Sunday Business Post | Irish Business News

Breaking News Business Ireland World Sport Weather

Navigation (Home)News News Features The Market Technology Media & Marketing Comment & Analysis Computers In Business Profile Property Motoring Agenda Letters

People In Business Done Deal Budget Forum Events / Conferences Company Reports Tools Crossword Search the archives Newsletter IMODE RSS

Text-Only

Irish parties may borrow from Barack’s box of tricks
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Expect to see our politicians copying many of Obama’s ideas, writes Pat Leahy, Political Editor.

The outcome of last week’s US presidential election will spawn a thousand would-be Barack Obamas across the world, and Ireland will have its fair share of them. Politicians and political strategists - who are notorious plagiarists - are already studying the Obama campaign for lessons that can be applied here.

The incoming vice-president Joe Biden’s first tilt at the presidency in 1987 ended after he asked: ‘‘Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?’’ As newspapers soon discovered, British Labour leader Neil Kinnock had previously asked: ‘‘Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?”

This wasn’t a coincidence. Few politicians are so blatant, but all of them watch what their peers do, and attempt to copy what works.

For reasons of history and culture, the Irish political classes have been close observers of American politics. Irish politicians and staffers attend the party’s conventions, pursue study programmes there and hire American consultants to advise them on elections. Last year’s election was a battle between Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny, but was also a clash between Tad Devine and Stan Greenberg, two American consultants hired by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Here are three central features of Obama’s campaign that you can expect to be features of our politics in the coming years.

Change
The call to change was the most powerful aspect of Obama’s campaign rhetoric. In a nation where eight out of ten voters believe that the country is on the wrong track, and where the current president is the most unpopular since polling began, calling for a change is what the Americans call a no-brainer.

Something like these conditions may well exist in Ireland at the next general election, and certainly for next year’s local and European elections. Expect all county council candidates to be announcing themselves as the candidate of change.

But it’s not as easy as that. Fine Gael and Labour tried the change motif last year. Kenny and Rabbitte asked voters to have the ‘‘courage to change’’. It didn’t work, either because after ten years of economic growth, voters weren’t all that dissatisfied with the Fianna Fáil government, or because not enough of them believed that the change would lead to something better.

Despite being vague about what exactly change would mean for many people, Obama was such a superior candidate that people were prepared to invest their hopes for change in him. That’s a trickier proposition than just being the ‘‘candidate of change’’.

The internet
Arianna Huffington, founder of the influential online publication The Huffington Post, has declared the internet the real winner of the 2008 election. And it’s true that, for Obama’s organisation, the web was a crucial tool. There are obvious lessons for Irish parties and politicians in using the resources of the internet, but there are limitations, too.

While the internet can be a powerful tool for political communication, its great strength - openness and accessibility - is also its great weakness. Anyone can post anything, often anonymously, without verification or editorial control.

Moreover, the most powerful US political sites are those (such as the Huffington Post) which have built up a respected brand, rather like newspapers and broadcasters have. But no such internet brands exist in Ireland yet. It remains to be seen whether the scale exists to support such an enterprise in Ireland.

The internet’s real value to Obama was as a fund-raising mechanism. Only one political entity in Ireland - Libertas - has attempted in any serious way to raise funds online, and it refuses to reveal how successful it has been in this regard.

Individual candidates for next year’s local elections are already using social networking sites to organise fundraisers.

The other factor which will limit the internet’s usefulness is the fact that Irish voters are still massively influenced by personal contact. Irish people expect to be asked for their vote. In the 2002 election, three-quarters of all voters reported personal contact by a candidate or campaign, and such contact made them more likely to vote for the canvasser.

The Lisbon referendum wasn’t lost because Libertas had a strong online presence; it was lost because the Yes campaign only asked 9 per cent of voters for their votes.

A move to the left
Obama ran on a more overtly redistributionist platform than many thought possible in the US, though tax cuts for 95 per cent of the population would not be considered as such in Europe. Nonetheless, his more statist approach chimed with the worsening economic climate, and it will be mirrored here and in Europe in the future.

People want the government to protect them from bad economic times, and it will be easy for the opposition to portray the government as the friend of the banks and the enemies of the little people. This theme will be flogged to death in the coming months and years.

There are other lessons to be learned from the Obama victory, and some of them present challenges for the opposition.

One is that charismatic leadership is a huge advantage for any party. For a Fine Gael party in which there is already a subterranean debate about whether Enda Kenny can win the next election, this fact presents some questions that need answering.

Another lesson is the need for discipline and self-belief. The Obama campaign leaders stuck to its strategy through good times and not so good.

They recognised difference between strategy - which they stuck to - and tactics, which they changed according to what worked and what didn’t.

The final lesson is this: unpopular governments lose elections, and governments that preside over recessions tend to be unpopular. For all the historic nature of Obama’s victory, this election may have been unwinnable for the Republicans.

Click here for Sunday Business Post stories before this date