Narrativewatch: "Barack Obama has lost focus"

I think it’s safe to say that there is a new narrative on President Obama: that he is trying to do too much when he should be focussing his efforts on stabilising the financial system.

Of course, this is not what the president is telling us. But one of the main rules of narratives is that politicians don’t get to decide what they are.

Mr Obama is being criticised for trying to act quickly on the wider agenda of healthcare reform, new investment in education and tackling carbon emissions -- and for trying to suggest that are all part of a plan for long-term prosperity.

The new narrative is well summarised in a major article in the latest issue of TIME, which starts off:

"Barack Obama's big reform agenda won't get off the ground unless he fixes the banks first. The case for doing one thing at a time."

Without endorsing it, the FT’s Clive Crook has summed up the new “conventional wisdom” about President Obama: “he has far taken on far too much” and may outstrip the system’s capacity – administrative, legislative and political – to deliver.

It should come as no surprise that conservatives are telling this “lack of focus” story. They oppose President Obama and have no truck with his policies. See, for instance, George Will on the president’s economic plans and Michael Barone’s (weird) views about global warming.

But some Obama supporters are also calling on the president to focus on the economy – or, in some cases, to avoid embarking on an FDR-style New Deal too quickly, in order to avoid a policy car crash.

Warren Buffett has accused the administration of having “muddled messages” on the economy.

David Brooks, a “moderate” writer for the New York Times, has said of the Obama administration: “I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well.”

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius has called on the president to avoid “financial giantism” and to focus on “reconstructing our broken financial system.

The risks of overload shouldn’t be brushed aside. Michael Galston, writing last week in the liberals’ house journal, the New Republic, made another case for caution. He drew a number of distinctions between the situation faced by Barack Obama and Franklin D. Roosevelt, a previous president facing a depression, and trying to take forward a big political agenda. Galston reminded us that FDR concentrated on fixing the financial system and delayed unrelated structural reforms until he was sure that he had Congress and the public onside. He concluded:

“In sum, our circumstances are not (yet) as dire as they were in 1933. In part for that reason, the people are not prepared to give the president and his party the degree of deference that Roosevelt and the Democratic congress enjoyed at the start of the New Deal--all the more reason for Obama to distinguish between short- and long-term measures at least as carefully as FDR did.”

And the veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder – usually cast as non-partisan and “centrist” – declared on Sunday that President Obama’s honeymoon is over. Broder set out the risks for the administration in having such a sweeping policy agenda; and, in particular, that its health and education programmes will get bogged down in Congress.

We shouldn’t forget that the “loss of focus” storyline is a clever political gambit for conservatives to follow. The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes gave some of the game away when he wrote that the president had a big “grandiose agenda” and that he was right to “go for it now”, while his popularity ratings are still high and the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate remain strong. The longer he waits, this argument runs, the more likely Obama’s personal ratings are to sag, with Democrats in congress becoming more worried about the 2010 elections.

Clive Crook explains:

“The prospects for Mr Obama’s agenda depend on his ability to marshal political capital and spend it wisely. In the simplest terms, he needs to stay as popular as he can for as long as possible. Once his approval ratings slide – and they show the first signs of doing so – he is sunk. This is why the “overload” critique is so significant: not because it is correct on the merits but because it is plausible and bipartisan and will erode his standing with the electorate.”

Even if he doesn’t buy the whole “Obama overload” story, Clive Crook regrets what he sees as the president’s failure to play to his strengths with centrists and to rise above left-right rancour.

If the “taking on too much” storyline sticks, his opponents will have succeeded in undermining one of President Obama’s strongest personal narratives: that he’s a positive, new force for real change who can put the “old politics” behind. Another embattled president, suffering falling poll ratings and seeming to play cynical games in order to advance an agenda that is too big and too “radical” can’t do that.

Or, as a very tough politician I worked with years ago told me, if you want to destroy your political opponents, you have to destroy their myths.

