Wednesday 5 November 2008

Tories for Obama - and Palin!

Flip- Flop-Flip. Louise Bagshawe has already got the Tory lines up and running.

It goes something like this:
- They wanted McCain to win, so are pretty gutted.
- She's delighted at Obama's victory at the same time, as its good news for the Tories.
- But she can't wait to get behind the Palin campaign in 2012.

This must be what they call Tory means to progressive goals (or is it the other way round; nobody can ever quite remember).

"They can have a previous president. We'll have the next one", senior Conservatives briefed gloatingly of David Cameron's decision to invite John McCain to the 2006 Tory party conference.

David Cameron may have got closer to John McCain than any other international politician, pretty much endorsing McCain as his favoured candidate for the White House as the primary season began.

But, by this morning, he will be renewing his enthusiasm for Barack Obama by the morning. I was pretty sceptical about this when he first tried it at the start of the primaries almost a year ago, suggesting David Cameron might struggle to capture the excitement and sense of change. Perhaps he could steal this Obama line:


"The day I'm inaugurated, not only will the country look at itself differently, but the world will look at America differently."


Or perhaps not.

1 comment:

Robert Alcock said...

There has been plenty of Tory flip-flopping on display this week.

Take their health team's dismal response to Alan Johnson's astute line on the thorny NHS co-payments issue yesterday.

Is it just me or is this this response from Andrew Lansley both a distortion and rather Janus-faced?

Lansley said: "We have consistently argued that it is morally wrong for patients to have their NHS care taken away from them if they choose to pay for part of their treatment."

But he added: "They've gone from letting patients lose their NHS care to creating a two-tier NHS, where some patients will get better care simply because they can pay for it. And they're trying to dress it up by calling it 'separate' care."

In the debate following his statement, Alan blasted the "weird and wonderful" contortions of his opposite number. And he later dismissed the histrionics of one hapless Tory MP as "an audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company" - which he would treat "with the contempt it deserves".