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Wednesday 23 July 2008

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Change you can believe in

Wednesday, 9th January 2008

The Spectator reflects on the parallels between British and American politics.

In an interview with The Spectator last September, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, advanced the following paradoxical political principle: ‘What we have tried to do is make sure people understand that you need experience to bring about change.’ To translate: in order to usher in the new, it helps to be old — or at least to have been round the political block.

The thrilling start to the US presidential primary season has revolved around the (often infuriatingly vague) notion of ‘change’, and the question of who is best placed to implement it. Which of the candidates, in practice, truly personifies the clean break with the Bush years that the American electorate seems to crave?

Barack Obama’s mantra — ‘Change you can believe in’ — reflects his contention that the shift must be generational, and the next President fresh and unsullied. ‘They want me to stew in Washington and boil all of the hope out of me,’ says the Illinois Senator, cunningly presenting his youth and inexperience as an advantage rather than a potential weakness.

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The mugger's accomplice

The Spectator on the return of inflation

Diary

Joan Collins

Joan Collins reflects on a week of parties

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

The cross-party consensus on welfare reform echoes the Gingrich–Clinton revolution

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson on the coming political week

Global Warning

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple delivers a global warning

Nudge, nudge: meet the Cameroons’ new guru

James Forsyth

The economist Richard Thaler — a favourite of the Cameron and Obama camps — talks to James Forsyth about the power of ‘nudging’: small transformative acts of persuasion

Glasgow East is Brown’s dirty little secret: a hideous, costly social experiment gone wrong

Fraser Nelson

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House

Some advice for Brown’s second year: find a John Reid and bring back Charles Clarke

Steve Richards

Steve Richards reviews the week in politics

Very discreetly, Cameron is writing his first Queen’s Speech

Fraser Nelson

In spite of their commanding poll lead, the Tories are terrified of seeming complacent. But, as Fraser Nelson discloses, work is well advanced on a first-term plan for government in which education reform and a welfare revolution will be the centrepieces