Events | 2010.08.17
Why David Cameron is the new Dubya | Andy Beckett
Our young, energetic prime minister has more in common with the discredited former president than you may think
Is David Cameron the new George W Bush? It may seem an odd comparison, with Bush drifting into discredited semi-retirement – one of his few relatively recent public appearances has been a pre-match coin toss for the Dallas Cowboys – while Cameron enjoys one of the most energetic prime ministerial honeymoons for decades. Yet in their backgrounds and how they have presented themselves, in their political trajectories and, most important, in their style of government, there are striking parallels. These parallels may tell us where Cameron\'s premiership, which will be 100 days old on 19 August, is heading.
Both men come from elite families, but rebranded themselves – with useful help from supposedly "anti-elite" parts of the rightwing media such as the Sun and Fox News – as relatively ordinary citizens. Both men were political slow starters: Cameron not active in student politics in the 80s, despite the decade\'s crucial and absorbing ideological battles; Bush not winning elected office until he became governor of Texas in 1995 at the age of 48. Rather than doing early political apprenticeships, like the earnest young Milibands, Bush and Cameron had some hedonistic times as young adults, which may continue to interest their opponents and biographers.
Having missed the heyday of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the two men began to rise instead when voters were losing their appetite for transatlantic conservatism\'s more caustic remedies, and positioned themselves accordingly as "compassionate conservatives". Most journalists took this carefully constructed moderation at face value.
Voters were less impressed. In the 2000 presidential election Bush, infamously, received about half a million votes fewer than Al Gore, despite Gore\'s over-complicated and stiff public manner, and a jittery economy. In this May\'s general election, it is already less remembered, Cameron\'s Conservatives scraped 36% of the vote – only a slight improvement on the share the party won in its heavy defeats in 2005 and 2001 – despite Gordon Brown\'s Gore-style presentational problems, and despite a British economy that was not so much jittery as post-traumatic.
And yet, out of Bush and Cameron\'s poor election showings in 2000 and 2010 has come a new, bolder British and American conservatism. You could call it a politics of wishful thinking – or of bluff.
First, the two men spun their thin or nonexistent electoral mandates as decisive expressions of public support. Thus, in America, throughout the month-long tumult of recounts and court challenges that followed the 2000 election, Bush presented himself as the contest\'s victor and Gore as the loser, when there was plenty of evidence that the situation was unclear or even the opposite. Similarly, in Britain this May, on election night, with a mere three seats declared (all retained by Labour) and the exit polls predicting a hung parliament, Cameron\'s key ally, George Osborne, told the BBC: "I do not think there\'s any question of Labour being able to continue [in office]." A few commentators fleetingly raised an eyebrow at Osborne\'s characteristically cocky, premature triumphalism, but it helped create a conventional wisdom about the election result that led directly to the formation of the coalition.
Once in government, Cameron, like Bush, has again exceeded the electorate\'s instructions. The cautious, inclusive, compassionate conservative has turned into a divisive rightwing radical. Both men have used national emergencies as political cover. For Bush, it was 9/11 that justified his huge, reckless neocon experiment. For Cameron, the emergency, more contrived, has been the double one of a hung parliament and a large national deficit – neither of them remotely unprecedented, but scary enough, in a Britain recently grown accustomed to political and economic stability, to make a shrinking of state spending drastic enough to satisfy the zaniest of 80s Thatcherites look like common sense, for the time being, to an impressive 55% of voters .
Will Cameron\'s shallow and opportunistic radicalism succeed? The Bush precedent suggests it may, but only for a few years. Bush was re-elected in 2004, and his approval ratings remained healthy until mid-2005. During this post-9/11 period, it sometimes seemed as if his government could be kept aloft almost by agenda-setting rhetoric alone, without the clever thinktank ideas and canny legislative arm-twistingand basic administrative competence that sustained Thatcher\'s and Reagan\'s administrations. In 2002, a Bush aide told the New York Times magazine writer Ron Suskind that he dismissed critics as members of the "reality-based community" . "When we act, we create our own reality … We\'re history\'s actors ... and you will be left to just study what we do.\'\'
At times, there has been a whiff of that gravity-defying arrogance about the coalition: in Michael Gove\'s careless handling of the school building programme; in Cameron\'s desire to give his government a fixed five years in power, after the public have just voted for a fluid British politics.
When government gets difficult, ambition and rhetoric will only take you so far. In 2005, Bush was found wanting by Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq; his ratings never recovered. Eerily, Cameron has enjoyed a first three months in power almost free of awkward events and accidents. But he has inherited a weaker economy than Bush, and is likely to face a stronger opposition leader and has a coalition to keep happy. He will be lucky if, like Bush, he gets five good years.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]d-cameron-the-new-george-dubya
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