Conservatives Wait and See on Cameron

The American blogosphere is currently holding its breath while it waits to see if David Cameron can hold his new coalition government together.

The American blogosphere is currently holding its breath while it waits to see how David Cameron’s coalition cabinet handles itself. There hasn't been much commentary on what this election “means” for American conservatives or the future of the Republican Party. This may be because several conservatives doubt that the coalition can hold, so a new election is expected.

In The Weekly Standard Fred Barnes wrote a piece titled: “Lessons for the GOP from the UK Election” The argument is that the Conservatives in the UK were not aggressive enough in differentiating themselves from Labour, which is why they didn’t do well. Therefore, he concludes that Republicans must differentiate themselves from the Democrats, and offers some advice on what positions to take to do this:

Voters didn’t think Conservatives were much better than Labour in fixing the economy.  The result, despite the economic distress in England: no majority...

What does this mean for Republicans?  They have to make certain voters understand how different their agenda is from that of Democrats and President Obama.  Republicans followed this strategy in 1980, when Ronald Reagan campaigned on a 30 percent across-the-board tax cut and in 1994 with the Contract for America.

This year, a “distance” strategy would require Republicans to emphasize their plan to repeal Democratic health care legislation, not merely to tinker with it.  Also, they would benefit from adopting most or all of the reforms in Congressman Paul Ryan’s “A Roadmap to America’s Future.” Those would put daylight between Republicans and Democrats.

On National Review’s The Corner, Andrew Stuttaford has recommended that Americans read an op-ed appearing in The Guardian by Tim Montgomerie, which focuses on the details of why the Conservatives did not campaign as well as they should have:

A ConservativeHome.com survey of more than 3,000 Tory members found 62% thought the campaign was poor. Just 20% thought it was good or excellent. The team around Cameron failed to decide on a big theme for the election, choosing to run a presidential campaign based around his personality. This led them to sleepwalk into their most fatal decision, agreeing to the three election debates. …

Conservative election literature promised to change the economy, society and politics, but in each of those areas the message lacked bite on the doorstep. The shadow chancellor, George Osborne, never developed a consistent economic message, choosing – perhaps rightly – to downplay the austerity message in favour of caution. Unforgivably, the "big society" message favoured by the Tory head of strategy, Steve Hilton, was never poll-tested, and failed to cut through with most voters – and even frightened some. …

Tory traditionalists were most disappointed at the reluctance of the party leadership to talk about issues such as immigration. Cameron's silence on this until the last part of the campaign was like Manchester United keeping Wayne Rooney on the bench until the last game of the season.

Suttaford adds that he is concerned about some of the initial tax plans from the new Cabinet:

In the meantime, it's disturbing to see that one of the first moves agreed to by the new Lib-Con coalition partners is an increase in capital-gains tax. Deficits cannot be wished away, of course, and, as valuable as a supply-side tack can be in helping restore order to the public finances, part of the fix will inevitably (and regrettably) have to include higher taxes (preferably weighted towards consumption). What should not be done, however, is anything that decreases the incentive to save.

One piece that has been reposted at The Corner and Heritage’s blog, is a piece by Nile Gardiner (director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation) who argues that this coalition will be hard to hold:

The main dangers of this arrangement are early paralysis within the new government or the watering down of key policies needed to enable an economic recovery. There is also the threat of the Liberals being part of the cabinet while actively working with the Labour opposition to undermine the Conservative agenda. The omens certainly don’t look good on the coalition front, and Cameron will need all his skills as the youngest prime minister in 200 years to steer his new government and his country through some very rough waters. In doing so, he should stick to core conservative principles and avoid making concessions to the Left. He must also look to Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill as his role models, great figures in British history who rescued their nation at times of great peril.

There hasn’t been much left-wing commentary on the coalition. (Though Jonathan Chait and a few other liberals did wonder why the Lib-Labour coalition seemed untenable).

At The New Republic, William Galston argued that immigration was the key reason the Tories did not win outright:

The answer is starting us in the face, and it’s disturbing: the Tories fell short because the right-wing anti-Europe, anti-immigrant parties surged.

This may well have made the difference between a Tory majority and the actual result. I count twenty-three constituencies narrowly won by Labour or the Liberal Democrats where the vote for the UK Independence Party alone was greater than the margin of the Conservative defeat. We can’t know for sure, but it seems likely that those votes would have gone to the more Euro-skeptic Conservative candidates had it not been for the UKIP.

Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair doesn’t have any predictions, but from interviewing Cameron last year, has some thoughts on how he thinks, and sees a confident Cameron:

His real interest, the point at which he picked up the story, where the story became about him, was when the conversation turned to Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, those artful dodgers, those all-things-to-as-many-people-as-possible men, those consummate politicians, those yuppies, those salesmen, those deft orchestrators of the modern psyche (stop me, please). Indeed, David Cameron, I’m sure, is utterly convinced he has the unique touch—the charm, the empathy, the savvy—to hold a coalition together.

Andrew Sullivan sees a lot of similarity between Obama and Cameron. Going so far to suggest that they are even similar in their “struggling with identity” narratives:

And here is where he reminds me a little of Obama. Class in Britain is what race is in America. Cameron never denied his past and even engaged in some of its more obnoxious practices. But he loves his country, and endured great prejudice, as well as great privilege, because of his class. Yes, Etonians can be victims too. He both owned his identity - all of it - and yet sought to transcend it.

I think he represents the future of conservatism, as well as the best of the Tory tradition of Disraeli and Butler and Baldwin. I think he is where the GOP will one day have to be, once they slowly find out the sheer depth of the abyss they have hurled themselves into.

Alex Massie, argues there is actually more commonality between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems:

In any case a Liberal-Labour alliance made more sense in the early decades of the 20th century when the argument was about building a welfare state and all the rest of it. Now that the argument is about reforming the welfare state and other government services it's not so obvious that liberals should ally themselves with Labour - and certainly not when there's a reform-minded Conservatism as the other option. Right now, to put the Lib Dems in American terms, the New Hampshire minority have defeated the Vermont majority.

And, look, Nick Clegg is much, much closer to David Cameron than he is to the Labour party. Consider this speech, from 2008, on the need for public service reform. Sure, there's a bit of Tory-bashing but the main thrust of it is entirely consistent with the brighter parts of Cameron's remodeled Tory party. And it makes it clear that, philosophically and in terms of instinct, a Con-Lib arrangement makes perfect sense.

Finally, many commentators find it impressive that the UK government can change much faster than the U.S. government, without the months of wrangling or a "change.gov" url. Yglesias has a whole post praising this aspect of parliamentary government.