Word: kinnocks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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First The New York Times ran a page one story on the, shall we say, similarities between a Biden peroration in an August debate in Iowa and a moving and brilliantly effective Neil Kinnock speech shown in an advertisement during the British elections. Then it turned out Biden had lifted, without attribution, a lengthy passage from another famous and eloquent speech Robert Kennedy made during the 1968 presidential campaign...
Britain's recent election struck many voters there as too much like an + American presidential campaign. Pollsters, Madison Avenue techniques and television played too conspicuous a role. And to what end? Margaret Thatcher won as expected, even though almost everyone agreed that Labor's Neil Kinnock had campaigned more effectively on television (causing Lady Seear, a Liberal politician, to complain, "He may be a nice man, but for a Prime Minister it's not enough to be nice. It's not enough even for a cook!"). British politicians may be learning techniques from us, but it appeared to an American...
Election analysts agreed that Labor had ensured its survival as one of Britain's two major parties by mounting a superior campaign. Party strategists focused their effort on the personable Kinnock and his wife Glenys. Cannily avoiding the largely Tory, London-based press, the couple spent long periods campaigning in the provinces, far from London. "The style was vintage Jimmy Carter," noted a Western ambassador in London. Thatcher, by contrast, made the usual one-day campaign forays from the capital. "The Kinnocks were packaged with professionalism and flair," conceded a Conservative politician, "while most of the time we seemed...
Less than 65 hours before the polls opened, Thatcher flew by private jet to the seven-nation Venice summit, where the televised image of her moving easily among major world leaders was not lost on voters. At his last campaign rally, Kinnock mocked the Venice trip before a crowd in the bleak northern city of Leeds. Said he: "And now the TV spectacular to end all TV spectaculars: Venice. Cinderella on canal. She went there because somebody told her she could walk down the middle of the street...
That final, cocky gesture was typical of Kinnock, who entered the campaign with a reputation as a political lightweight. In just over 3 1/2 years as Labor's leader he had rarely bested Thatcher in their almost weekly jousts during the Prime Minister's question time in the House of Commons, and he had been ridiculed for his often rambling and emotional speeches. He was criticized by radical leftists in the Labor Party for moving it too far toward the center. But his eloquent campaign attacks against Tory parsimony won him respect as a warm, compassionate leader. In one crowd...