Narrativewatch: Nick Clegg's new order

Here’s the, err, story so far. Nick Clegg worked last year to communicate this narrative: Labour have had their day and can’t create a fairer Britain and the Conservatives won’t but the Liberal Democrats will make it happen. It was old third party wine in twenty first century bottles, but showed promise all the same. Then, after Lehman Brothers collapsed and the economic crisis hit, the media meta-narrative took a new turn: the government’s response to the recession and the short-lived “Brown bounce”. Nick's story was squashed flat and the Lib Dems (as opposed to Vince Cable) struggled to tell a story about the economy.

In his spring conference speech on Sunday, Nick presented an updated and improved version of last year’s almost-narrative. Labour had presided over economic collapse and were now a "spent match". But the Conservatives would be no better. He slammed the Tories' plan to cut spending in a recession as "madness".

More importantly, Conservative and Labour prime ministers, from Margaret Thatcher to Gordon Brown, were to blame for our economic problems. Sticking with the same “never-ending cycle of red-blue, blue-red government [that] got us into this mess” would offer no solution. The two old parties just wanted to "cling to those old 80s ideas with a tweak here, or a nip and tuck there".

So, a plague on both your houses. Grimond, Steel, Ashdown and Kennedy would all recognise that story. Nick also said that the crisis had “opened the door to a genuinely new way of doing things”. What the Liberal Democrats offered people, he said, was a choice between “policies to patch up the old order, or policies to build a new one”.

The archetype used was that of a fresh start, a new dawn, the phoenix rising from the ashes; a new dawn. Here, Nick’s rhetoric became more interesting. He cleverly grounded the narrative in historical stories and symbols: Christopher Wren who “looked beyond the pain and dreamed what might come next” after the Great Fire of London, Beveridge and Keynes after World War II with their new ideas for healthcare and insurance for all; and Monnet, Schuman and the founders of the European Union.

What Nick Clegg told on Sunday was the outline of what Annette Simmons calls a “vision story”.

“A vision story raises your gaze from current difficulties to a future payoff that successfully competes with the temptation to give up, compromise or change direction.”
[Whoever Tells the Best Story WINS (2007)]

This could work -- if Nick can show voters what the “future payoff” would look like. Perhaps we could see this as his story’s “happy ending”.

When he spoke of “not just . . . sticking plaster solutions – [but] a new, better approach,” Nick offered a bit more substance than previously. Reforms to split investment and retail banking; barring board members of failed banks from holding other directorships; forcing high-street banks to give up risky, casino-style lending, with their bosses banned from receiving short-term bonuses of any kind; and allowing investments that took risks and hit problems to fail. On Saturday, Vince Cable provided some more economic detail. (He also told the conference a familiar, plausible morality tale: that a decade ago Brown and Blair “made a pact with the Devil” – “the financial aristocracy” – and now it’s collapsing, leaving Labour exposed and without a soul.)

But first we need unity and cohesion around the policy messages. If Liberal Democrats are going to call for a “new order”, we’ll need to project a clear and consistent idea of what it looks like. Talk of a more radical approach could bring forward a wide range of messages. Compare, for instance, the tone and content of Vince Cable’s “responsible boldness” (my description, not his) with the way some leading “social liberals” perceive the new dawn. [Click here, here, and here] Other people will have suggestions too. Let’s not forget, for instance, the new world will need to be built on sustainable, low-carbon foundations.

The Lib Dems’ revamped story also will need to strike a chord with our target voters. Annette Simmonds explains:

“A good vision story makes otherwise ambiguous promises for future payoffs come alive with carefully crafted sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings that eclipse the work we do for tomorrow’s payoff. Overwhelming obstacles shrink to bearable frustrations that are worth the effort.”

