Word: politicians
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...been decades, of course, since any important politician admitted to being a liberal. In a reissue of her book It Takes a Village, Senator Hillary Clinton indulges in yin-yangery worthy of her husband's notable indecision about boxers vs. briefs. "Most of us would describe ourselves as 'middle of the road'--liberal in some areas, conservative in others, moderate in most, neither exclusively pro- nor anti-government," and so on. Senator Barack Obama, in his book The Audacity of Hope, concedes only that his mother was a liberal of the romantic, pre-1967 variety, most emotionally engaged with things...
...politician ought to have an ideology. For that matter, so should a voter. Although ideology is sometimes dismissed as a substitute for thinking, it more likely is evidence that you've thought things through. Why is there a huge farm bill and no bill for struggling autoworkers? Why did we invade Iraq in search of nuclear weapons, but not North Korea? Hillary Clinton's description of her beliefs, quoted above, sounds more like a charity fund-raiser gift bag--a little of this, a little of that--than a coherent philosophy. Her competitors are no better...
Many or most of the decisions that an elected official must make on your behalf aren't even known when you must decide whether to vote for him or her. An ideology functions like a pledge or a promise, and it allows you, the voter, to judge the politicians seeking your vote in two different ways: their politics and their character. Do you share his or her political principles? And does he or she stick to them as new issues arise? Without some kind of ideology, the politician is asking voters to buy a pig in a poke...
...TIME: You're putting some faith in the power of new media, with your Webcameron web site. You've described Gordon Brown [who is expected to lead the Labour Party in the next election] as an "analog politician in a digital...
...David Cameron: Yes. He's a politician whose approach I just find very stuck in the past. It's all about top-down big government solutions, and if you look at the tax credit system, the NHS computer, the national ID card scheme, this belief in big government solutions solving the problems of the world. I just take a totally different view. Compared with Labour's state control, what we need is what I call social responsibility, which is trusting professionals to run our public services more, trusting parents to bring up their children more, trusting business to tackle some...