Opposition takes leaf out of Clinton book while Fianna Fáil is all at sea

JAMES CARVILLE has a strange Louisiana accent, and he speaks very fast.

Widely known in America as the “Ragin’ Cajun” because of his accent and his sharp tongue, it’s unlikely that his style of broadcasting and commentary would go down particularly well with Irish or English audiences.

So he’s not too well known here. But he is remembered for one thing that, strictly speaking, never happened. He was the genius who masterminded Bill Clinton’s first election and is universally recognised as the author of the famous phrase “it’s the economy, stupid” that was stuck to the wall of Clinton’s election HQ in Little Rock.

Fianna Fáil appears to have taken the Carville slogan to heart. Again and again at its press conferences, it hammers away that the thing that matters most is management of the economy, and nobody else can run the economy like it can.

But Carville never actually wrote “it’s the economy, stupid” on his campaign wall. It’s one of those phrases that has gone into history as a misquotation — like Jack Lynch (not) saying “we will not stand idly by”.

If Fianna Fáil knew what was actually written on that campaign wall, it might understand why its election has gone so disastrously wrong so far.

What Carville actually put up was a three-part message, aimed at the workers on the Clinton campaign. The purpose of the poster was to focus them on the three things that Carville believed would win the presidency for Bill Clinton.

Clinton, remember, was not at all well known. He had been governor of Arkansas, one of the smallest states of the union, and was frequently sneered at for his lack of governmental experience. And he was campaigning against George Bush Snr, who had won the first Gulf War and driven Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. When the 1992 campaign got under way, Bush was often seen as unbeatable.

By contrast, before his first term as president, George Bush had been vice-president for eight years, a senior congressman, ambassador to the UN and head of the CIA.

There were only two chinks in Bush’s armour, apart from the fact that he was sometimes seen as not being in touch with ordinary people. One of his weaknesses was the state of the economy, which had gone into recession, and some of the cutbacks being made to save money, especially in healthcare, were biting deep. And the other was a single speech that Bush had made four years earlier when he was campaigning to succeed Ronald Reagan. In another of the soundbites that has stood the test of time, he had said, “Read my lips. No new taxes.” And then after being elected, he had broken that promise. (Actually, he didn’t. He raised existing taxes rather than introduced new ones. But sometimes the electorate knows what it has heard.)

Against that background, this is what Carville wrote on the wall:

1. Change vs. more of the same.

2. The economy, stupid.

3. Don’t forget healthcare.

Anybody beginning to see any parallels here? Leave aside for a minute the obvious and crude attacks on Enda Kenny as inexperienced — they didn’t work for George Bush. If the people decide they want change, it’s partly because what Fianna Fáil sees as experience the people see as stale and out of touch.

In overall terms it’s the opposition that has been following Carville’s advice, not the Government. And the Government (we’re talking here about the FF component — the other bit no longer matters) has made mistake after mistake. From the beginning, it has fallen into every trap imaginable.

Forget the controversy about Bertie’s house and financial affairs. All that stuff, going back to last autumn, has been a distraction. Most of us don’t believe the Taoiseach was ever involved in anything corrupt. But his dig-outs diminished the office he holds, and whoever is the next incumbent has a big job to do to restore trust and confidence in that office as a focus of political leadership and as a fulcrum of good political practice.

The controversy, however, has principally been a distraction to FF. By and large Labour and FG have been concentrating on getting their messages across to the electorate, while Fianna Fáil has stumbled around dealing with issues where most of us have our minds made up already. And the messages from Pat Rabbitte and Enda Kenny could have been drawn almost word for word from the 1992 Clinton campaign. We don’t want more of the same, we want change. The economy is a settled question, we won’t interfere with the basics. And the health service is a key issue.

There is another parallel that could be drawn with 1992. Clinton knew his profile wasn’t as high as a lot of his opponents. He won the Democratic nomination in the first place partly because he believed he could persuade everybody he met to vote for him, and he made a conscious decision to work till the last minute. In the early New Hampshire primary, where his fate could have been sealed before his campaign even got off the ground, he defied all the conventions by campaigning at traffic lights, in the pouring rain, right up to the minute the polls closed.

PAT RABBITTE and Enda Kenny have been out at the traffic lights day after day, jackets off and sleeves rolled up, persuading strangers that change is needed.

Commentators have insisted they should be engaged in weighty debate on the issues — something each of them has done to a considerable extent — but what the commentators have missed is the sense of energy that both leaders have injected into the search for change.

Meanwhile, FF has been wheeling out its best and most articulate ministers, apparently under instructions to speak only gobbledegook. Good campaigning is about telling stories, and instead we have really talented and articulate ministers like Brian Cowen spouting endless reams of figures and statistics.

To make matters worse, all these facts and statistics are about the past, not the future. The economy is strong — that’s a given in this campaign. Nobody is really going to mess it up — that’s another given. The only question people want answered about the future is — how are you going to make the economy work for us? FF hasn’t even begun to address that question yet.

There’s a thing called the hierarchy of needs. It means that when our most basic needs and insecurities are dealt with, other needs develop a higher priority. So, when the economy is sorted, it’s no longer a priority. If taxes, inflation and unemployment were high, the health system wouldn’t be as important. But it has taken its place in the hierarchy of needs now.

Rabbitte and Kenny get that and all the signs are that FF (which used to be so good at this kind of thing) doesn’t. And that’s why it is in the middle of the worst FF campaign in history.