WASHINGTON: At the low point of his presidency, after a disastrous first year of his second term, George Bush has at last attracted an imitator. David Cameron, 39, the new leader of the Conservative party, unabashedly claims to personify the future. He seems to embrace aspects of Blair’s policies, so as to present himself as Blairite without the burdens of having been Blair: a ‘reformer’ without a past.

His implied promise is to conserve Blair’s achievements and continue some version of their logic, while casting doubt on the commitment of Blair’s rivals and critics within his party. Cameron is New Labour without Labour, just New. But the strategy is not new; it is adapted from the playbook of Bush’s 2000 campaign.

Bush confronted a popular two-term Democratic president credited with peace and prosperity. Clinton’s vice president was his natural successor. Republican positions on domestic policy were almost uniformly unpopular.

As governor of Texas, Bush turned his inexperience in national government into a virtue: he was outside the fray and free of its rancour. The Republicans had shut down the federal government twice and impeached Clinton. Bush promised to ‘change the tone in Washington’. He said that he was ‘a uniter, not a divider’.

It was Bush who first assumed the mantle of ‘compassionate conservatism’. He also distanced himself from some of his own party’s positions on social issues.

Bush appeared to reject the right-wing economic hard line, instead emphasising issues associated with the Democrats such as education. It was essential for him to try to erase Democratic management of the economy from the campaign.

In order to shift discussion away from Bush’s proposals, which were not generally accepted, he strained to make the election a contest of personalities.

Once in office, a closed, harsh and ideological president replaced the seemingly open-minded, tolerant and pragmatic candidate. But the palimpsest of the nearly forgotten earlier Bush remained to be discovered by David Cameron as a map to political fortune. Cameron’s profession to be a true ‘compassionate conservative’ is step one. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service