Nick and the rest of the party needs to show what the “new order” would look and feel like for voters (and for that matter, how credible is it?). For instance, James Graham has pointed out that Nick has been arguing some time that a new economic order would need to be based on a new political order. I have blogged previously that in promising a better sort of politics, we are not really talking about what most people are most interested in. They will want to see and feel what it would mean for them, in their daily lives. As the American pollster and political strategist Frank Luntz says:

“Political messages should emphasise bottom line results, not process.”
[Words that Work (2007)]

And Nick will need to embody the promise of a “genuinely new way of doing things” in his actions and appearance. In his 1995 book Leading Minds, Howard Gardner stressed that leaders need to embody their own narratives in order to seem authentic and credible.

I’ll finish with the same optimistic point that I made this time last year.

No-one ever said the Lib Dem narrative was going to arrive, gift-wrapped, in the post. It didn’t work for Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair – or, for that matter, for FDR or Ronald Reagan. But at least Nick Clegg – the only person who can provide the Liberal Democrats with a story – is on to it.

Pollwatch: Lib Dems behind Labour as best party on the environment and third on economy and education

Full details of the ICM’s Guardian poll for February are now up on the company’s website. This was the survey, you may recall, that led UK Polling Report to come to the entirely plausible conclusion that the Lib Dems’ 22 per cent rating in January was a blip.

I quickly turned to the results for the question,

“Irrespective of how you yourself will vote at the next election, which political party do you think is putting forward the best policies on . . . ”

As usual, the Liberal Democrats’ best rating – 19 per cent – was on the environment. But we were one point behind Labour and one point ahead of the Conservatives. Allowing for margins of error, the three parties were level pegging, with one in five respondents saying that “none of them” had the best environmental policies.

The last time ICM asked this question (that I can find) was in September 2007. The results were Labour 24 per cent, Conservatives 20 per cent, Lib Dems 18 per cent.

All the same, this result is somewhat disappointing, especially given the government’s record over recent months, what with Heathrow, more news about missed CO2 emissions targets and ministers’ slowness to assemble a substantive green new deal.

There are a couple of possible explanations. Perhaps the Liberal Democrats are still not pushing green issues hard enough. Also, the environment is not a deal-breaker for many voters who, since the recession began, may be going into a climate trance. Just 4 per cent of respondents picked the environment as the issue that will be important in their decision on how to vote. (A comparable figure for 2007 is not available). Voters may be less inclined to look closely at any party.

The top-ranked issue was, unsurprisingly, the economy, nominated by 35 per cent of respondents. Just 10 per cent said that the Lib Dems had the best economic policies, compared to 29 per cent for the Conservatives and 23 per cent for Labour.

As for which party had the best policies for “sorting out the economic crisis”, the Conservatives held a 2 point lead over Labour. Just 9 per cent said the Lib Dems.

The big story, in my view, is Labour’s crash as the party that is seen as best at managing the economy.

But the ICM figures provide further confirmation that Vince Cable’s brilliant economic commentaries are perceived as just that: Vince Cable’s brilliant economic commentaries; wise, accurate and incisive, but above and beyond party politics and not much to do with the Liberal Democrats. The public may like and respect Vince, but that does not mean they are more inclined to support the party.

On the other issues of most concern to voters: taxation and public services; health and law and order; asylum and immigration; and education, the Lib Dems did not do much better. The Conservatives were ahead of Labour on each one, apart from health – but on education they had only a one point advantage. In September 2007, Labour was ahead in all of the top-ranking policy areas.

These sorts of polling figures need to be seen in perspective. We usually come last in this kind of poll. Most voters do not expect the Liberal Democrats to win power and may not look very closely at us or our policies, at the national level. The question facing party strategists is, just as in previous elections, how to be seen as the “best party” on the issues of most concern to voters, in constituencies where we can win.

Still, other polling agencies’ research usually gives the Lib Dems better scores on “key issues”. For instance, last September, Populus gave us 31 per cent and a clear lead as the best party on climate change (though a different set of questions and options were offered). On the environment, Ipsos MORI told a similar story.

