Brits Borrowing from American Political Playbook
Jules Witcover

The British have borrowed one of the most popular American political institutions by holding a series of televised debates among their three candidates for prime minister. It appears to have been a success, at least in heightening public interest in the race.

In 1992, the three-way debates among Bill Clinton, the senior George Bush and Texas tycoon Ross Perot elevated the third-party hopeful into national prominence here. Now, the British version has made an instant star of the Liberal Democrats' Nick Clegg, against the Labor incumbent Gordon Brown and the Conservatives' David Cameron.

Conventional political wisdom about such debates is that an incumbent is unwise to give a challenger an equal platform. But in the latest British contest, Brown was trailing Cameron in the polls and presumably agreed to debate for that reason, basically disregarding Clegg at the time.

In that earlier American election, Perot won 19 percent of the vote but Clinton was an easy winner, in both the debates and the final outcome. Some thought Bush sealed his defeat with a gaffe -- appearing disengaged in one of the debates, the camera catching him glancing at his wristwatch as if impatient for it to be over.

At any rate, Clegg, like Perot, caught the public's attention, and Brown in the first two debates didn't fare very well among the press and other unofficial referees. So the third debate was the incumbent's chance to recover. Then came a gaffe of his own.

On the eve of the debate, he was caught by an open microphone calling an old Labor voter "a bigoted woman" after a contentious exchange with her over immigration policy. Brown was obliged to go see her and apologize at length for the conduct he said left him "mortified."

In the final three-way debate, he felt it imperative to make reference to the gaffe, observing at the outset that "there is a lot to this job and, as you saw yesterday, I don't get all of it right." But, he insisted, "I do know how to run the economy in good times and bad." To the latter, both Cameron and Clegg strongly dissented, leaving Brown again appearing to be the odd man out as he sought to take the fight to Cameron, the Conservative frontrunner.

Although the state of the economy is the central substantive issue in the campaign, Brown's off-the-cuff remark to an aide not intended for public ears dominated the coverage in the British press and on British television. American TV featured it as well. In the final debate, the immigration issue that had prompted Brown's unfortunate comment generated heated argument among the candidates.

If Brown loses the election on May 6, as many British experts are predicting, the outcome no doubt will be widely attributed to his taped gaffe, repeatedly aired thereafter in the news media. It may indeed prove to have been a factor. But long before, there was general disenchantment with Brown over the bad times, and with his Labor Party after 13 years of its rule.

Inevitably, the collapse of public support for his Labor predecessor, Tony Blair, over his conspicuous partnership with the junior President Bush in the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath has also taken its toll on Brown, although he has denied having a voice in that calamitous war decision.

In the recent extensive review of that British commitment by a blue-ribbon investigatory commission, Brown testified that as chancellor of the exchequer he confined himself largely to assuring that British troops serving would have all their needs provided.

As for the prime minister's now-celebrated gaffe, he can take consolation in the history that such slips of the tongue are seldom politically fatal. Ronald Reagan easily survived his fictitious "nuclear bombing" of the Soviet Union in a warm-up to a speech captured on tape. And his successor, George Bush, would have lost to Clinton in 1992 whether or not he had impatiently looked at his watch during their debate.

More recently, despite Joe Biden's careless whispered profanity to President Obama about the momentous significance of health care reform picked up by another open mike, he's still the vice president.

Available at Amazon.com:

The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

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