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By Howard Fineman
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Dr. Frank I. Luntz is a busy, well-traveled man. With a childlike love of politics and a Ph.D. from Oxford, the 39-year-old Republican polltaker and message strategist has helped make Newt Gingrich speaker of the House, Rudy Giuliani mayor of New York and Silvio Berlusconi prime minister of Italy. (Luntz also polls and analyzes for TV, including MSNBC.) So it was no surprise when, on a recent trip to London, I found him huddled with British pols in a conference room near Parliament. His goal: To help the U.K.'s enfeebled Tories survive.
American campaign strategists have been roaming the globe for decades, at first secretly (in the CIA's cold war days) and then publicly, for profit, starting in Latin America (Venezuela in particular) in the '70s. Ronald Reagan's polltaker, Richard Wirthlin, created a lucrative alternative practice in Margaret Thatcher's Britain in the '80s. And, of course, the Soviet Union's collapse was the ultimate victory for the American style of politics (the wooing and winning of votes) in its profound sense.
But now, like Starbucks and the Gap, MasterCard and Microsoft, American consultants are a planetary brand, spreading a gospel of poll-driven, focus-grouped centrism and spin. Their overarching "third way" vision: to slowly but steadily let for-profit market forces replace the welfare states of the West as providers of societal needs such as health care, education, public transportation and retirement security.
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This is politics for a postapocalyptic age: eschewing big, abstract ideas in favor of "practical" solutions, favoring friendly "compassionate" candidates who speak, not in the prickly argot of theory and combat, but in the soothing language of family, home and hearth.
Ironically, the two leading politicians of the day in the United States-Al Gore and George Bush-haven't always practiced at home what the U.S.'s consultants counseled abroad. Gore chose to run a combatively retro populist campaign last year; Bush, for his part, has governed more ideologically (and more to the right than he campaigned-at least so far. (Bush will tack back to the center when he needs to.)
The Americans' handiwork is most evident in the U.K., where Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and other leaders of "New" Labour fashioned a revival in the '90s by consciously following Bill Clinton's centrist, attack-your-own-base "third way" campaign. Some of the Clintonites who helped Blair become prime minister in 1997 were back last month, when Labour (retooled from the "old" pro-union and pro-welfare Labour Party) demolished the hapless Conservatives to win a second term.
American aid was considerable. As he was in 1997, Stan Greenberg, the polltaker who charted Clinton's rise, was there to assist Blair's own public-opinion types. More interesting, at least to me, was the addition this year of Robert Shrum, probably the premier speechwriter of our time. A graduate of Georgetown and Harvard Law, a former aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, Shrum has made a pile as a media consultant.
But his real gift is writing speeches, which he's done for a flock of Kennedys and other Democrats. This time he took his talents across the pond. Since there's no paid political TV advertising in British campaigns, "free" party broadcasts on TV are crucial. Shrum wrote, or helped to write, many of them. "Bob's a wonderful wordsmith," Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications director, told me during an interview at 10 Downing Street.
Campbell didn't seem to find it troubling or ironic that an American had been imported to help a Brit sell himself to Britain, or that Blair inhabits a home lived in by the greatest "wordsmith" of all, Winston Churchill. In fact, Campbell proudly displays on his mantle a picture of himself with the man he sees as "the greatest political communicator of the 20th century"-not Churchill or Blair but Clinton.
Now it may be the Tories turn to look again to their American cousins. Just as Democrats helped Blair become a business-oriented leader of "New Labour," Republicans, at least in the person of Frank Luntz, are journeying to London to try to push the crusty City of London Conservatives toward a centrist strategy of compassion.
The Tories certainly could use the help. This week, as they begin the process of choosing a new leader, the once-dominant Conservatives-the party of Empire and England, of Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher-was flirting with oblivion. Only a third of all British voters consider themselves Tories, and the average age among those few, those happy few is ... 65. "The average age of a Tory is deceased," Luntz told me.
So the Tories are desperate enough to listen to a few Americans. The other day, in a spartan think-tank conference room around the corner from the Houses of Parliament, I sat in as Republican polltaker Luntz attempted to administer a form of shock therapy and tough love to his Conservative mates: MPs, spindoctors and strategists.
First came a short course in American Politics 101. As president, Luntz said, George W. Bush may be governing from the right on issues such as taxes, global warming, strategic missile defense and genetics. But he ran and won as a man of the middle, softening the hard edges of free-market conservatism by vowing to "leave no child behind" in an inferior school and by promising to use "faith-based" partnerships to combat poverty, crime, drug dependence and family dissolution. Stylistically, Bush's manner was sunny, unassuming and personal, with every proposal (and political counterpunch) expressed in carefully crafted, kitchen-table terms.
In Britain, Luntz said, Bush's Conservative Party cousins campaigned on abstract, cold-blooded issues such as the preservation of the British pound. They avoided discussing medical care or education-the top two issues here, as in the U.S.-on the mistaken theory that mentioning them would help their opponents. The Tory candidate, William Hague, was a quick-witted, asp-tongued debater in Commons but otherwise struck most voters as the kind of guy who would deny your Mum a decent burial if you didn't fork over the full price of the casket in advance.
Using a laptop and a portable projector, Luntz reviewed the numbers he had amassed for Britain's Channel Four TV. Tories were nowhere with women, with minorities, with the young. They talk about issues the country didn't care about-such as the euro and the decline of "British" traditions-and in words and images the country didn't understand. "Why would anyone even consider voting Tory?" Luntz barked at the sheepish-looking band around the conference table.
"Look at you," said Luntz. "A bunch of aging white men in ties! You spent the entire campaign talking about saving the pound! You hardly talked about the two issues most on the voters' minds-medical care and education." The Tories needed to take on, and try to "neutralize" at least one of those issues, said Luntz. "That's what Bush did, on education and Social Security. You won't necessarily win on them, but you can't afford to look like you don't care about those problems."
One MP, almost plaintively, demanded to know whether it was possible that voters would reward a leader "who spoke from the heart about principles he cared about"-even if those principles focused on issues that weren't uppermost on the voters' minds. "Sure you can do that," said Luntz dryly, "and pretty soon you won't have a party."
And why should anyone care if the Tories survive? Because they are (or were) one of the great political parties of the West. And because they have been a spawning ground for many of the ideas of free markets and charitable responsibility that "centrists" now champion. And because at least two of their own-Churchill and Thatcher-made possible the era that we now live in by their iron defense of freedom. The Tories don't have to listen to Luntz, or any American for that matter. But they owe it to their own history to learn to lead in the world they helped create.
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