In the late summer of 2023, a small group of American and British political strategists sat down for dinner at a restaurant in London’s Marylebone district.
On the menu: French cuisine and political fear.
The meeting included several key Labor Party officials and two outspoken American centrists, Matt Bennett and Josh Freed, both leaders of the think tank Third Way. The conversation quickly turned to Labour’s political message, which remained vague even as the governing Conservatives faltered in the polls.
As good as things looked for Labour, there had been some troubling political missteps – most notably a by-election for Boris Johnson’s seat in west London that Labor lost in a blow, largely due to opposition to local policies that discouraged the use of cars.
Was it time, some party officials wondered, to set a more precise government agenda, to make it harder for the Tories to brand them with a radical caricature?
Freed and Bennett responded with one voice: Don’t do it.
Publishing reams of well-intentioned white papers wouldn’t solve Labour’s problems, they said; on the contrary, presenting such a policy library would actually give conservatives numerous small targets to shoot at. Not long after the dinner, Bennett recalled citing the 2016 U.S. election as evidence.
“I pointed out that Hillary’s campaign had about 290 policy ideas on their website; Trump had seven,” Bennett said, perhaps exaggerating, but not by much.
As a general message, the Americans advised Labor: Keep it simple, keep it safe – just like Joe Biden did in 2020.
It was reassuring advice for members of Labour’s brain trust, most of whom were already campaigning to welcome generalities rather than sharp plans. Their main goal was to bring the party back into the political mainstream and remind voters every day that the Conservatives had been in charge for centuries and that the country was a wreck.
That’s exactly what Labor has done, and nine months later the party appears poised for a landslide victory in the July 4 snap election called by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Labor has set out a broadly ambitious agenda based on themes of economic opportunity, national renewal and seething public contempt for the exhausted Tories. According to the polls, the most important question is not whether Labor will win, but whether the Conservatives will be destroyed or merely defeated.
Even if Biden-style politics prevails on July 4, Labor must be careful not to place too much stock in that American playbook.
In fact, they should probably throw it out on July 5th.
The weak state of Biden’s re-election campaign is proof of the limits of his political methods, and an object lesson in why Labor should not follow his lead after Election Day. What worked for Biden in 2020 — offering himself to a broad community of voters as a safe haven amid the storms of Trumpism — has sorely failed him as president. His party is taking a huge risk by relying on that approach again.
The reasons why Bidenism isn’t working should be as clear to British political professionals as they are to American voters. Because he amassed a large electoral majority of people opposed to Donald Trump, Biden never fully cemented them into a positive pro-Biden coalition. He campaigned on confident promises to tackle the major crises of our time – the Covid pandemic, climate change, racial injustice – but never made much of an effort, during the election or afterwards, to tell voters what that actually means. could mean their lives. Few voters credit the Biden administration with the colossal policy victories it has achieved.
And after winning the presidency as a calming and grandfatherly figure, Biden quickly shriveled into a less appealing persona: the aloof old man.
The latter problem is one that Labor does not have to worry about. The likely next Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is disparaged in Britain as a scripted and wooden speaker. Next to Biden, the 61-year-old Starmer looks like John F. Kennedy or Tony Blair.
Yet Labor faces an even more dangerous challenge than the one Democrats have faced in closing the gap between overarching campaign rhetoric and policy implementation and salesmanship. If anything, Britain’s state – its public finances, healthcare system, public infrastructure and global competitiveness – is far grimmer than that of Joe Biden’s America.
The next administration won’t joust there over whether to spend $1 trillion or $6 trillion on a transformational economic agenda, as Biden’s Democrats did in 2021 and 2022. She will try to find out if any change needs to be paid into the treasury. for whatever social improvements the electorate desperately desires.
In that context, Biden’s political situation currently looks even more deplorable. He has an impressive record to campaign on, one that no Labor prime minister can realistically amass in the coming years. But most Americans experience Biden as a ghostly presence. They don’t hear him speak about their immediate concerns – especially the cost of living – if they hear him speak at all.
The president and his aides endlessly refer back to the dark days of his 2020 campaign, accusing the media of writing Biden off now, as they did when Bernie Sanders rolled over him in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, before the Democratic campaign turned upside down. in South Carolina.
I don’t actually know a single journalist who thinks Biden can’t win in November. He’s taking on one of the most maligned people in American political history. A low-risk, low-energy campaign once worked for Biden. It could work again, especially if Donald Trump is a felon by the fall.
But looking at the US campaign today, it is difficult to see the Biden approach as a model for the next generation of any country. Labor’s likely victory on these terms looks less like a vision of the political future than an image of a distant place that has traveled across galactic distances to arrive, light years later, in an America where our version of the same political moment has already is long gone. It’s a mirage.
At the Third Way-Labor Party dinner in Marylebone last year, Biden was not the only American mentioned as a political model.
When I spoke to Bennett and Freed about the meeting last year, I asked whether they had mentioned anyone else as a useful American template for 21st century center-left politics — someone perhaps like Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the former intelligence operative. He has become a moderate lawmaker and is now running for governor of Virginia.
The two men laughed at the question. They had pointed Labor to one person besides Biden as an American model, and that was Spanberger.
She has been a sharp critic of Bidenism at times, stating after Democrats’ defeats in the 2021 off-year elections that the president was trying to govern like Franklin Roosevelt when no one had elected him to rebuild the country. Bennett considered her a powerful communicator for democratic values.
“We pointed to her as someone who has been particularly effective at communicating in poetry,” Bennett said, “but in a way that doesn’t feel like she’s dodging the question.”
Labor has campaigned not so much in poetry but certainly in lively themes. The British electorate seems prepared to reward them for this.
We will soon find out whether the party is better prepared than Biden to answer the tough questions that come with power.
