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Obama: An American Tony Blair?
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Published: December 3, 2008
Ronald Reagan's famous "It's morning in America" campaign ads could have played well in Great Britain when Margaret Thatcher first began to hoist the UK out of the socialist malaise in which it had languished in under the Labour party.
The UK was a sad imploding mess. The stubborn pride, stoicism and re-sourcefulness that had held Hitler at bay until America's resolve, manpower and industrial might could be brought to bear was unrecognizable in 1979 when Thatcher was first elected.
So far from the miraculous collaboration that had won Britain the war, British society had become paralyzed by the passive-aggressive equivalent of a civil war. Petulant, resentful unions responded to the dark, self-inflicted hopelessness of the times with wave after wave of mutually destructive strikes.
The quality of British-made goods, especially cars, became a bad joke as shop-floors rang with, "You can't touch me! I'm in the Yoon-er-yun."
By 1979 the British had finally wearied of pursuing "The Work-er's Paradise" and they elected "the Iron Lady," Margaret That-cher, who for her unshakable resolve, was often likened to Sir Winston Churchill.
Things turned around in due course and Britain again be-came one of the most vibrant economies in Europe and even resumed its stature as a center of world finance.
So far, so good.
Then the Iron Lady's leadership of the Conservative Party passed to a pleasant young man named John Major. Thatcher's eleven-year renaissance was a hard act for anyone to follow and after seven years Americans awoke to find that the Labour Party again held sway at 10 Downing Street.
I was aghast. It seemed to be shades of 1945 all over again, when Winston Churchill – having just saved the UK from the fascists – was dumped by his thankless nation in favor of Labour's Clement Attlee and Britain's spiral down into socialism began.
But I was wrong – very wrong.
Though elected by the Labour Party, Tony Blair, so far from being a knee-jerk Leftist, proved to be a pillar of centrism – if anything, shoring up the pro-business structure that Thatcher had raised by keeping Labour's Lefty fringe out at the fringes.
By October, 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 disaster, Blair had proved such a staunch and popular American ally that an editorial cartoon in the Charlotte paper showed a tough guy in an American Flag T-shirt holding up a Union Jack and saying, "I'm 100% behind Tony Blair."
The interwoven world of 2001 immediately felt the impact at The World Trade Center in New York. The even more interwoven world of 2008 now feels as clearly the rumbling as some of Wall Street's giants – and one of South College Street's – trip and tumble.
Amid the brick dust, we just may have in Barack Obama an American Tony Blair heading the clean-up crew. There are obvious comparisons: youth, exceptional articulation, an aura of candor and unflappability.
Like Blair, Obama clearly has a pre-sold overseas following in Europe, where being well-spoken counts for much, and everywhere else, where the brown-like-us factor contrasts with the earlier, snowier iterations of Uncle Sam.
No president-elect in recent memory has been handed the ready-made centrist mandate Obama now brandishes. Staring into the fiscal abyss, the Right can't credibly oppose Roosevelt-ean government involvement in business ownership for job creation. And the Left must yield ground as well; rescue-craving auto makers were sent back to their drawing boards to prove they can make money going forward. That necessarily means revisiting decades of legacy labor agreements, hatchet-in-hand.
It's not too hard to imagine a scenario emerging over the next few years where centrist Rep-ublicans and centrist Democrats forge a durable alliance in support of Obama to fend-off flakey ideological assaults from the outermost ends of the political spectrum.
But will Obama prove an American Tony Blair? He just might – if we give him a chance.
Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Tele-communications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com
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