If there is one thing that British Prime Minister Tony Blair has never underestimated, it is the importance of an American presidential election in shaping the dynamics of British domestic politics. Until now. For years, Blair’s analysis of American politics has been simple, strategic and, ultimately, determinist.
He believes the British live downstream from them. He believes that what happens in the United States defines the limits of the possible for Britain, and thus for the Labour Party.
Everyone knows about the practical lessons that Blair’s Labour Party learned from Bill Clinton — the campaign tactics, the triangulation, and even what became the Third Way ideology. What fewer people grasp is the overriding importance that Blair attached to the fact that Clinton won.
Clinton’s victory in 1992, after 12 years of right-wing Republican rule, made New Labour credible. With a Democrat in the White House at last, Blair believed it was possible for a reformist, mildly social democratic Labour Party to present itself as cutting with the grain of history. If Clinton had lost in 1992 then, Blair believed, Labour’s task next time round would have been just as hard as it had proved to be against John Major in that year.
In that context, the presidential election of 1996 could hardly have been more important for Britain. Once again, for Blair, Clinton’s re-election victory was crucial. If Bob Dole had unseated Clinton — making him a one-term aberration — then Blair’s task of persuading British voters to take a chance with Labour six months later in May 1997 would have been far more difficult.
In seeking to understand Blair, one should never, ever underestimate the importance of this deep intellectual pessimism. By May 1997 just about everyone in the country was clear that Labour was going to win the election by a landslide. Blair was not among them. So ingrained was his caution that, even on election day itself, he privately predicted a Labour majority of about 50. In the event, Labour won by 179.
Nor did pessimism disappear with office. The Blair who approached the task of winning Labour’s own historic re-election in 2001 was unchallenged at home. But something else had changed by then. The electoral cycles of the US and Britain had become firmly aligned — with a November presidential contest in the US followed, six months later, by a United Kingdom election — and in November 2000 George W Bush had emerged as president from a contest the Democrats had been widely expected to win.
Blair’s total and immediate determination to establish a strong relationship with Bush tends to be seen, in retrospect and through the prism of Iraq, as purely an act of raison d’être — the belief that it was essential for any British prime minister to be at the shoulder of any US president. But that pivotal visit to Camp David for the ”Colgate summit” in February 2001, just weeks after Bush’s inauguration, also had a very partisan domestic purpose.
Not only was Blair keen to show that a prime minister who had been so close to Clinton could be just as close to a man who loathed Clinton and everything he stood for, he was also genuinely concerned that Conservative Party leader William Hague — who had cultivated candidate Bush in 2000 — might capture the place at the new president’s shoulder.
He travelled to Camp David, in part, to negate that possibility. It worked brilliantly. Four months later he won his second landslide.
With hindsight, it probably worked too well. Three months after the 2001 general election — and all within the space of 24 hours — al-Qaeda attacked the US, and the Tories elected the most pro-American, most anti-European leader in its history. For the next two years and more, Blair’s unchanged double imperative — to define the British possible in the context of US electoral choices while simultaneously seeking to prevent the Tories from posing as the White House’s more natural ally — pushed him ever deeper into the US corner.
Whatever its other increasingly serious costs — in terms of Britain’s international standing and in terms of Labour Party management — it was still possible to argue that the strategy made a certain perverse sense, even if one disagreed with it, as long as you assumed that Bush would be re-elected in November 2004.
Until very recently, that was precisely Downing Street’s assumption. With Bush fighting the election as a post-September 11 warrior incumbent, and with his increasingly likely opponent, Howard Dean, fighting it as an anti-war liberal, it seemed certain that Bush would be in the White House until 2008. Looked at from Downing Street, the growing reality was that the remaining years of Blair’s premiership — including the prospective general election of 2005 — would be defined within a Bush presidency.
All that changed in Iowa a month ago, when John Kerry stopped the Dean machine in its tracks and began his march towards the Democratic presidential nomination. Though eight and a half months of unprecedentedly negative campaigning and a host of unforeseeable events still separate us from election day, Kerry’s emergence has already turned the contest on its head. Last week’s Washington Post national poll had Kerry leading Bush by 52 to 43 points. The assumption that Bush is bound to win no longer applies.
To most Labour supporters — indeed it would not be an exaggeration to say to most people in Europe — the prospect of ”President Kerry” is almost too good to be true. The ameliorative possibilities for international affairs from a Kerry victory are immense. If ever there was a US presidential election that exposes the lazy lie that it does not matter which man wins, it is this one.
You might think, therefore, that behind the doors of Downing Street there is also a new optimism about the possibilities opened up by the turn of events in the US. Given the axiomatic importance Blair attaches to US presidential politics, you might assume the prime minister’s mood has lightened, as he contemplates the possibility of a 2005 general election conducted in the light, not of a triumphalist Bush re-election but of Bush’s deposition by his more internationalist Democratic challenger.
But I fear that you might be wrong. If Bush is defeated in November, does that actually make Blair stronger or weaker? Would a Kerry victory give fresh credibility to Blair the Labour prime minister or toll the knell for Blair the Bush ally? Inside Downing Street there is much disagreement about all this. It is a mark of the political cancer caused by the Iraq war that it cannot be assumed that Blair wants Kerry to win. It is the ultimate pessimism that Blair may even prefer to see Bush re-elected. — Â