William Flew on US Presidential Politics

William Flew on US Presidential Politics

As Barack Obama put his arm on David Cameron’s back and walked into Downing Street with him yesterday, I think I know what he was up to. I learnt about it on a plane trip that I took more than ten years ago. When I landed, I encountered a genius. Actually, that’s way, way too strong. What I encountered was a genius plan.
I was working for William Hague and we were booked in to meet the Governor of Texas and his wife. George W. Bush was good at all the meet-and-greet stuff and then we sat down and got on to something he was even better at — political strategy. He hadn’t yet declared himself a candidate for the presidency, but he quite happily laid out for us his strategy for getting to the White House.
Working with his political adviser, Karl Rove, Mr Bush had been trying to solve two problems at the same time. The first was that he was a Bush, his father’s son, and thus distrusted by conservatives who didn’t like the former President. Yet at the same time he was a Republican trying to follow a Democrat as president at a time of economic and military peace. He faced the danger of being simultaneously too conservative and not conservative enough.
So Mr Rove and Mr Bush developed what I regarded then, and still do, as a genius plan. They would retain their small-government, low-tax conservatism and win Christians in the South by being one of the gang. Yet at the same time they would talk about social issues — addiction, poverty, schools. They would drop the traditional Republican pledge to abolish the federal Department for Education and instead put in place a reform programme to raise standards. And they would emphasise Mr Bush’s bipartisan work in Texas and his successful appeal to Hispanics.

As Mr Rove put it to me years later, sitting in his White House West Wing office, the strategy having worked: “It’s about being for something as opposed to against something.”

It’s worth recalling all this for more than the historical (but still interesting) reason that it shows that Mr Bush was no dummy. It’s a reminder that, whatever his later reputation, George W. Bush ran for the American presidency from the centre, not the right.

He and Mr Rove spent years on a creative idea — compassionate conservatism — that could hold the base but had appeal far beyond it. And they showed immense strategic discipline. I remember sitting in the hall watching Laura Bush address the Republican Convention and marvelling that the choreography had left a classroom of schoolchildren at their desks sitting behind her.

Look at American politics today, and wonder which politician shows the same creativity and determination to position himself for victory and it’s obvious — Barack Obama. And that’s what he is doing here.


The move to the centre for Mr Obama — badly needed after the Democrats were slaughtered in the mid-term elections — started with his announcement of a deficit reduction plan. The plan was carefully calibrated, designed to look fiscally conservative while creating an issue — bringing an end to tax breaks for the rich — that kept his base and trapped the Republicans on the wrong side.

Then there was the production of the President’s supposedly missing birth certificate, a rebuke to those on the Right who — taking their cue, it must be said, from Hillary Clinton’s campaign — have been suggesting there is something unAmerican about Mr Obama. He could embarrass the ultra-Right (by exposing the idea that he wasn’t American-born as a ludicrous conspiracy theory) and at the same time deliver a direct statement, in rather clever wrapping, that he isn’t some odd leftwinger from out there, but a mainstream American.

After that, along came the discovery of Osama bin Laden’s hiding place, a fortuitous event that allowed the President to show that he is a Commander-in-Chief and not just a Chicago political organiser.

And now the visit to Europe. Naturally, in Britain, we smile at how our politicians want to be seen with Mr Obama. But on this visit, Mr Obama wants the photographs too. Being seen with the Queen at the Palace, with the Guards and the Duke of Edinburgh and with the British Prime Minister outside No 10 all emphasise that he is leader of the free world.

The message that Mr Obama hopes to send from Europe is that he is on good terms with America’s traditional allies, a proper, down-the-line President. In The Times yesterday he compared his relationship with the British Prime Minister to the one that Ronald Reagan had. Not an accident. And he said that he looked at the world in the same way as Britain’s Conservative leader. We see that as being part of Mr Cameron’s attempt to appeal to more than his ideological soulmates. But it is obviously true of Mr Obama, too. In other words, it wasn’t just the Irish homecoming and the pint of Guinness that was designed with a domestic audience in mind. That’s true of the whole trip.

Meanwhile the Republican Presidential effort continues to flounder. The announcement this weekend by Mitch Daniels, the Governor of Indiana, that he won’t be seeking the Republican nomination has not been big news in Britain. But for his party it is something of a disaster. It leaves Republicans without the one mainstream candidate whom they could confidently present as up to the job and for whom they showed any enthusiasm.

The former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, whom few rate, now faces the former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, whom few trust. In such a race, much of the energy will be with candidates on the fringe, perhaps with Newt Gingrich, who is unelectable. And none has a George W. Bush strategy — an imaginative idea allowing them to appeal to party and swing voters at the same time. Mr Romney can make up ground with the base only by alienating centre voters whom he needs if he is to be president. Mr Pawlenty is lacklustre and is relying on harsh attacks on Mr Obama to make himself seem dynamic. It’s a rather depressing sight.

What happened in the 1994 mid-terms — a crushing Republican victory, pushing a Democratic President to the centre, making his opponents look extreme and winning re-election in 1996 — could be about to happen again. I don’t think that smile on Mr Obama’s face on the Downing Street doorstep was just that he liked Sam Cam’s dress.