative. Taking over as Labour leader in the wake of the party’s devastating drubbing by the Tories in 1983, Kinnock began a process which Tony Blair would complete in the ’90s: Turning his back on the party’s–and his own–socialist roots, Kinnock recast Labour as the party of responsible centrism, whose plans to get Britain’s economy back on track stressed tax incentives, foreign investment, “durable growth”, and retraining British workers for greater competitiveness. … But Major always retained an advantage over Kinnock: Despite his party’s and his government’s unpopularity, his personal approval ratings consistently hovered in the low fifties–relatively high for a prime minister in Britain, where voters, in general, tend to take a dimmer view of politicians than in the United States. Kinnock, by contrast, could barely get out of the low thirties.

A train wreck ensued, for a reason complacent Kerry-ites should note:

[T]he Major-Kinnock contest does provide at least one critical lesson: it gives the lie to the notion–which seems lately to have become conventional wisdom amongst Democratic strategists and liberal pundits–that undecided voters will always break towards the challenger in a close election. Proponents of this view argue that if voters haven’t made up their mind to support the incumbent over the course of his tenure, they’re unlikely ever to do so. As evidence, they cite Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter, as well as Clinton’s over George H.W. Bush. But in Britain in 1992, late-breaking undecideds did exactly the opposite: Ultimately, they opted for the devil they knew, because the governing party successfully planted and exacerbated doubts about both the policies, and the personal qualities, of the challenger.

As Roth suggests, the Tories would’ve almost certainly been better off had they lost to Kinnock. As things stand now, I’ll have to wait until I’m eighty-five to see Oliver Letwin (who gave my favorite speech of all time) depose Euan Blair as Sky Marshall of the Federal Republic of England. Ben-Zvi’s piece is potentially even more dire for the Dems. Ben-Zvi cites Israel’s 1999 election, in which undecideds did break for the challenger, Ehud Barak.

The Barak campaign was revolutionary in Israeli politics. While most Israeli political leaders rarely spoke about their personal lives or trumpeted their own histories, Barak’s campaign made his biography the heart of its message. His ads told and retold stories of Barak’s military exploits, from his days as a young commando to his tenure as Chief of Staff. Campaign posters showed a photo of Barak standing over the bodies of dead terrorists that he had shot during a heroic hostage rescue operation. The message couldn’t have been simpler: nobody needs to tell Barak about fighting terrorists. Or, to paraphrase another military veteran running for office, Barak fought terrorists as a young man, and he would fight terrorists as Prime Minister. By using Barak’s biography to prove his ability to protect Israel’s security, the campaign was able to move voters past that fundamental security threshold and allow them to start looking at all the other issues. And that’s where Barak had the clear advantage. On basic social issues the majority of Israelis identified strongly with the secular, center-left policies of Barak and his Labor Party.

If you replace “social issues” with bread-and-butter economics, the analogy seems to hold (whether we believers in “smaller state, bigger citizens” like it or not). The question is, what happens next? Will Kerry fumble disastrously (due to the intransigence and bad faith of his diplomatic interlocutors, let’s say), and will he unwittingly usher in a period of conservative hegemony, with a figure more aggressive and unresponsive to the entreaties of traditional allies than President Bush at the helm? Not sure that’s what Ben-Zvi’s looking for, but it’s food for thought.