10.22 pm. The metaphor of the soldier slowly, relentlessly, grindingly putting his life back together was a powerful one for America – and Obama pulled off that analogy with what seemed to me like real passion. One aspect of his personality and his presidency is sometimes overlooked – and that is persistence. He’s been hailed as a hero and dismissed as irrelevant many times. But when you take a step back and assess what he has done – from ending wars to rescuing the economy to cementing a civil rights revolution to shifting the entire landscape on healthcare – you can see why he believes in persistence. Because it works. It may not win every news cycle; but it keeps coming back.
If he persists on healthcare and persists on Iran and persists on grappling, as best we can, with the forces creating such large disparities in wealth, he will…
Cognizant of the UK Independence Party’s likely strong performance in the upcoming European Parliamentary elections, some reputable publications have joined the long-established monitors such as UKIP Watch in paying closer attention to the daily goings-on within the resurgent party. Displaying great originality, The Telegraph calls their version…UKIP Watch too. So no possibility of confusion there, then.
To their credit though, The Telegraph’s UKIP Watch redeems itself with some insightful analysis on Day 1, effectively countering the oft-repeated myth that UKIP’s support is comprised almost exclusively of disaffected “grumpy” Tories:
Why is the myth of Ukip as an army of angry, middle-class suburbanites who are obsessed by Europe and having a referendum so widespread and persistent, when the reality is so different? Most likely because of the difference between Ukip’s activists and their voters.
Committed activists and politicians, the kind of Ukipper the media are most likely to encounter, very often are middle-class, Southern and suburban former Tories (particularly the Ukippers you are likely to stumble across in the Westminster village, where most journalists congregate). Add to this the continual fascination in the media with Conservative splits over Europe and it is easy to see how the “Ukip = angry Tories + Euroscepticism” formula has taken hold.
A very good point. Why would UKIP be immune from the phenomena that affects the main three parties, namely that their most strident activists little represent their average voter? It is good to hear this point addressed in the media, and it would be even more encouraging to see the stories about the kooks and crazies in UKIP’s midst covered in the same way – namely that those on the cutting edge, whether for good or bad reasons, tend not to represent the whole.
Godfrey Bloom will be sitting out the next few rounds. Image from ITV News.
The column’s authors, Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, also make clear that the ‘typical’ UKIP voter is nothing like the cartoonish stereotype of a stuffy, old-fashioned Conservative, and that the retired colonel or Women’s Institute stalwart image is misplaced:
If Spitting Image were still around they would most likely portray the average Ukipper as a ruddy faced, middle-class, middle-aged golf club bore, who lived in a suburban semi-detached house in the Home Counties, wore lots of tweed and bored his neighbours to death by droning on about the evil Eurocrats in Brussels. But this stereotype could scarcely be further from the truth.
Ukip’s supporters look more like Old Labour than True Blue Tories. Ukip’s supporters tend to be blue-collar, older, struggling economically, and often live in poorer, urban areas, with big pools of support in the Labour heartlands of the North. Middle-class suburbanites do not dominate Ukip. They shy away from it.
In fact, Ukip are Britain’s most working-class party. Blue-collar workers are heavily over-represented. Middle-class professionals are scarce. Such voters often express as much hostility to the Conservative party as they do to Labour. This news should not be surprising. Earlier research on Goldsmith’s Referendum Party in the mid-1990s found that they too came from across the spectrum. But despite this research the “disaffected Tory thesis” has become entrenched in the Westminster village, and now dominates misguided coverage of the party.
This, if anything, is the area on which UKIP will need to focus the most if they are to make the perilous transition from successful protest party to a real general election player capable of winning seats in the House of Commons – the fact that the spot in their party reserved for middle-class professionals is currently Tumbleweed Central. These higher-information voters are key to credibility, and they are also primarily the movers and shakers who keep the British economy ticking over. Not having these people in your camp in any significant numbers is a cause for concern, and one that will certainly need to be addressed after the upcoming European elections.
