Chasing Dragons

What Makes Political Campaigns Go Viral? Five Lessons from the Founder of MyDavidCameron.com

Clifford Singer, founder of Bubblewrapped, the Other TaxPayers' Alliance, and MyDavidCameron.com has published a concise audit of the factors that made some of these endeavors successful and others--in the words of Borat-- not so much.

With on-line political campaigns that rely on 'word-of-mouth' for promotion, social networking for distribution, and crowd-sourcing for content becoming more common, he provides an interesting set of observations about the positives and negatives of this nascent form of political activism. You can read his comments here.

The unanswered question for me is what kind of effect do these campaigns have on election outcomes? Do they amplify lingering suspicions in the minds of the doubtful? Do they convert the potentially convertible? Or, are they a means of promoting group solidarity in situations where mainstream forms of media are largely under the control of opposing political forces? 

But this also raises the issue of whether immediate electoral results should be the litmus test of success for these kinds of campaigns? Might it be that the power of something like MyDavidCameron.com derives from the ability to contribute to the process of repositioning the terms of political discourse during the Con-Dem reign so that privilege, class, and structural inequality are once again recognized as problems facing the United Kingdom? Time will only tell...

Image credits: David Rosenberg and Ian Cuthbert at MyDavidCameron.com

Dr. StrangeGov: Have the Lib Dems Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Tories?

Last night, after Gordon Brown formally resigned as Prime Minister the Queen accepted David Cameron's offer to form a new government. And after days of speculation, conjecture, and predictions, we now have a Con-Dem coalition government that aims to hold power for the next 5 years. David Cameron will serve as Prime Minister and Nick Clegg will assume the position of Deputy Prime Minister. Furthermore, Lib-Dems will be receiving additional cabinet positions as well as mid-level postings within all government departments. The policy compromises underpinning the agreement can be found here.

One reading of the Con-Dem coalition is that it demonstrates innovation and creativity in the way that compromise is embedded into the agreement. Some will argue that this indicates that British politics may be turning towards a new positive direction for governance based on consensus building, unity, and bi-partisan support.

I think that such a characterization is overly optimistic. The odds are long that this government will be able to last five years in any kind of functional form for the following reasons:

• It is going to be exceedingly difficult to keep civility, let alone unity, in a divided cabinet. For example, how is a reasonably intelligent operator like Vince Cable--if he is given the post of Chief Secretary to the Treasury as is expected--going to be able handle working with George Osborne--generously described by those who you would think would be largely supportive as 'untested'--in his capacity as Chancellor? Is Nick Clegg going to be prepared to defend core Tory policies as Deputy PM? Moreover, how divisive will the decision to allow 'sleeper' Lib-Dems to be strategically positioned in all of the major government departments and offices turn out to be when there are stark differences of opinion? Will this create a culture of secrecy, suspicion, and stilted communication? And if things do become toxic, how badly will the morale of top civil servants--the people who actually get things done in Westminster-- be affected?

• The size of the majority of the Con-Dem coalition (approximately 76 seats) may prove to be too big, leading to break-downs in party discipline, and very public expressions of discontent that undermine the coalition. Counter-intuitively, the price of dissent with the current distribution of seats is relatively low for an individual MP. And many MPs in both parties are going to feel real pressure to vote in a way that best reflects the demands of their core constituent supporters. This probably won't lead to a defeat that triggers a registration of non-confidence, but it will create tensions and bad-feelings that will amplify over time.

I'm also very puzzled why the Lib-Dems were willing to form a coalition with the Tories rather than holding the sword of Damocles over the heads of a Conservative minority government. While the prize of electoral reform must have been a motivating factor, the following risks--which I initially outlined in a previous comment to my colleague Nick Appleby who, amongst many hats, is a Lib-Dem activist-- strike me as major reasons not to enter into a formal agreement:

• Even the most optimistic Liberal Democrat has got to know that they will be punished for forming a coalition in the next election. Tactical voting--with a sizable number of traditional Labour voters crossing over-- got the party 23% of the vote. What happens when these people leave at the next election? Moreover, what happens when core membership that is anti-Tory also leaves? The Fabian Society has done an initial analysis based on the recent election results with a projection that if 1/5 of soft Lib-Dem support migrates to Labour, they lose 15 seats. A similar shift would potentially swing another 25 Conservative seats to Labour. Even if this projection is overly pessimistic in its assumptions--and who says previous voting patterns will hold--I'd still find this very worrying if I were a Lib-Dem strategist.

