UK Election: Conservatives relying on US input for Prime-Ministerial Debates

Catherine Mayer of Time Magazine wrote on April 26, 2010;

The American Connection

Referendums and recalls aren't the only things that Cameron has borrowed from the U.S. His rhetoric has a familiar ring to it. "Change vs. more of the same is the big clarion call," Cameron tells TIME. "The change we need, the change we believe in, change we can trust, change that happens — call it what you want." He has taken more than slogans from Barack Obama's 2008 campaign — the President's former White House communications director and campaign adviser Anita Dunn, for one. Dunn, together with Bill Knapp, her partner in the Washington-based consultancy Squier Knapp Dunn Communications, is helping with preparations for three potentially pivotal televised debates pitting Cameron against Brown and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader. Cameron hopes these jousts will help him finally seal the deal with voters, many of whom are still suspicious that at heart the Tories don't really like the messy, multicultural, open and nondeferential society Britain has become since the Conservatives last held power. "People want to know two things," he says. "They want to know that things really will change, but also they want reassurance that the Conservative Party itself has changed."

And it has, to the extent that it is not surprising to see consultants associated with Obama helping the British cousins of the U.S. Republican Party. There's a huge gap now between American conservatism and the touchier-feelier variety promoted by Cameron's Conservatives. Thatcher, a hero to many on the U.S. right, laid the foundations of a long British boom that has only recently ended. But Thatcherite economic reforms came at a social cost that earned Conservatives a reputation — in the phrase of a party chairwoman — as "the nasty party." So Cameron has been at pains not to embrace Thatcher's legacy but to rid the party of it. Launching the Tory manifesto on April 13, he promised a return to an inclusive "one nation Conservatism" in place of the polarized and polarizing ideology of the Thatcher years.

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