The Perils of Incumbency

Bear with me here – I’m skating on thin ice as far as my knowledge base goes. But, nonetheless, let me offer a few words on the British election results from this past Thursday.

Fundamentally, they amounted to a major disaster for Gordon Brown and his ruling Labor Party. (By the way, the spellchecker insists on “Labour” but I’m holding onto my Americanism, even in Scotland.) The elections were local, for community council seats; for reasons I don’t fully understand, they occurred only in England and Wales, not in Scotland or Northern Ireland.

But, in any event, Labor went down like the proverbial free drink. The Conservatives, led by David Cameron, garnered 44% of the votes cast. Remarkably, the somewhat marginalized third party, the Liberal Democrats, came in ahead – 25% to 24% -- of the Labor Party. To cap off an all-round miserable performance, in by far the most important local election the two-term incumbent mayor of London, Labor’s Ken Livingstone, lost to the Conservative media celebrity and political maverick Boris Johnson. Exit interviews and political experts attributed Labor’s wipe out to economic concerns: the credit crunch, falling home prices, rising gasoline prices. Sound familiar? And, speaking of high gas prices, those of you who read the last blog, on my journey to Pennan, consider this. The price for regular unleaded is, right now, about 1.10£ per litre. That amounts, if I’m doing the multiple math conversions correctly, to about $8.30 per gallon in U.S. dollars! Maybe we Americans should quit whining.

OK, back to American politics for a couple of brief points. Those of you (I’m sure you are legion), interested in the Democratic presidential caucus in Guam, here’s an early Sunday morning headline: Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton by a grand total of 7 (!) votes – 2264 to 2257. I doubt that either side, no matter how hard they try, will be able to discern any notable trends from those results.

And, reaching back into American history, I have had a wonderful time here at St. Andrews reading through the latest installment in the Oxford University History of the United States series. The book, written by Daniel Walker Howe, is entitled What Hath God Wrought:the Transformation of America, 1815-1848. At one point Howe discusses the hotly contested election of 1828 between Andrew Jackson and the incumbent, John Quincy Adams. The Jackson campaign made much of the president’s putting a billiard table in the White House; in addition, many of Old Hickory’s supporters attacked Adams’s Unitarian religious beliefs as "heresy.” In sum, Howe writes, “the accusations against Adams were designed to show him as aristocratic, intellectual, and un-American.” Does this have a familiar ring? Like not wearing an American flag pin in one’s lapel, having a fairly unhinged pastor for a number of years, or asserting that, in tough economic times, less-well-off Americans “cling” to guns and religion? The names have changed but, nearly 200 years later, some political constants remain: tagging your opponent as elitist and potentially unpatriotic may top the list as the best possible sure-fire vote-getter.