Blimey, That Could Save the Democrats

Across the nation, Democrats are arguing about how to make their party more electable. The answer to their question actually arrived in Washington last week and stood next to George W. Bush at the White House, flashing a toothy smile.

Back in 1992, Tony Blair inherited a Labor Party in far deeper trouble than the Democrats are in today. His opponents in the Conservative Party -- the most successful political machine of the 20th century -- had just won their fourth straight election. People thought there would never be another Labor government.

Today, however, Labor rules the roost. The Tories have been forced back into the rural shires, and the average age of their membership is in the 70s. Blair is likely to see his huge majority shrink as a result of the Iraq war in the next election, but nobody expects him to lose it.

Blair troubles Democrats in the United States because he symbolizes the gap in their party. The Michael Moore wing, for instance, views him as a traitor for joining the Iraq coalition and helping Bush steal another election. But Blair’s achievement is not one that Democrats can afford to ignore at the moment because he has shown far more willingness than the Democrats to confront his opponents’ strengths and limit his own weaknesses.

Blair’s first lesson for Democrats is one that Bill Clinton never quite managed to teach them: You cannot be too close to the center. In Britain, Blair embarked on a series of gestures so dramatic that middle England -- our Peoria -- realized Labor had changed. He embraced privatization, upheld his promise to not raise the rate of income taxes, made the Bank of England independent of the government and ignored teachers’ protests about introducing standards testing.

The Democrats desperately need a similar display. One possibility might be embracing school vouchers (which poor blacks want, even if teachers don’t); another would be Social Security reform (something has to be done, sooner rather than later); yet another might be denouncing partial-birth abortion (which is opposed by many people who regard themselves as pro-choice). Forget all the Mooreish nonsense about fighting as hard for the left half of the country as Bush does for the right. That won’t help.

Blair can also teach the Democrats a thing or two about the culture wars. Contrary to much of the guff presented in the U.S. media over the last week, cultural politics is never just about religion; it involves a broader proposition -- convincing white working-class voters that your values are their values (and that your opponents’ values are not). When Blair came to power, middle England associated his party with the Loony Left -- chardonnay-drinking pacifists of dubious sexuality who were soft on crime (sound familiar?). Now it is the Tories who are caricatured as loonies -- xenophobic bigots who want to close down your hospitals.

Presentation has something to do with this change. Blair’s party has ruthlessly shed its beards-and-sandals image. (Michael Moore would have been ejected from the Labor Party conference.) But there was also a clear strategy: First neutralize Labor’s weaknesses (Blair boasted how his party was “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” for instance), and then relentlessly paint your opponents as extremists.

Could the Democrats do the same? For much of the mid-1990s, Clinton managed to convince many Americans that the extremists were mostly on the right. John Kerry may have had more traction with stem cells if he had been tougher on other moral issues. The Democrats are still identified with what the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) called “defining deviancy down.”

The final thing Blair can teach the Democrats is simple: You can never be too tough on terrorism. Blair’s support for the Iraq war has a lot to do with personal conviction, but it is also shrewd political positioning. It has infuriated the Labor Party, but it has also ensured that the Tories can never attack him in the same way that Bush ripped into Kerry -- for being unwilling to confront evil with military might. “Tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism” would not be a bad rallying cry for the Democratic Party.

Democrats will scowl about much of this. They might care to remember that it took 15 years in the political wilderness for the Labor Party to accept Blair.