Tips for Gordon

Hillary’s guru has some tips for Gordon

Matthew d'Ancona

19 September 2007

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An interview with Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist

This subverts one of the core assumptions about politics since the end of the Cold War, namely that personality, performance and the megawatt smile are the keys to winning power. We supposedly vote for those we would like to be friends with. Nonsense, says Penn. ‘I think “buddy potential” is way overrated. It’s not who you want to have a beer with, it’s who you want to have as president or prime minister. Again, the Margaret Thatcher experience here showed pretty clearly how the Conservative party did so much better with strength and leadership. I think in the US people realise increasingly that running for president is not an American Idol-like contest, especially with the war and the global economy.’ For which read: Barack Obama may have stormed on to the scene as a darling of the gullible elites — ‘I think he has a number of issues that are related around experience’ — but the electorate care about issues and will end up voting for Hillary.

On the eve of Labour’s conference, Penn says that Gordon Brown’s impact as PM and his defiance of expectations has been an object lesson in how ‘Impressionable Elites’ misread the public’s true preoccupations. ‘He is seen as more of a champion of things [the voters] are really interested in,’ the pollster continues — with the corollary that, in Penn’s view, David Cameron has made a strategic error in investing so heavily in ‘buddy potential’.

What links Gordon and Hillary, he suggests, is that you need to have been round the block a few times to be a true change-maker. A fresh face is not to be confused with a guarantee of innovation. It is the most fabulously cheeky political maxim: to bring about the new, it helps to be old.