Saturday, April 24, 2010
More than halfway done
It is such a shockingly short campaign to an American, our last presidential campaign lasted 18 months. Why could a country that fashions itself in the top 5 on Earth take only a month to make a decision on their leader. A country that seems to enjoy politics so much more than my own seems to dispatch with their process so quickly. I believe fixed elections would change this, people would know when the election is and be prepared from a much earlier stage to fight it. It is also so medieval that the leader can decide when he wants to face an election. But maybe if I truly was a part of your system the whole process would make sense, but I doubt it.
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It allows the government to get things done rather than being in election mode for two years
ReplyDeleteWe in the UK are more intelligent than the average Yankee-doodle-dandy. Believe me, 3 to 4 weeks is more than enough time to decide which twat we should vote into Number 10. And we can decide a PM without having to descend to having 'pop-art' prints of a candidate to make him look 'fresh' and 'new' and 'exciting'-lol!
ReplyDeleteI don't think I could stand an 18-month campaign. Remember, in British politics, we've usually had a good few years of the party leaders actually in parliament defending themselves and their policies (as the case may be) so I think we can skip quite a lot of the US stuff where presidential candidates can come from virtually nowhere.
ReplyDeleteBasically, their job interview for being prime minister in Britain starts not just when HMTQ dissolves parliament, but when the an MP becomes party leader.
You could argue that people don't make the decision in a month in the UK. We make over the 4 or 5 years since the previous election.
ReplyDeleteIt's just that the parties only spend a month frantically kissing babies and going into PR overdrive.
After all, if you have come to the idea over 4 years that party A is poor on the economy or parrty B is poor on law and order, you'd be daft to change your mind over the course of 4 weeks just because party A issued a pledge to fight inflation or party B issued a pledge to hire more police. Especially as few manifecto promises get kept.
The advantage of the UK system over the US here, I think, is that shorter campaigns require less cash.
Zedro has a point there: unlike the US Presidential elections, where primaries mean at least one of the two candidates isn't known until a few months before the election, we've seen Brown, Cameron and Clegg for years already, even seeing them going head-to-head on TV regularly in PMQs.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, though, none of us will be voting for PM a week on Thursday anyway. I'm not even really faced with a choice between Lib Dem, Tory and Labour: my constituency is a straight Conservative-SNP race, with the other two fighting over third place. Even if I wanted to vote for either of them, it would be an empty gesture!