• Even with a guaranteed referendum, electoral reform is still a long-shot. Both the Tory and Labour machines will do their best to undermine it. Moreover apart from the Independent and the Guardian, the Lib-Dems lack media support. How can one expect a positive result from a referendum when every single major tabloid will be coming out against it. In this country, that makes it a dead duck.

• Finally, the Lib-Dems will gain nothing from humanizing the Conservatives. Anything positive that the Lib-Dems bring to the coalition will be attributed to the Tories by their self-promotion machine. Anything that goes wrong--including any breakdown in the coalition--will be blamed on the Lib-Dems. This seems like a lose-lose to me even if some pet Lib-Dem legislation is passed.

Given all of these reasons, I fail to see what long-term benefits Clegg et al believe are going to be accumulated through the StrangeGov arrangement?

Image credits: mydavidcameron.com

Good-Bye Mr. Brown: Visual Resignation

  

I find photographs of Gordon Brown incredibly interesting because they often seem to capture a pathos that many public figures work incredibly hard to conceal. Nowhere has Brown's pathos been clearer than during yesterday's resignation speech, a poignant twist in the ongoing election drama.

No doubt this was a hard decision for him to make. Admitting defeat is always difficult when you've fought for something you believe in. But beyond the difficulty of articulating defeat, he would have also been aware that with most of the media establishment against him, members of the press would see this act as a final opportunity for a public humiliation. Yet in the photos above and directly below, you have images of a confident and dignified Brown seizing the moment. At the same time, the poisoned chalice of #10 looms behind him, with the number bearing weight on his left shoulder in the first image and dwarfing him as an obelisk in the second. The signal is somewhat ambivalent: is it that being Prime Minister was a burden upon the back of Gordon Brown or that no person is bigger than the office of the Prime Minister?

It is these visual contradictions that I find so fascinating.  In a previous post some weeks back, I remarked that Gordon Brown when photographed conveys a remarkable level of vulnerability. In my eyes at least, it is his vulnerability and awkwardness that makes him appear more human and common--in the very best sense of the word--than other political leaders.

This inner turmoil surfaces quite clearly in the photo above. And this time, we see a man who is enveloped in darkness, a lonely and solitaire figure trying to figure out why the reward for boldly preventing a global financial meltdown--at a time when no one else was prepared to do so--has been vilification, unpopularity, and abandonment by the very people he helped.

But perhaps the most iconic image from yesterday--and one that has been picked up as the lead photo by several newspapers--is of Gordon Brown retreating from the press scrum. Again, the ambiguity of #10 looms large in this photo: is it his sanctuary or his tomb? More importantly, the image is of Gordon Brown turning his back on a press, a party, and a public that had turned on him. And the message is clear: you won't have Gordon Brown to kick around anymore.

Photo credits: Getty Images and David Levene

UK Election 2010 Update

With the plot-line of the UK election still unfolding like the second act of a Shakespearean drama, I'm going to hold off on speculating what is going to happen and what might make it possible for particular results to happen because:

a) even though I've been obsessive about keeping updated, I'm still having trouble keeping up;

b) strange things are taking place (e.g., the Boulton-Campbell bust-up);

c) given all of the twists and turns thus far, nothing has been predictable;

d) there's probably still another twist or two to come;

What I will say is that this has been a truly historic election and probably the most significant out of previous hung parliaments and/or narrow majorities [by the by, for a refutation of the rarity of hung Parliaments see the following analysis from Left Foot Forward].

One party has failed to win the 'unloseable' election. A sitting Prime Minister has resigned. A party and its leader have emerged from the margins of British Politics to a position of extreme influence. Depending on what happens in the coming months, this may be the election result that leads to a permanent change in the Westminster electoral system and party compositions.

And in all of this intrigue and political theater, the media and members of the Conservative Party still fail to grasp the basic point the British system is not Presidential so no Prime Minister has ever been popularly elected. So maybe as a part of electoral reform, members of Parliament and political reporters should be made to take the citizenship test?

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see what the next couple of days bring...

