The most effective poster of the current British election campaign is a Tory one about Tony Blair. It shows a hugely pregnant Blair (you can do anything with computers and photographs these days) above the slogan, “Four years of Labour and he still hasn’t delivered.” The voters seem happy to give Blair another chance but his abject failure to do anything to improve the dismal public services in Britain is a sign of something. Simply put, shoveling money into failed government bureaucracies solves nothing and wastes a lot of resources. New Labour, like the New Democrats, were supposed to forge a Third Way in which they believed in government but were somehow able to reinvent it along more effective lines. They couldn’t. So now, according to the liberal Guardian, a secret report from Tony Blair’s private think-tank is proposing radical privatization of many parts of public services, including hospitals, schools, and local government. Four years of the Third Way and Blair is resorting to Thatcherism to get any kind of results. He’ll probably win anyway – but he knows deep down that he has failed. The Third Way was a public relations campaign to persuade the middle classes to vote for the left again. It lasted eight years in America – buried by Gore’s populist campaign. I give it eight years in Britain – max.
SHE’S BACK!: Awesome Dowd column on Hillary today. How can Senator Clinton profess shock at how the F.B.I. “mislaid” important documents on the McVeigh case, when she narrowly escaped prosecution because she “mislaid” so many of her own? Ahem. Almost makes me want to have the Clintons back so I can enjoy Maureen more. W seems to have eluded her grasp so far. But maybe we just need to give her time to get her better barbs back.
EUROPE THE PURITAN: The health Nazis have crossed the Atlantic. Hold on to your Gauloises as the EU cracks down on smoking. And I mean Nazis literally. Hitler was the first author of an anti-smoking public health campaign. You’d think that might give us pause.
ALL RIGHT ALREADY: Yes, I know the Mormon church no longer supports polygamy. I also know they no longer ban African-Americans from being priests of the Church – but they very recently did – until the late 1970s, after almost every other social institution had long since opened its doors to black Americans. I also know that no-one is proposing to make polygamy legal, as they are same-sex marriage. I just think that a Church that was once founded on a principle different from traditional marriage and one that was racist to its core until very recently might be a little leery of weighing in on civil rights matters in the public square, using tax-exempt dollars to swamp media markets in Alaska and Hawaii to protest gay civil rights. Clear now?
The Dish 