And the party rankings could change during the general election campaign. In 2005, Populus found that, on education and health, the top two concerns for voters, the Lib Dems gained significant ground during the general election campaign and by polling day, were level pegging with the Conservatives in being perceived as the “best party”. Next time, we will need to do perform a similar feat on what is sure to be the big issue, the economy.

Another striking feature of the ICM results is, once again, the number of people saying that “none of them” have the best policies in what voters see as the top six issues. The “none of them” figures were: 21 per cent for health; 20 per cent for education; 21 per cent for law and order; 26 per cent for asylum and immigration; 22 per cent for taxation and public services – and 24 per cent for the economy.

So there is still a lot to play for. But are the Lib Dems playing it correctly?

Social liberals a-go-go

Last week, while flicking through Liberal Democrat News, on my return from NZ, I came across an article announcing the new Social Liberal Forum. My initial reaction was not positive.

This is despite the fact that my responses to those on-line “what are your politics” questionnaires place always me in the “social liberal” category. Also, I was quite comfortable with a lot of the material in Reinventing the State (2007). This is the nearest thing that the party’s “social liberals” have to a political tract and two of the book’s co-editors were Dr Richard Grayson and David Howarth MP, who are now leading lights in the SLF. Its core idea was, in the words of the editors:

“reinvent[ing] the British state so that it delivers social justice and environmental sustainability through a decentralised and participatory democracy”.

As far as it went, this was OK by me. But I also think that John Maynard Keynes had it right when he said:

"The political problem of mankind [sic] is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty”.

I support the Liberal Democrats because we, alone of the parties, stand for all three of these, as well as environmental sustainability.

In my experience, however, the party’s self-described “social liberals” – or, if you like, the “centre-left” - have been too narrow in their approach. They have paid too little attention to questions of economic efficiency and wealth creation. In pursuing their concerns about social and economic inequality, they have often tried to defend spending on public services, but have had rather less to say about how those services might be reformed and improved. (For more on this, see my review of Reinventing the State, in the autumn 2008 edition of the Journal of Liberal History.)

Through my jet-induced haze, the concept of another “ginger group”, apparently devoted to locking the Lib Dems into a “tax and spend” time warp, just didn’t do it for me.

Having followed the SLF website for a week or so, I have modified my opinion. For a start, their “ideas factory” is welcome: Liberal Democrats desperately need a new, inclusive forum for discussing new policies. There is already some valuable material on the SLF website. For instance, I commend to you the essay by David Howarth MP, on “what is social liberalism”. He describes the difference between “social” liberals and “economic” liberals as being about how best to achieve the redistribution of wealth and power. This is not the comic book tussle perceived by sections of the media – and some Lib Dems.

And it should come as no surprise that the “social liberals” are getting organised within the party. For some time now, Richard Grayson and co have been quite open about what they are trying to achieve [see this Guardian article, on the publication of Reinventing the State]. That’s to his/their credit. Some of the key players in the SLF were, predictably, very upset by the outcome of the vote on taxation during the Make It Happen debate at the 2008 autumn conference. After conference, ideas vacuum in the party started to be filled by the libertarians of Liberal Vision.

This means that the advent of the Social Liberal Forum might inject some more honest, rigorous politics into our internal debates. But if they want to be the predominant political voice within the party, the people running the forum should also address some big political questions.

The first relates to the “economic efficiency” part of Lord Keynes’s trilogy, as quoted above. A strong, sustainable economy is needed to support and underpin policies aimed at promoting equal opportunities. And, of course, the economic crisis is the biggest issue in politics right now (even if the climate crisis is just as important). The “market liberal” orthodoxy in economic policy, built up over the last thirty years is under sustained attack; a fresh approach is needed. This is a big opportunity for the organised “social liberal” group. But I am still not clear what sort of economic policy they propose and how it differs from current Liberal Democrat thinking (i.e., what Vince Cable says). This new forum provides them with a unique opportunity to tell us.

The second question is about how to improve public services, in order to improve public services and address social and economic inequality. In Reinventing the State, Chris Huhne MP made the case for ‘localism’ -- the decentralisation of management decisions and political responsibility – ahead of the use of markets and quasi-markets. Richard Grayson suggested how these principles can be applied in the NHS.

