The British election has finally hit the US. It was front page news in yesterday’s
New York Times and
Wall Street Journal. Robert Thomson, the
Journal’s editor, used to run the
Times of London, and the
Journal’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, prides himself on, usually, picking the British prime minister—but even at the
Journal the election has been, so far, a modest story.
Generally speaking, the election of the world leader who will have the closest relationship to the US president and be our most vital and strategic ally (we might not be in Iraq if Tony Blair hadn’t so enthusiastically supported George Bush) is of no interest to the American media, or, for that matter, to Americans.
This is partly because we still think of Tony Blair as the prime minister (and he is often on American television rather pretending he is still prime minister), and yet, confusingly, he isn’t running, and partly because his stand-in, Gordon Brown, who is actually the prime minister, is a figure of almost incomprehensible dourness and turgidness. Brown’s opponent, on the other hand, the Conservative Party leader David Cameron, is very smooth—so frictionless that virtually nobody in the US has ever heard of him. Being quite an anglophile, I was able to get my editors at
Vanity Fair to let me
profile Cameron, largely, I believe, because they thought it was James Cameron. (I rather liked Cameron, an intelligent, moderate consensus-builder. Comparing our leading conservative, Sarah Palin, to theirs suggests another reason why we are not interested in British politics—we live on different planets.)
This is the first time that there have been US-style televised election debates in the UK. These debates have meant a surge for the perennial also-ran third party, the Lib-Dems, and their candidate, Nick Clegg, who is, it seems, 20-something, and would, if he were to be elected, instantly become history’s
most telegenic head of state. Clegg was once an intern at the
Nation, American’s most doctrinaire and humorless left-wing magazine, but no one seems to hold that against him in the UK, where no one has obviously read the
Nation.
The election has finally hit the US, however minimally, because it has become a nail-biter. Cameron’s lead has shrunk, Brown has remarkably held on for dear life, and Clegg has been the unexpected contrast gainer—anything could happen (though it will probably still be Cameron by a hair). Also, Brown’s gaffe, a week before the election, of saying, over an open microphone, that a clearly bigoted woman
was clearly bigoted, was too great a media chuckle even for the American media to pass up.
Last night marked the
third and final debate, which was seen, in the US, on CNN by 30 or 40 Americans. Other than sweating copiously, the candidates conducted themselves as though they were American presidential candidates, with the absence of humor, style, verbal facility, directness, joie de guerre, and genuine human warmth that political consultants always counsel against.
They have watched us, even if we don’t watch them.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: @MichaelWolffNYC.
