View from Australia: Campaign sweetly and carry a big stick

By Jonathan Bradley

Yesterday in Blogbook, we looked at previous presidents through whom the current one has been analysed over the course of his first three years in office. Last week in Osawatomie, Kansas, Barack Obama himself added a name to that list, and he did so specifically to frame his upcoming re-election campaign. “In 1910,” the president said, “Teddy Roosevelt came here to Osawatomie and he laid out his vision for what he called a New Nationalism. “ Obama used the revered Republican to tweak his opponents:

Now, for this, Roosevelt was called a radical. He was called a socialist —even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women — insurance for the unemployed and for the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax.

Obama’s speech announced that the president would run as a modern day Roosevelt, and that he would cast his opponents — perhaps, especially, that CEO from Massachusetts? — as stewards of a new Gilded Age.

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.

Campaign sweetly and carry a big stick, perhaps? This is Obama railing against inequality, grouping he and Teddy Roosevelt with the 99 per cent, and his unnamed opponent as a defender of the one per cent. Occupy Wall Street can be proud of that, at least.

Roosevelt may be a more respectable totem than George Bush, whose re-election campaign the president's team has been studying, but in the presidential election that followed that Osawatomie speech, he was a less successful one. Roosevelt’s progressive movement would be influential in American politics, but he couldn’t ride it to a third term in the White House, under the mantle of his Bull Moose Party.

But perhaps American presidents are the wrong figures to be looking at in understanding the lay of this election. I often think the Obama team might find grim comfort in a more obscure race: the state election in New South Wales in 2007. Australian state politics is vastly different to those surrounding American presidential races, of course; state premiers are elected effectively as service providers, not national figureheads, and the public tends to judge them on their ability to act as successful managers.

Nonetheless, in 2007, a deeply unpopular incumbent Labor government faced a wooden and colourless opponent in opposition leader Peter Debnam. In what observers agreed was a distinctly dirty campaign, Labor savaged its opponent, focusing particularly on his business record and his tony background — the same weaknesses the Obama campaign sees in Mitt Romney — and the public reluctantly returned the party to government. The effort was so effective that its victory came about in spite of it being saddled with the campaign slogan “More to do, but we’re heading in the right direction.”

“More to do, but we’re heading in the right direction.” Campaign managers across the United States would shudder at such a graceless tagline, but it pretty much sums up what most Democrats think of their president’s first term. A word of caution, however: Four years later, the voters of New South Wales decided the state was definitely not on the right track, and reduced Labor to a rump in state parliament. There are no shortage of problems facing the United States of America. Campaigns are great, but eventually, the public is going to want to see results. Can Obama convince it that he has done enough?

15 December 2011