It’s morning again in America. Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past 4 years. This afternoon, 6500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what was just 4 years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America and, under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than 4 short years ago?
This 1984 campaign was the work of adman Hal Riney (1932-2008). He started doing PR for the US Army in Italy and then took an entry level job in BBDO‘s San Francisco office in 1956. He rose to become creative director in 1968. In 1976 he moved to Ogilvy & Mather and set up their West Coast office. After working on Reagan’s re-election campaign, he purchased Ogilvy’s SF office and renamed it Hal Riney & Partners. After several highly successful campaigns he sold out in 2003 and retired.
Here is an extract from an obituary in AdWeek:
Riney’s work celebrated an optimistic, perhaps even romantic vision of America. It was a land populated with people of simpler values, small town Fourth of July parades and rocking chairs on shady porches. There was little tolerance for fakery. It was this vision he mined in his 1984 campaign for President Ronald Reagan, as well as his advertising for beer and automobiles.
“The beauty and whimsy, the cleverness and the suggestion seem to be gone from everything,” Riney said in 1982. “And it’s been replaced by two people holding up a product they would never hold up; and talking about it in a way no one ever talked; and being astonished, pleased, delighted or surprised about characteristics of a product which in real life would actually rate no more than a grunt, at best.”
Riney’s persona catapulted his San Francisco agency to national, and even international acclaim. His style was widely copied, and his disciples went on to found 28 other advertising companies.
I mention all this because there was an interesting comment piece in Thursday’s i, suggesting that a slight re-write of this ad will be the centre-piece of Cameron’s re-election campaign in three years’ time:
They will be declaring Morning in Britain, whether it is or it isn’t. And this is the impossibility of Ed Miliband’s position. He has to argue it isn’t. So a politician who instinctively wants to cast himself, like Blair and Obama, as an agent of change instead sounds like Mr Doom and Gloom … A man who is young and positive by nature is trapped in a language of hopelessness and negativity … Ed finds himself constantly bemoaning a long, dark winter night. The dream has turned into a nightmare from which he might not wake up.
The first sentence sounds plausible, but I am not sure about the rest. Declaring Morning in Britain might well work. The reason is that New Labour, which was welcomed with such enthusiasm, ended up as something of a nightmare. A few cynics like me found Blair ghastly from day one, but most people thought he was a breath of fresh air. An exciting, dynamic leader who would take the country to places it had not been before.
He certainly did that. He became convinced that his messianic role was to right the world’s wrongs by pre-emptive strikes in countries where there was no national interest in intervening and no bilateral treaty to justify our intervention. After early success (by later standards) in the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, he joined America in seeking revenge for 9/11 by invading Afghanistan when Mullah Omar refused to hand over Osama Bin Laden. Despite the fact that it was clearly against our national interest to do so, there was some at least some kind of Old Testament eye-for-an-eye justification for attacking Afghanistan. But bizarrely, just as the mission looked – against the odds – as though it might succeed, the US and UK got deflected onto a totally madcap scheme to invade Iraq.
It was probably the most unpopular overseas adventure in UK history (in terms of absolute numbers of citizens against it). Certainly, it was by far the most outrageous act of any UK government since Suez. It ended more disastrously than even its severest critics imagined possible. Even worse, Blair spent most of the time since lying about it and trying to whitewash what happened with a series of rigged enquiries (carefully chosen enquirers with carefully chosen terms of reference.)
Meanwhile, domestic policy was largely controlled by Gordon Brown. He was much more an old-fashioned socialist who wanted to change the UK by substantially increasing expenditure on various public services and to modernise the country by freeing market forces from unnecessary regulation. In broad terms those objectives were reasonable, but unfortunately they were disastrously botched in execution. An alarming proportion of the increase in public expenditure was totally wasted. What on earth was the point of arranging for the median GP salary to be £100k?
Then his approach to financing it was scandalous. Stealth borrowing was simply a device to get around the government accounting rules. That might not have been too bad, if it had not been so expensive and inefficient. Because it was also a way of making government borrowing far more expensive. It also enriched a generation of entrepreneurs who were amazed to find a government willing to offer them a guaranteed profit with almost no risk.
The light touch regulation practiced by OfThis and OfThat was almost as bad. A collection of fat cats were allowed to run de facto cartels, many of which will prove hard to get rid of, because their lawyers would probably complain to the European courts if their cream was taken away.
Much of this has failed to catch the attention of the typical voter, mainly because New Labour was lucky enough to face the most incompetent Opposition in living memory. The Tories spent most of the New Labour decade consumed by infighting and a struggle to find a set of policies that looked different from those stolen from them by New Labour. With hindsight, that was Blair’s real achievement and truly breathtaking it was. He took over the Tory policies wholesale in order to make New Labour electable.
It was breathtaking for two reasons. The first was how easily he triumphed all the socialists in the Labour party who were absolutely appalled at what he was doing. The second was how readily it was lapped up by the voters as something new, when actually he was just carrying on with more of the same.
Voters are slow-moving. They can take years to grasp something that the political classes grasp almost immediately. Well, maybe that is a little too kind to the political classes. It seemed to take a great many political journalists a surprisingly long time to grasp what Blair was doing. But that cuts both ways. Once the electorate had turned against Blair, it was always going to take a long time to woo them back.
So that is my analysis. The political classes may have moved on from May 2010, but most voters haven’t. They still blame New Labour for the current mess, which makes them disinclined to vote Labour back in.
Certainly, Ed Miliband looks unelectable, whatever the voters’ mood. That has nothing to do with what he says, it is just a question of how he says it and what he looks like. He lacks charisma. In fact it is hard to think of any politician who has less. Even John Redwood sparkles by comparison. But then, the first leader of the opposition was always likely to be replaced before Labour got re-elected, so any rivals are probably only too happy for Ed to take the blame.
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