Photo credit: Jo Udall

David Cameron Lost: 10 Initial Impressions on the UK Election

As the UK election story continues to unfold, here are my initial--and somewhat sleep deprived--impressions in no particular order:

1. David Cameron and the Conservative Party lost this election. It's quite an achievement in mediocrity to go from a 20 point lead against a divided government burdened by a recession and two unpopular wars to a position where you fail to achieve a majority of seats.
2. Over 64% of those who voted rejected the 'Big Society'.
3. The results--particularly the under-representation of the Lib Dems-- make a pressing case for urgent electoral reform.
4. Swings amongst the parties demonstrated themselves to be riding specific and often based on local as opposed to national issues. It would be foolhardy to claim a national generalization from these swings.
5. The Conservatives are strong believers in tradition and convention except when it doesn't suit them.
6. Why were the bond markets allowed to open at 1.00am GMT today? Given that the City is the single biggest contributor to the national deficit, why were they being given the opportunity to influence and publicly support one party's political narrative about the dangers of a hung parliament by orchestrating a mini-run on the pound?
7. Someone needs to remind the media and the Tories that no Prime Minister is ever directly elected. The UK does not have a presidential system. So the knock that Gordon Brown is an unelected Prime Minister is complete rubbish.
8. There is a massive urban-rural divide in voting patterns in the UK with the Tories fairing very poorly in the cities.
9. It is an absolute outrage that people were denied their right to vote at some polling stations across the country.
10. Nick Clegg has made a major mistake in saying that he thinks the Tories should have the first shot at 'governing in the national interest'. If I were a top level Lib Dem strategist, I would have been hammering out a deal with Labour based on an agreement to change to a proportional representation voting system within 12 months and to have an election within 36 months with Gordon Brown stepping down as Prime Minister at some point during this time period. I suspect Labour would be willing to go along with such a plan--with a dignified exit for Gordon Brown--and the Lib Dems would have operationalized the most significant element of their platform. Even if there was initial public concern over a coalition of the so-called 2nd and 3rd parties, three years would be enough time for any fauxrage from the Murdoch press to die down and for a divided Conservative party to rip themselves apart.

The next couple of days are going to be interesting and harrowing...

Photo credit: onesecbeforethedub

UK Election Day: The Good Society vs. The Big Society

People across the UK go to vote today in the national election. If recent polls prove correct, there is the strong possibility of the Conservative Party winning the most seats but falling short of an overall majority.

Convention dictates that Gordon Brown should have the first chance at forming a government in these circumstances. However, it is almost certain that David Cameron will declare himself the winner, aided and abetted by the Rupert Murdoch owned press who will argue that receiving the largest share of the popular vote and/or parliamentary seats makes this breach of convention legitimate.

But I really hope that Labour and the Liberal Democrats do not make the mistake made by Al Gore in 2000 and decide to simply roll over. My advice to Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg--who will play an important role in determining what kind of government emerges from today's vote--is that they should not be afraid to exercise their right to resist Cameron's coronation. 

Even if the Tories do better than expected, the simple fact will remain that nearly 60% of voters--an overwhelming majority-- will have made it clear that they prefer some version of the good society over the big society. To me, that sounds like a strong claim on having a popular mandate to govern...

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 51

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Standing Up to Standing Up' by August J. Pollak at someguywithawebsite.com (one of the most sensible commentaries on the Danish cartoons/South Park controversies. Plus the accompanying comic is aces too)

• 'Calypso Magic' by Mukul Kesavan at thehindu (a treatise on West Indian cricket by an Indian supporter. Sports writing at its best).

• 'UK Media and the Election' from the mediablog.co.uk

• 'UK Media Bias: BBC and Channel 4 beat SKY and ITV for political balance' again from the mediablog.co.uk

• The Vigilante Journalist conducts an investigation into how a photojournalist managed to capture images of alleged Ugandan child sacrifice victims. The results raise a series of ethical considerations (here and here)

Have a good bank holiday weekend!

Photo credit: fdecomite

Bigotry, Duplicity, and the Politics of Scandal

There have been two recent cases in the UK election that demonstrate a double-standard with the popular identification of bigotry and how its appearance is produced as scandal.

Case 1: On Wednesday, Gordon Brown made private comments--picked up by a Sky TV microphone--that described a pensioner named Gillian Duffy as 'this sort of bigoted women' after she made anti-immigrant statements while chatting with the Prime Minister on the streets of Rochdale (note this was after she first heckled him). The incident has been dubbed 'bigot-gate'--the 'gate' suffix a sure sign of a  scandal bound to be forced down our throats into the zeitgeist by the 24 hour news cycle--and Brown presented as a two-faced bully, desperately out of touch with the concerns of 'real' 'salt-of-the-earth' people.

Case 2: In an interview with the Gay Times, David Cameron is unable to keep his stories straight. First he argues that the Conservative Party believes that gay equality is a fundamental human right. He then lets slip that he thinks Tory MPs, Peers, and MEPs should be allowed to freely vote over whether gay equality is a fundamental human right. Not only is this duplicitous in its characterization of party policy, it reveals that the Conservatives are open to manifest bigotry within their own party and having this bigotry potentially institutionalized through the legislative process. Yet, apart from some initial coverage on the Channel 4 national news, this story falls by the wayside.

