Why can’t Ed be like Barack?

Mehdi Hasan, in The Independent today, urges Ed Miliband to espouse economic populism.

First I had to overcome my distress at discovering that Hasan has not read my book, in which I explain that James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992, did not write “It’s the economy, stupid” on the whiteboard in the Little Rock war room. He wrote, “the economy, stupid”, as the second of three reminders to campaign staff, the others being “Change vs more of the same” and “Don’t forget healthcare”. Besides, the misquotation is a dreadful cliché, number one, the first, the worst, the prompt that started me on the book, the original sin of the Banned List.

Apart from that, Hasan will be astonished to learn that I agree with him. A bit of clever economic populism is necessary and right. We can do without the stupid variety, such as the protectionism that infects American politics in every primary season, but Clinton held that in check and then passed Nafta (North American Free Trade Agreement) as President.

Nor am I in favour of banker bashing, but I do think that “we, the people” who own RBS and Lloyds TSB, and who underwrote the survival of Barclays, should say how much their bosses get paid (I would say give Stephen Hester his bonus, and would part from Hasan on that point, but that is democracy for you). And I think that many salaries are too high and many jobs too unnecessary in the rest of the more conventional public sector.

But I am not sure what Hasan is saying, apart from of Ed Miliband, the subject of his critically sympathetic biography: “Wonks will be wonks.”

Hasan seems to think that the Labour leader’s main failing was to give his dreadful Sheffield speech, which I criticised here, in the university rather than outside Forgemasters.

He says Miliband ought to be more like Obama who in turn learned from Clinton. But there are differences between being an economic populist in opposition and in office. The big story of Carville and Clinton is that Carville raged at his former boss when, once elected, Clinton turned out to mean it when he said he was a Balanced Budget Democrat. Carville and Robert Reich were furious that Clinton bowed to the bond markets, as they saw it, as a fiscally responsible president.

Photograph of Barack Obama on the phone to David Cameron: Official White House photo by Pete Souza

PS. I don’t know who Hasan is calling a Blairite retread. Jim Murphy and I have always been Blairites.

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