Month: April 2013

One of the smaller aspects of Margaret Thatcher’s unlikely rise to power is relatively unknown to Americans. That’s the story of how she became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975. And the truth of the matter is that it was an inspired strategy on her part and a huge miscalculation by her opponents. She was, truth be told, never supposed to have become party leader. It was her very unelectability that elected her. It was the mother of all bluffs.

She was, after all, a woman – and in the mid-1970s, the idea of a female prime minister was not exactly congenial to the Tory party. She’d had a rough time as Education Secretary in the previous government. She was a minor figure in the grand scheme of things. So when she decided to challenge former prime minister Edward Heath for leadership of the parliamentary party, she was clearly understood to be acting as what’s called a “stalking horse.” She obviously couldn’t beat Heath, but she could reveal serious erosion in his support among his fellow Tory MPs, wound him in a first ballot, allow him to pledge to resign, and then have a new contest among his rightful, more established and palatable inheritors. Her strategy, conjured by her friend Airey Neave (later murdered by the IRA on the eve of her first election), was to tell MPs to vote for her just to get rid of Heath. Then they could have a real contest.

Neave told everyone as the vote approached that she didn’t have a chance – in fact, her weakness could mean a triumph by Heath which would end any way of getting rid of him as leader before the next election. And Neave was so successful in downplaying her chances and the party was so desperate to fire Heath, and the likely successors were so scared of getting too far out in front, that she won the first round overwhelmingly. So overwhelmingly in fact that the momentum continued and she went on to defeat the establishment candidate, Willie Whitelaw, in the second round.

Old school Tory MPs thought they were using this odd female politician to get rid of a flailing and failed leader. They didn’t realize until it was too late that she had been using them. And it’s worth recalling that her time as opposition leader was not that successful. As she moved toward the right, the centrist wing of her party got more and more nervous. Chauvinists were perturbed. If Callaghan had called an election in the fall of 1978, the polls suggest he would have won. But he dithered. And she pounced.

This was a woman who took risks. And her first move for the party leadership was one of the more stunning and unexpected rewards.

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Here’s one of several charts marking Thatcher’s impact on Britain. If you consider the success of a country measurable by the levels of emigration out and immigration in, then Britain became far more attractive a place to live after her eleven years. But here is where the paradox of Thatcherism truly comes to the fore. Thatcher campaigned on economic liberalization and social conservatism. Here’s what has happened to the marriage rate since her time:

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Thatcher’s fiscal conservatism did not survive her. Blair did what Bush did: spend, spend and borrow and borrow. Watch how she reduces the percentage of public spending as a percentage of GDP – from 49 percent to 39 percent – and then look how Labour let it rip – leaving Britain high and dry today:

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This is the one core difference between Thatcher’s Tories and Reagan’s Republicans. Thatcher actually cut spending significantly and durably. She never promised something for nothing.

More data on growing inequality in Britain and other less flattering statistics here.

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[Re-posted with several questions added by readers. If you have a minute to vote for your question preference, we would really appreciate it.]

Long-time readers of the Dish know Dreher well. But for everyone else:

Rod Dreher was a conservative editorial writer and a columnist for The Dallas Morning News, but departed that newspaper in late 2009 to affiliate with the John Templeton Foundation. He wrote a blog previously called “Crunchy Con” at beliefnet.com, then simply called “Rod Dreher” with an emphasis on cultural rather than political topics. … Raised a Methodist, he later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1993. He wrote widely in the Catholic press, but covering the Roman Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal, starting in 2002, led him to question his Catholicism, and on October 12, 2006, he announced his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy.

You can follow Rod’s writing at his blog at the American Conservative. He also has a new book out, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life:

[The book] follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie’s death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life. In Louisiana for Ruthie’s funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher. In order to explore this revelation, Dreher and his wife decided to leave Philadelphia, move home to help with family responsibilities and have their three children grow up amidst the rituals that had defined his family for five generations – Mardi Gras, L.S.U. football games, and deer hunting.

Some praise for the book:

“If you are not prepared to cry, to learn, and to have your heart cracked open even a little bit by a true story of love, surrender, sacrifice, and family, then please do not read this book. Otherwise, do your soul a favor, and listen carefully to the unforgettable lessons of Ruthie Leming.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

“The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is Steel Magnolias for a new generation.” -Sela Ward, Emmy Award-winning actress and author of Homesick

To submit a question for Rod, simply enter it into the above Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing him answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care. View the results here. Thanks for your help.

McArdle wonders what Obama hopes to accomplish with his new budget, which leaked last week and will be officially released this week:

It’s unusual for a budget to leak so far ahead of its actual release. The administration is clearly trying to seize the initiative, getting a few days of talk about their budget while the Republicans, who don’t have the actual budget yet, are unable to mount a real attack on it. But it’s not clear to what end he is fighting. Winning the budget messaging war is not going to get us a sound budget, and probably not going to open up much movement on the rest of his policy agenda. The president is defending his flanks while the advance grinds to a halt.

Chait’s view:

Josh Marshall is less cynical:

In conversations with the president’s key advisors and the President himself over the last three years one point that has always come out to me very clearly is that the President really believes in the importance of the Grand Bargain. He thinks it’s an important goal purely on its own terms. That’s something I don’t think a lot of his diehard supporters fully grasp. He thinks it’s important in longrange fiscal terms (and there’s some reality to that). But he always believes it’s important for the country and even for the Democratic party to have a big global agreement that settles the big fiscal policy for a generation and let’s the country get on to other issues — social and cultural issues, the environment, building the economy etc.

Drum’s notes that Obama’s budget “sounds as if it mostly embodies the president’s sequester-replacement plan that’s been on offer for the past two months”:

This will be an interesting test of the theory that one of the things preventing a deal has been simple Republican ignorance of what Obama has offered. Once these things are in the official budget, there’s simply no way to ignore them. They’ll get a ton of coverage—including massive outrage from the liberal base—and there will be enough detail that even Bill O’Reilly should be satisfied that Obama is offering a “real plan.” The fact that Obama is proposing serious cuts in entitlements will finally be impossible to ignore.

Peter Orzag puts Obama’s chained CPI proposal, which would reduce future increases in Social Security payments, in perspective :

President Barack Obama deserves credit for political courage in being willing to adopt the chained CPI — in the face of strong opposition from members of his party. But if switching to the chained index reduces the 10-year deficit by less than $150 billion and the 75-year Social Security actuarial gap by less than 10 percent, can a “grand bargain” built around it really be all that grand? And if it reduces benefits for an 85- year-old retiree by less than 2 percent, is it really so destructive?

And Collender expects the budget to have very little impact:

The reality is that the Obama 2014 budget has already been declared dead on arrival by the House GOP leadership. Minutes after the first leaks appeared last week about the Obama budget proposing to change in the way the CPI is calculated so that payments to Social Security recipients would be lowered, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) denounced both the chained CPI proposal and the administration’s efforts to tie that change to additional revenues. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) then repeated the denunciation on CNBC later in the week.