However, I do not think that the Liberal Democrats are a ‘localist’ party; at least, not of the type apparently contemplated by Richard Grayson and his colleagues. They should be concerned about this. Efficiency in public services is a more pressing question now than for many years, given the state of the public finances. A suspicion of the centralised state and its propensity to be bureaucratic and out of touch with peoples’ needs is an important reason why “social liberals” (dominant in the Lib Dems) part company with “social democrats” (who are more likely to be found in the Labour Party). Perhaps, in time, the SLF will show us a way forward:

The third issue is really about hard politics: how to ensure that voters like and support the SLF’s version of “social liberalism”. I argued in my Journal of Liberal History review that when the “social liberals” lose battles within the party, it is often for reasons of political strategy: the party leadership has decided that the party’s electoral interests are best served by moving in other directions. The vote on taxation last year is an obvious example. If they want to “win” all the policy arguments, the organised “social liberals” will need, over the long term, to convince the party’s leaders and strategists that their approach, their policies will benefit the Liberal Democrats electorally.

They may find this question the most uncomfortable. My diplomatic attempts (in private discussions) to draw out some kind of response have met with an awkwardness and the sort of statement Ken Livingstone made during Labour’s locust years in the early 1980s. (“We must not compromise with the electorate”, he said then).

The SLF website features an article by Steve Webb and Jo Holland on building a “social liberal” narrative. Steve and Jo build a compelling intellectual case for “social liberalism” but they do not provide a story that will engage with the emotions and expectations of the public. Yet they are not the first to fall into this trap. In any case, Steve and Jo have (re)-opened a discussion that is crucial within the Liberal Democrats; after all, “social liberalism” is – and is sure to remain – the dominant philosophical strand.

So we should try to be positive. If they can provide convincing responses on these key questions, the people running the Social Liberal Forum won’t simply have an even bigger say in the future direction of the party, they will deserve it. And the Liberal Democrats could become a stronger political force.

Clean, green and living the dream

I’m not long back from a terrific three-week holiday in my home country, New Zealand.

Nearly five years since my last visit, I was delighted to find that the waters of Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour still sparkle like no other; that the beaches of the Whangaparaoa Peninsula are just calm and beautiful as ever; and that Great Barrier Island remains a paradise, unique in the world.

Each visit, however, I notice something big and important that is different from the time before. Last time, in 2004, it was the amount of change and new prosperity in Auckland and the extent to which the city had become plugged into the economy of the Asia-Pacific rim.

This time, something was missing. It seemed to me that New Zealand has, sadly, lost some of its green edge. Concern for the environment, sustainability -- kaitiakitanga -- seemed less significant in politics and public debate than in the past.

Kiwis have a deep sense of pride in our natural environment, our green credentials. Clean and green, 100 per cent pure, are the national brand. It’s not just spin: the 2006 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranked New Zealand first in the world. (OK, last year we came in at number 7)

New Zealand has often led the world for environmental commitment. In 2007, for instance, the then prime minister, Helen Clark, set the country a goal of being carbon neutral.

As long ago as 1972, New Zealand had the world’s first green political party. Both main parties now have vocal environmental lobbies. In NZ general elections, the Green Party usually wins between 5 and 7 per cent of the vote and, under the MMP electoral system, a commensurate number of seats in parliament.

When it comes to environmental policy, there is, sadly, a growing gap between the rhetoric and the reality.

The most obvious example is climate change. New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased by about a quarter since 1990. The fulcrum of an effective policy to tackle emissions is a clear price for carbon, to ensure that those responsible pay for the damage they cause the environment. This way, emitters receive clear incentives to change their behaviours. A carbon price can be delivered through emissions trading (as in the EU), or via a carbon tax. After years of talk, New Zealand has neither.

