From a student farce to an American tragedy

Paul Gourlie broke all the rules of student politics. In pre-student loans New Zealand, when the universities were still capable of disgorging thousands of student protesters on to the streets, Paul re-defined what it meant to be a student politician.

Not for him the varsity student uniform of jeans and T-shirts. To the consternation of the Otago student body, ‘‘The Governor’’ (as Paul styled himself) sailed across their campus in a starched wingcollar and a flapping undergraduate gown.

He wasn’t interested in the votes of the student ‘‘activists’’ who wore badges and carried placards. The votes he was after were those of the students who didn’t protest. The ‘‘scarfies’’ who saw life at university as an opportunity to have fun. The ones who found student politics ‘‘boring’’.

Paul’s crucial political insight was that student activism was a minority sport, and that the leftwing rhetoric spouted by those activists left most students cold. Paul’s flamboyant speeches were fast, furious, funny and almost completely devoid of content. Ordinary students cheered him to the echo.

No-one had the slightest idea how to fight – let alone beat – a candidate who appeared to have escaped from the pages of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (or, for the benefit of younger readers, Hogwarts). For a while, Paul Gourlie was invincible: one of only a handful of student presidents to serve two consecutive terms.

There is something disturbingly contemporary about ‘‘The Gourlie Years’’. The US presidential election campaign of 2016 is stirring up old memories. Paul Gourlie, the student antipolitician, and Donald Trump, the populist anti-President, have more than a little in common.

Not the least of these commonalities is the challenge presented to the Left by right-wing candidates of such uninhibited flamboyance. And, if comparing Trump to Otago University’s student president of 1979-80 seems just a little too weird, then think instead of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. He, too, built a political career on the insight that, eventually, a great many voters become tired – even resentful – of social-democracy’s high-minded expectations.

As the Democratic National Convention gets underway in Philadelphia, the world is about to discover how Hillary Clinton and her campaign team propose to counter Trump’s flamboyant contempt for the rules of conventional politics.

The first indication of how she intends to meet Trump’s challenge may be seen in her choice of Senator Tim Kaine as her VicePresidential running-mate. Kaine is a solid Democrat of quietly expressed liberal views, with a reputation for executive competence. In choosing the Senator from – and former Governor of – the state of Virginia, Clinton has opted for personal and political safety.

Those on the left of the Democratic Party had been hoping that Clinton would nominate the Massachusetts Senator, Elizabeth Warren, as her running mate. Their argument was that, in a year when the ‘‘Establishment’’ and conventional politics were being rejected by an angry and disaffected electorate, the novelty and out-there-ness of two women on the ticket would undercut the widespread characterisation of the Clinton Campaign as both uninspired and uninspiring.

The ‘‘Clinton-Kaine’’ ticket suggests that the Democratic Convention will be long on worthiness and short on spark. If this is the way it plays out, then the Clinton Campaign will find itself in serious bother. Conventional pundits may have slammed the chaos and confusion of the Republican Convention, but in doing so they entirely missed the point. Trump wasn’t interested in staging a well-run convention. What he wanted, and what he produced, was a riveting political mini-series; replete with heroes and heroines, hucksters and villains. For a whole week it was all anyone was talking about.

What distinguishes Trump’s campaigning from Gourlie’s and Berlusconi’s is the darkness and brutality of his rhetorical palette. The latter exploited voters grown weary of the Left’s moral exhortations.

Trump’s voters, by contrast, are driven by a toxic mixture of moral indignation and the violent desire to discipline and punish an America they no longer recognise as their own.

My gut feeling is that the cautious Hillary Clinton will fare as badly against ‘‘The Donald’’ as I did against ‘‘The Governor’’.