Why Labour are now borrowing more from the Bush campaign book than the Tories

Vanity Fair has a long series of interviews looking back on the Bush presidency. A lot of the ground covered is familiar—9/11, torture, Iraq and Katrina—but this comment from Mark McKinnon, Bush’s chief adman during his presidential campaigns, touches on an aspect of Bush’s election victories that people don’t think about enough:

“The interesting thing about both Bush campaigns is that they strategically defied conventional wisdom and turned it on its head. In 1999, on the old “right track, wrong track” question, which we ask on every poll—the reason we ask it is because it determines whether or not it’s a change environment or a status-quo environment—in 1999, the “right track” was 65 percent or 70 percent, which under conventional wisdom would indicate that it was a great environment for the Democrats and for Al Gore. The strategic challenge we had was—we were in the position of trying to argue everything’s great, so it’s time for a change, right?