Just got around to reading The Economist before last — part of it, anyway, the part that mattered. The part about my hero, Tony Blair, whom the Brits don’t properly appreciate. Although it is to be noted that while they did slash into his ruling majority, they 
did elect him to an unprecedented third consecutive term. Consider the way they dumped Winston Churchill immediately after he saved their bacon in the war, and what the current PM just received from the British electorate qualifies as a big, sloppy kiss by comparison.
But they can’t bring themselves to work up any enthusiasm about it, which would make you think he was the kind of near-zero that the major parties keep forcing us to settle for over on this side of the pond. As the magazine-which-inexplicably-calls-itself-a-"newspaper" said of the UK electorate it in its cover story, "Like The Economist, it sees no clear alternative to Mr Blair, but it has come to wish there were one."
So they settled for a guy who most Americans would love to have a chance to vote for — a fact that The Economist acknowledges with the bemusement with which it often regards the colonies:
The strangeness does not stop there. Mr Blair’s eight years in office have won him extraordinary standing abroad, something which he plainly relishes. In America he is talked of reverently by Democrats and Republicans alike. In a country where politics has become ever more viciously polarised, it often seems that adoration of Mr Blair is the one thing the opposing tribes can agree on. Republicans love him for his unflinching support of America’s assertive foreign policy; Democrats because they see a towering figure of the centre-left, a man with the magnetism and the energy of Bill Clinton, if not quite the brains—and, would you believe it, no bimbos. They rightly give Mr Blair the credit for reinventing the Labour Party and transforming its electoral prospects. If only, they tell themselves, we could find a leader like that.
You can say that again. And who says Tony doesn’t have "quite the brains" of Bill? Mr. Clinton may have been a champion talker, but can one really watch the PM during the House of Commons’ "question period" and think that the ex-president could do better under similar circumstances? I can’t, and partly because Mr. Clinton lacked the requisite intellectual combativeness — at least in public. He wanted to be loved too much.
Note that The Economist gives different reasons for why Republicans and Democrats over here like Mr. Blair. This passage illuminates two things: Why I can identify with neither party, and why I like Tony more than any partisan could. The thing is, I admire him for both sets of reasons.
Oh, and could somebody explain to me again why it’s the Republicans and the Tories who admire him for his war stance, and not the more liberal parties? The use of Anglo-American military might to spread democracy among oppressed peoples is a Wilsonian enterprise — the sort of thing one would expect from a Roosevelt or a Truman or a Kennedy; not from, say a Calvin Coolidge. There’s nothing conservative about risking and sacrificing so much for strangers who may never fully appreciate what we’ve done. The old policy, that of maintaining the status quo so the cheap oil would keep flowing; that was a conservative approach.
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