Feeling sort of sorry for Gordon Brown today. Yesterday I watched this video, in which he spends a considerable amount of time patiently (for him) engaged in discussion with a complaining voter.
I’ve been there. I’ve been there at the end of a long workday, fielding a call from an angry reader. So you spend a certain amount of time listening, try to make your points patiently, try to make some personal connection, see if you can defuse the anger. Usually you can, if you’ll spend the time. It’s amazing how often just listening will turn a caller from someone who hates you to someone who appreciates the chat and goes away friendly.
So Gordon, grouchy as he naturally is, gets through the confrontation with some grace.
Then he gets into his car, and once the door has closed and he starts to ride off, he lets out his irritation, lashing out with a “Whose idea was that?” before muttering something about “bigoted woman” and “just ridiculous…”
This happened with the election a week away, and the PM has apologized profusely and abjectly, but it’s not just going away. It was the centerpiece on today’s Wall Street Journal.
A couple of contradictory points occur to me:
- How did this guy get so far in politics? The contrast to Tony Blair couldn’t have been more marked. Tony wouldn’t have been caught like that for a couple of reasons. First, he’s too media savvy; I think his Spidey Sense would have picked up the presence of a live mike. Second, he enjoyed the give and take of politics too much. He may have found the woman just as off-putting, but I think he’d have felt more satisfaction for having handled it well. Gordon Brown’s way is to go away glowering, resenting that he’d had to put in the time.
- Just to swing violently in the other direction: The world is much too much with us these days. At what point to we get to blow off a little steam and express our honest frustration without the world hearing it? Who the hell was responsible for that microphone being on? It makes me feel a bit like 1984 — not the year, the dystopian novel.
So — while I miss my man Tony (possibly my favorite politician of his generation — here’s my paean to him when he left office) and don’t like Gordon nearly as much, to some extent Gordon can’t help the fact that he’s not Tony. And I feel for him that he can’t even express (what he thought was) private frustration without losing an election.
Oh, by the way — if you haven’t seen it, check out “The Deal,” an excellent film about the political relationship between Blair and Brown. It’s made by the same folks who made “The Queen,” and the same guy plays Tony Blair. Brown is played by the actor who portrayed the politician in trouble in the original British production of “State of Play.” See an excerpt below…
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E.J. Dionne provides more food for thought on all this at The Post’s “PostPartisan.“