So far, however, UKIP seems to be showing no signs of wilting under the increased scrutiny – indeed, their affable leader Nigel Farage MEP seems to have recovered some of the form which deserted him last week, going so far as to record this spoof weather forecast segment for the BBC’s Sunday Politics show:
Perhaps this further helps to explain the reason for UKIP’s continued popularity and appeal – which of the other party leaders, emerging from a week of very difficult and in some cases embarrassing press coverage, would be so relaxed and willing to poke fun at themselves in so self-deprecating a manner? There is something inherently appealing about a politician who is willing to speak
Nigel Farage is confident, and as more and more of the media is coming to realise, his confidence may be well placed.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has been fighting some rearguard defensive action in an attempt to counter claims from the Democratic Party that the GOP is waging a “war on women” in their legislative efforts.
Dredging up the memory of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Paul took to NBC’s “Meet The Press” to make the slightly odd argument that the Democrats have no right to call out the GOP for their retrograde attitude towards women’s equality and freedom because a former Democratic president abused his position of power and treated certain specific women disrespectfully.
Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday that Democrats and those in the media criticizing Republicans for a so-called “War on Women” give a free pass to former-President Bill Clinton’s “predatory behavior” against Monica Lewinsky.
“The Democrats — one of their big issues is they’ve concocted this, ‘Republicans are committing a war on women,'” Kentucky Republican said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “One of the work place laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office. I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20-years-old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that and that is predatory behavior.”
“It should be something we shouldn’t want to associate with people who would take advantage of a young girl. This isn’t having an affair — this isn’t me saying, ‘Oh, he’s had an affair. We shouldn’t talk to him.’ Someone who takes advantage of a young girl in their office — I mean really, and then they have the gall to stand up and say that Republicans are having a war on women? So yes, I think it’s a factor. Now it’s not Hillary’s fault. But it is a factor in judging Bill Clinton in history.”
Senator Paul is absolutely right to call out Bill Clinton’s behaviour for what it was – an abuse of his presidential power and symptomatic of a predatory attitude toward women. What makes this different from what the Republican Party has been doing, however, is the fact that the Lewinsky affair was a private indiscretion, and the harm done to women took place in the course of interpersonal relationships between those people directly involved. The Republican Party, on the other hand, has sought to push for legislative outcomes – around contraception, abortion and equal pay to name a few – that would impact all women in the United States. Private action vs. public legislative action. False equivalence.
He waged war on specific women, not all of them as a group. Image from AP.
When it comes to Republicans and standards of personal behaviour, it is all too often a case of “do as we say, not as we do”. Rand Paul now seems to be trying to change this motto into “don’t do as the Democrats say, because of what Bill Clinton did”. It is a flimsy argument, because the uncomfortable truth is that large swathes of the Republican Party have not been marching under the banner of gender equality, even in 2014. And I suspect that it will take more than rushing Rand Paul out on stage to remind us of Bill Clinton’s wandering hands to divert attention from the Repubican Party’s manifold shortcomings in this area.
I find a lot to admire in Rand Paul, who I find infinitely preferable to the GOP’s other main rising star in the US Senate, Ted Cruz. Where Cruz is abrasive and haughty, Rand Paul seems somewhat more collegiate, able to press even his more strident causes (such as his lengthy filibuster against the US policy of drone strikes and targeted assassination of US citizens without trial) without ruffling too many feathers or unduly making enemies. However, by making this false equivalence between the actions of a politician in his private life and the legislative goals of a whole political party, Paul is doing himself, and us a disservice.
Democrats have what Sen. Paul calls “the gall” to accuse Republicans of waging a war on women because unfortunately, a lot of them are. For every tirade by Rush Limbaugh accusing women of being sluts for daring to want birth control to be covered by their health insurance, there is an elected Republican legislator or governor diligently working to actively chip away at women’s rights in slightly more palatable, legislative language.
And so for as long as the Republican Party remains in thrall to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and his unenlightened attitude toward gender equality, they will likely continue to be perceived as “warriors against women”. If Rand Paul is unhappy with this reality it is within his power to do something about it. He has a bully pulpit, and his words command attention. But it is some of his own colleagues that he will need to publicly disown; not Bill Clinton.
Semi-Partisan Politics 