Word: britain
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...election is the battle for the soul of a country, and party spin doctors are busily concocting competing visions of Britain to lure voters to the polls on May 6. The stakes are high. The Conservatives' lead in opinion polls is too narrow to guarantee an outright victory, and that might allow the Labour government to hang on by the skin of its teeth (Britain's electoral system favors incumbents), or it could result in a hung parliament, with Liberal Democrats and other smaller parties holding the balance of power...
...those different visions of Britain. On Tuesday, Conservative leader David Cameron presented his party's manifesto in a derelict power station festooned with the word "CHANGE." He has promised Britons "change [they] can believe in" and at the launch reworked another familiar phrase, saying, "Yes we can ... make things better without spending more money." Prime Minister Gordon Brown, meanwhile, chose a rural backdrop for Labour's manifesto unveiling on Monday: a sunlit cornfield, the grain undulating in a virtual breeze. Britain? This looked more like Oklahoma. (See pictures of the U.K. election campaign...
...Britain's election campaign seems a bit, well, American, that's not entirely surprising. British politicians watched the 2008 U.S. presidential contest closely. "All the main parties are trying to grab a trick from [President] Obama's campaign textbook, focusing efforts and resources on social media," says Alberto Nardelli, co-founder of the website Tweetminster, which tracks politicians' and commentators' Twitter interactions and analyzes the sentiment toward political issues...
...infusion of Washington into Westminster doesn't stop there. Dunn, Knapp and Sheehan have all been hired to prepare Cameron and Brown for Britain's first-ever televised debates between party leaders (the Liberal Democrats' Nick Clegg will also take part). The first will be broadcast live on Thursday. Britons, used to abrasive political debates that routinely see the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition swapping contemptuous jibes while backbenchers heckle gleefully, may notice an American politesse to the TV confrontations. That's because the party leaders agreed to participate only if the broadcasts followed the deferential model...
...Britain's Affair with the U.S. Is Over...