In 2008, legislation was finally passed to enact an emissions trading scheme, that was innovative and ambitious, even if it agriculture, responsible for half the country’s emissions, was excluded until 2013 and cushioned with free credits after that. At the end of last year, the incoming National-led government suspended the scheme, pending a comprehensive review of climate change policy by a parliamentary select committee. The review arises from National’s coalition agreement with Act, whose leader says that climate change and global warming are a hoax. The committee’s terms of reference strike a sceptical tone, to say the least. The MPs will even look into the basic question of whether or not climate change is real! Back to square one . . .

In December, Simon Upton, who was environment minister in the National-led governments of the 1990s, noted in a Dominion-Post article that:

“Millions of dollars have now been invested in policy development [on greenhouse emissions]. New Zealand is the only country in the world to have fully elaborated both a carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme and implemented neither. That takes some doing.”

He took all the key players in New Zealand’s multi-party parliament to task for this state of affairs. Mr Upton predicted that some kind of trading scheme will be enacted (he is probably correct) and called on the main political parties to build a political consensus behind whatever scheme finally emerges.

New Zealanders care a lot about the environment but that doesn’t shift too many votes. One reason may be the complexity of the issues, on climate change for instance. Moreover, the recession is now biting and Kiwis (like people in other countries) become more worried about jobs and mortgages. Last week, a survey for the NZ Business Council for Sustainable Development (NZBCSD) asked what New Zealanders saw as the most serious problem facing them and their family. Their top concerns were rising fuel and other prices, followed by the domestic recession, health care, household finances and crime. Climate change came in at number six. So the politicians may be tempted to perceive green issues as being less urgent than other problems.

Still, New Zealanders do not appear to have gone into a full-blown “climate trance”: 59 per cent of respondents to the latest NZBCSD survey picked climate change as a top problem. Earlier NZBCSD surveys suggested that Kiwis are clearly concerned about climate change and demand action. [click here].

Trance or no trance, it’s crucial that New Zealand gets this one right, even if its contribution to global greenhouse emissions is infitessimal.

The reasons are about trade and money, as well as greenery. Foreign investors will expect New Zealand to be credible on climate change policy. The world will look at the greenhouse record of NZ and its products when assessing whether to buy Kiwi. So will tourists deciding whether or not to visit. Kiwis can’t afford to risk losing their “clean, green” brand.

If New Zealand doesn’t get its climate act together, foreign governments and others may get stroppy. In 2006, the French prime minister asked the European Union to investigate imposing new border taxes on countries which have not put a price on emissions or carbon.

Let’s not forget the foreign policy issues. As new international climate change agreements are thrashed out, for Kyoto 2 or at Pacific and other levels), New Zealand’s negotiators need to be credible, seen to represent a country that “walks the talk”.

The new NZ government must provide the leadership and the vision and build the political consensus that is needed around climate change action. A programme to reduce emissions, including an emissions trading scheme, is essential. The price of failure could be very high.

Embodying his narrative

Part of Barack Obama's political narrative is based on his work as a community organiser in Chicago. The day before his inaguration - Martin Luther King Day - Obama called on Americans to dedicate themselves to a day of service.

Then he visited the Sasha Bruce House, a Northeast Washington shelter for at-risk adolescents from troubled families and helped renovate the temporary shelter in the upstairs part of the home. The project is designed to install curtains, lockers and energy-efficient light fixtures.

No politician and no person will ever be a paragon of virtue. But they all have to embody their narratives to be seen as authentic. Once again, Barack Obama showed us how it's done.

Are we going into a climate trance?

Not long after he was elected president, Barack Obama spoke of the “shock” and “trance” syndrome, that brings panic and then paralysis over America’s reliance on fossil fuels.

Britain (and most of the world) was in “shock” about climate change for a few years. But the credit crunch and the economic recession have now caused a climate “trance”. A trance? In this, of all years. A new global deal on emissions targets needs to be reached at December’s UN climate change conference in Copenhagen.

I have picked up this issue today, in a post on Liberal Democrat Voice.