Anyone remember the last rich, personally charming but rather inexperienced young man who decided to take up the challenge of reviving a somewhat tarnished political brand? Out of office for the previous eight years, the party he sought to lead was seen as intolerant, divisive and, to coin a phrase, ‘nasty’. Once dominant in national politics, it had been forced off the centre-ground by a skilled opponent who had stolen not just its voters, but some of its policies, too.
George W. Bush was, of course, a virtual political novice when he announced his decision to run for the Republican party’s presidential nomination, having been in elective politics for just four years.
While the media obsesses over whether David Cameron is the ‘Tory Blair’, the more telling comparison is thus not, perhaps, with the current occupant of Downing Street, but the Oval Office. Remember that Bush presented himself during that presidential campaign as a Republican moderniser: a ‘compassionate conservative’. And, just as Cameron is accused of aping New Labour, some pondered at the time whether or not Bush might be ‘New Democrat-lite’.
The future president certainly did much to encourage that impression. After the fierce partisanship of Newt Gingrich’s mid-1990s ‘Republican revolution’, Bush promised to ‘change the tone’ in Washington. Pledging to bring ‘civility and respect’, the then Texas governor pointed often to his record of assembling bipartisan coalitions in his home state. Cameron has adopted the same approach in attempting to shake off the Tories’ reputation for negativity and harsh partisanship. While Bush contrasted his record in Texas with the politics of Washington, Cameron waxes lyrical about life outside the ‘Westminster village’ Of the House of Commons, he says: ‘We’re not there to play partisan games.’
Bush’s attempt to rebrand the Republican party also involved a conscious decision to draw lines between himself and both popular perceptions of the party and unpopular elements within it. He attacked Congress, for instance, for attempting to ‘balance the budget on the backs of the poor’. Similarly, Cameron has attacked rightwing newspaper commentators who believe that ‘the Conservative party just needs to shout louder and hate the modern world even more’. The attitude they personify, he suggested, ‘is not just part of the problem, it is the problem’.
Bush’s apparent concern for the plight of the poor was a recurring theme of his campaign, and purposefully stood in marked contrast to those of his Republican predecessors. During the election, he vowed to ‘extend the promise of prosperity to every forgotten corner of this country’, and pledged that, when cutting taxes, ‘on principle, those in greatest need should receive the greatest help.’
Like Bush, Cameron has been keen to advertise what he terms ‘a distinctive modern compassionate Conservative agenda’. He has urged the party to throw its ‘energy, passion and creativity into tackling the problems of urban Britain’.
But is there another, more substantive, similarity between the president and the aspiring Tory leader? Since he arrived in Washington in January 2001, it is the conservative, rather than the compassionate, element of Bush’s campaign trail equation which has been most in evidence. Could Cameron turn out to be the same? During the leadership election, he has talked rather more about changing the Tories’ ‘culture’ than its policies. Indeed, while Cameron has ditched the party’s ‘patients’ passports’ (tellingly, not because he disagrees with the principle but because he believes them to have sent out the wrong message to the public about the Tories’ attitudes to public services), this is, so far, the Conservatives’ only general election policy from which he has distanced himself. That, though, should hardly be a surprise, given that he was the manifesto’s principal author.
Moreover, the ground that Cameron has so far staked out – reintroducing tax breaks to support marriage, the need for deregulation and tax cuts, and the importance of social entrepreneurs and the voluntary sector in tackling the problems of the inner-cities – all have a pretty strong conservative pedigree.
Of course, it suits Notting Hill’s Tory modernisers to have us all believe that Islington circa 1994 is their inspiration. So far, though, Crawford, Texas, circa 1999 looks a little more convincing.