There are lots of things that one can say about how this becomes possible including the influence of media (specifically Rupert Murdoch's Sky News and his newspaper empire), the different ways that the two leaders had been characterized prior to the election campaign, or broader cultural representations of pensioners as compared to homosexuals.

But in the end, they lead us to this bizarre turn of events: Gordon Brown calling a person who adopted the discourse of bigotry a bigot is treated as a scandal whereas David Cameron admitting that his party is willing to enable the expression--and perhaps even the implementation--of bigoted views through the legislative process is not. 

This just goes to show that scandals, quite like crises, are complex, yet contingent, socially manufactured products. It also demonstrates that more reputable media outlets--like the BBC--ought to think more closely about how they adopt the narratives of particular tabloid presses in covering this election.

Reading the Financial Crisis Through the FT's UK Deficit Buster Simulation

With the UK election campaign in full swing, it has recently begun to dawn on media commentators that the focus on the high probability of a hung parliament and what kind of coalition might be formed--if any--has meant that very little attention has been placed on each party's specific plans for cutting the national deficit.

To help voters understand the scope of cuts that the parties are pledging to undertake based on their manifestos and their effects, the Financial Times has designed a UK Deficit Buster simulation where players get to choose what will be slashed in order to meet deficit reduction targets.

As a simulation, what makes the Deficit Buster effective is that it is able to convey how deeply unpleasant and intrusive these cuts are going to be. Vital front-line services are going to be effected and the impacts are going to be disruptive no matter the assurances that Brown, Cameron, and Clegg have given the public over the past three weeks.

Where the simulator is genuinely dishonest is that it provides no mechanisms for raising revenue from measures like an increase in tax rates on those with incomes over £150K a year (the wealthiest 0.6% of the population), the introduction of a financial transactions tax, or the elimination of out-dated military programs like Trident.

But beyond these specific points of weakness, what strikes me as most interesting is how the Deficit Buster simulation is indicative of a deeper problem with the way in which in the UK deficit is being understood as a political issue. And that problem is that the source of the current deficit is being willfully forgotten.

The origins of the current deficit have been completely de-contextualized. It did not appear out of thin air or as a product of carefree spending. It resulted from the financial crash and the UK government's attempts to mitigate its worst consequences. Just over a  year ago, Bloomberg reported that government bailouts to UK banks had already reached £1.4 trillion. This was in addition to other forms of economic stimulus spending. And the financial crisis itself arose from a failure to effectively regulate the banking sector, a failure made possible by the total acceptance of the necessity of financial deregulation across the big three political parties.

What is so amazing is the astounding feat of jedi mind trickery that Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats have been able to pull off despite these circumstances. In securitizing the deficit--that is by representing public spending as an existential threat that requires the imposition of emergency budgetary measures-- they have managed to deflect all responsibility for bearing the cost from the banking sector and placed it squarely on the laps of the general public.

The current situation--regardless of who gets elected--is one where those least culpable for the financial crisis--those on benefits, front-line public sector workers, children, and universities--are being asked to take primary responsibility for sorting its lingering effects as though this is a common-sense and uncontroversial solution to the problem.

Therefore, in the waning days of the election campaign, I would argue that if people are interested in real change, it will not come from accepting the deficit as a political issue and seeing which cuts you find the least objectionable. Rather, real change will only emerge if the electorate makes it clear that it understands that the positioning of the deficit as a political issue is itself extremely political and that it is not prepared to accept this framing. One can only hope that someone raises this as a question at tomorrow night's debate...

And here's a slogan: It's finance capital, stupid.

Photo credit: Helga's Lobster Stew

UK Election 2010: Shiver Me Timbers, It's Mad Cap'n Tom

Since I moved here, one of the things that I've noticed that the UK does really well is light-hearted eccentricity. And as an article by Toby Lichtig in today's Guardian outlines, what better opportunity for the gregarious eccentric than an election?

What strikes me as important here is what can eccentricity tell us about the political culture within which it  becomes manifest? In North America, when one thinks of an eccentric, images of compounds, weapons caches, messianic pretensions, and hard-core paranoia come to mind. This is not to say that the UK does not have its own share of this type of eccentric. But more often British political eccentricity appears to be expressed in humorous and less confrontational ways. And Map Cap'n Tom seems to embody the best of that goofy self-deprecating spirit.