I know this a bit OT but I found this review of the candidates in UK's prime ministerial race to be interesting. In looking at the photo of Brown from when he was young, I am impressed he has gotten as high as he has........given American superficiality, I don't think he would have done as well here. What's your take on the American view of this race........or at least the NY Time's view? Just curious.
In the British Election, It’s Posh, Posher, Poshest
By SARAH LYALL
Published: April 30, 2010
A CLERGYMAN'S SON Gordon Brown at Edinburgh University in 1975.
LONDON — Typically, encounters between British prime ministers and their political enemies here are immature exercises in name-calling in front of baying rows of overstimulated legislators in the weekly contest known as prime minister’s questions.
The televised debates among the three men competing to run the country after next week’s election were meant to provide a corrective to that, replacing the histrionics with gravity and purpose. But their main effect, it seems, has been not to get people thinking about issues so much as to accelerate a different trend entirely — the move to an American-style obsession with personality politics.
What the leaders look like, what they sound like, how sincere they seem, how sweaty they are, how often they smile, how their wives dress, whether they appear comfortable with “regular” people and whether they speak fluently into the camera or mumble shiftily toward their feet — all these have become crucial elements in the campaign, Britain’s most important in years. “The Talent Show of the Damned,” a Guardian columnist called the final debate last week, acknowledging that the change has come at a singularly difficult time for a troubled country.
But if the process has become more American, it has done so with a British flavor, so that what has come to matter most is each candidate’s particular style of Britishness. Britons remain obsessed with the minutiae of social distinction, and the candidates have gone into elaborate contortions in their efforts to present themselves as ordinary working people. The Labour leader, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose father was a Scottish minister and who became a left-wing student leader at the University of Edinburgh, can plausibly get away with this. It is a harder act to pull off for David Cameron, the Conservative leader, and Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats.
For those keeping score — which includes the entirety of the class-obsessed British news media — Mr. Clegg and Mr. Cameron came from privileged backgrounds that most Britons would call, roughly, “posh.” Yet there are gradations within gradations at the top (in The Independent, the columnist Simon Carr recently described one Tory candidate, Annunziata Rees-Mogg, as having “one of those unplaceable accents that mark out a specific quintile of the upper-lower-upper class”).
So it means something that Mr. Cameron is a descendant of King William IV and that he went to Eton, the ancient boarding school for aspiring empire-builders, whose pupils wear strange get-ups of striped trousers, tailcoats and waistcoats. And it means something else that Mr. Clegg is the grandson of a (non-British!) Russian baroness and that he went to Westminster, a first-class school in London that sits socially at a rung below Eton — in the upper-middle rather than the top drawer, perhaps.
And it also means something that while Mr. Cameron’s family made its money in good British business, Mr. Clegg grew up European rich, the descendant of White Russians and the son of a Dutchwoman. He also speaks five languages, is married to a Spaniard and was a member of the European Parliament — three strikes against him in the anti-Europe, pro-Cameron Tory press.
Emphasis on such details encourages the candidates to think more about presentation and less about pressing issues like how, exactly, they intend to reduce the $248.4 billion annual deficit, said Steven Fielding, a professor of political history and the director of the Center for British Politics at the University of Nottingham. “Given the seriousness of the issues,” he said, “this election campaign is living in a parallel universe to what is going to be going on after May 6.”
Struggling with the enormous budget deficit, a weak currency and an anemic recovery, Britain is facing the prospect of a new period of austerity as painful as anything in at least a generation. Last week, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, was quoted as warning that whoever becomes prime minister will have to make such savage cuts that his party risks being consigned to political oblivion for years afterward — just as the Conservatives were following the disasters of the early and mid-1990s.
Professor Fielding and others say that at a time like this, personality — particularly the kind that flourishes in heavily choreographed 90-minute debates — is the last thing the voters should focus on. “Glib fluency in front of the camera might win over TV viewers, but it is not an indicator of a politician’s genuine stature,” the columnist Leo McKinstry wrote recently in The Daily Mail.
Mr. Fielding said that viewers who see politicians performing on television start to regard them, in a sense, as protagonists in fictional dramas. “It’s not that they confuse them with TV characters, but that they see them in the same framework,” he said. “The leaders’ debates exaggerate that by encouraging voters to focus on the minutiae rather than on the policy.”
The debates have changed the course of the campaign by reconfiguring the political landscape. Unexpectedly catapulted to prominence at the first debate by his earnest demeanor and smooth, fresh approach, Mr. Clegg has put his party on the map, successfully presenting himself as a viable alternative to politics as usual. Mr. Cameron has used the debates to hone his credentials as potential prime minister-in-waiting, assuaging the fears of some voters, at least, that he is too slick and callow for Britain’s top job.
But Mr. Brown, a naturally uncomfortable person, has fared poorly next to his self-assured opponents. The spin from his aides that being telegenic is less important than being serious hasn’t gained traction with the public. Told to humanize his campaign by interacting with ordinary voters, Mr. Brown sabotaged the effort last week when he forgot he was wearing a microphone, angrily dismissing a lifelong Labour supporter as a “bigoted woman” after she expressed worries about immigration.
The comment certainly didn’t help Britons sort out their feelings about what it means to be British in these trying times. And what it means to actually want to be prime minister right now.
“A lot of people think, ‘Who on earth wants to be doing this?’ ” Professor Fielding said. “It could potentially finish you off.”
nytimes.com |
