The re-election of Barack Obama has and will be analysed in great detail by many people. Regarding the outcome, I’m largely ambivalent given that the republicans control the House of Representatives and the democrats control the Senate, whoever won would have faced political gridlock on Capitol Hill. One positive might be that the social conservative element of the Republican Party might start to lose control and allow others more in tune with the swing voters to rise. I’ll leave that sort of analysis to folks who know better (and those who don’t).
For me, who actually won the American presidency is unimportant in one major respect; ultimately their head of state should be the Queen. More interesting and relevant for us in the UK was the victory speech Barack Obama made, and the great resemblance it bore to the speech David Cameron made at the Conservative Party conference last month.
The theme the President went with in his speech was simple – if you want to work hard and get on, no matter who you are or where you’re from, you can in the United States of America and he’s there to help. Perhaps he was watching the speech from Birmingham that the Prime Minister made when he said that Conservatives don’t care where you’re from, it’s where you’re going and that we’re not the party of the better off, we’re the party of the want to be better off.
Some commentators are welcoming the re-election of President Obama as being good news for the Prime Minister and the Conservatives. I think it’s a stretch to compare the two, but if the ‘hard-work for just reward’ theme gets you re-elected, the Conservatives should be well placed to win in 2015, as long as the message can be got across to the electorate convincingly.
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