One Step Ahead

That's the art of politics it seems to me: being one step ahead.

Bush was one step ahead of John Kerry; Howard one step ahead of Latham, and Blair is one step (or several) ahead of the Conservatives.

So what is it, to be one step ahead?

Well, Douglas Alexander, a relatively young Home Office Minister, demonstrates the 'touch' by his analysis of the US political situation and the lessons that can be drawn for a Labour Britain. Melanie Phillips, meanwhile, has been right about most movements of the zeitgeist for quite a while, and she picked up on Alexander's openness to the lessons Dubya's success can teach to make a prediction:

'it will once again be Tony Blair who grasps the need to appeal to the socially conservative centre (however bogus that appeal may be), while the Tories continue to commit slow political suicide by not recognising the need for such an appeal at all.'

Naturally I find this quite scary, especially as it relies in part on the success of an idea that Alexander calls 'manufactured' common sense. To me you don't manufacture commonsense, you appeal to it- which W. successfully did last week. It's one of the fundamental differences between a conservative and a socialist that socialists believe common sense can be 'manufactured'- a very different thing from, say, 'being learned by experience'. However, the lines do get blurred, as when a socialist describes 'creating a learning experience'. That's what Blair would like to do for us: create a learning experience where we associate Labour with Government, Pavlov-style.

Well, Alexander is at least one step ahead of The Conservatives, who couldn't recognise Dubya as anything except foreign to them and their values- and couldn't envisage any sort of synthesis of Republican success with Tory re-election (which wouldn't, you'd have thought, take a genius).

Another sort of 'one step ahead', a more exciting one, is demonstrated by Irwin Stelzer in the Weekly Standard. I've long suspected that W. was likely to be remembered as a great custodian of the US economy in a time of crisis. If Stelzer is to believed such a legacy is a certainty, and the UK and Europe are to be buffeted by economic waves- from China. If he's right then Bush will show, by the end of the next four years, that he truly has been one step ahead.