British candidates get American advice
Obama strategists have a role in race
The two men vying to be Britain’s next prime minister have each hired a former political adviser to President Obama to carry them to victory in what is shaping up as a tight election Thursday.
Jim Messina, who led Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, is advising Prime Minister David Cameron, whose Conservative Party is fighting to retain power.
David Axelrod, who came up with Obama’s galvanizing 2008 campaign slogan, “Yes We Can,” is advising Ed Miliband, leader of the left-leaning Labor Party.
“I’ve tried to help them think through how best to deliver their message,” Axelrod told USA TODAY in an email Tuesday.
After Miliband this week unveiled a stone with Labor’s pledges etched onto it, Messina tweeted: “Volunteers working our targeted seats on beautiful day in London. No need for stone tablet gimmicks, record speaks for itself. #GE2015.”
Attempts to reach Messina were unsuccessful.
Some British politicians have groused about the growing influence of aggressive and negative-style U.S. presidential campaigns.
“What I’m seeing in this election is the influence of these big American advisers and it’s becoming the most negative, personal and nasty campaign I’ve ever seen,” United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel Farage told the London radio station LBC in March.
The Electoral Commission forbids British parties from buying broadcast airtime for political ads, but that doesn’t extend to digital platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
The Conservatives, for example, have attacked Labor’s governing record and its public spending claims on YouTube.
British campaigns also are shorter than those in America. “The absence of wall-to-wall television ads removes one primary tool for the campaign toolbox familiar to Americans,” Axelrod said. “There is a blessed brevity to the campaign, as compared to the U.S., where the media already is breathlessly charting the doings of candidates a year and a half before the election.”
The most contentious and riveting election in recent British history, culminating Thursday, pits two bland and clumsy candidates against each other: the current prime minister, Conservative Party’s David Cameron, and Labor Party leader Edward Miliband.
In one sense, the election, which may not give either party a working majority, can be read as a revolt against each man’s lack of appeal.
Cameron, who often seems to regard the prime minister’s job as an inconvenience, has run a campaign that has been lackluster, at least until party leaders are said to have shaken him awake. His style is characterized by a phrase to describe rich women in Britain who schedule babies to be born by C-section: “too posh to push.”
Cameron, a former PR man and graduate of the elite Eton school, seems to get most exercised by the common perception that he is, well, an Etonian — selfsatisfied, entitled and out of touch. Yet as an aloof character, he has avoided most debates and one-to-one interactions. “Why is David Cameron not at the debate?” was among the most asked Google search questions when the BBC recently hosted five of the leading parties in the race.
Miliband, less liked than even Cameron, has, by many estimates, run a much better campaign, at least until last week, when he fell off of a debating stage. Just before that, he bizarrely sneaked off in the middle of the night to be interviewed by Russell Brand, the former heroin addict, turned comedian, 9/11 conspiracist and self-styled revolutionary who had been urging Britons not to vote.
A few weeks before, to establish a personal connection, Miliband gave an interview in his everyman kitchen in his north London home. This turned out to be merely his upstairs kitchen, not his large, well-equipped kitchen downstairs. “Two kitchen Miliband,” thereupon became his election sobriquet.
Miliband is perhaps best known, and most disliked, for having defeated his own brother, David, for Labor’s leadership.
Cameron and Miliband are marked not only for their personality flaws, but by the fact that each has been outflanked by more charismatic politicians to their respective right and left.
To the right of Cameron’s center-right Conservative Party is Nigel Farage of UKIP (U.K. Independence Party). He is a showman and character actor who has vividly personified a small town, lower-middle-class, pub-centric, anti-immigrant English reactionary. It is a role that has dramatized how far from the Conservative Party’s low end the high-end Cameron really is.
To the left of Miliband’s center-left Labor Party is Nicola Sturgeon and her patron, Alex Salmond, who represent the movement for Scottish independence and a fiery, anti-corporate, old-fashioned left. The Scottish National Party, dramatizing how tepid Labor’s idea of the left has become, will surely take almost all of Labor’s seats in Scotland. Miliband, who will need its votes in Parliament, has had to grin and bear these zealous upstarts.
Then, too, both Cameron and Miliband suffer as contrasting losers in their own party, where they each have a shadow leader more charismatic and likable.
For Cameron, it is the ebullient London Mayor Boris Johnson, who, by many measures, is the most popular politician in the United Kingdom. Johnson has played the loyal soldier in this race, dodging all questions about his own plans. Yet his presence is always a reminder of a more compelling Conservative Party future.
For Miliband, there is his own brother and the buyer’s remorse among Laborites that the party chose “the wrong Miliband,” the more aggressive and ruthless brother instead of the one who might have better connected with voters. David Miliband, who exiled himself to New York to leave the field clear for his brother, is expected by many to be on an early flight back to London if Labor fares poorly on Thursday.
The election, of course, is not merely about Cameron and Miliband personally, but rather about what they have come to symbolize: the anodyne nature of the two main political parties and their mutual lack of conviction in the face of the passionate intensity of the marginal parties.
The best that can be hoped is that a begrudging, resentful and often mocking electorate will give one party the bare minimum of votes need to form a government. But it is also possible that both parties and both leaders will be rejected on Thursday in favor of an anybody-but-them free-for-all.