Campaign launch excites UK voters shock – too bad it’s Hillary Clinton’s
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Version 0 of 1. There are still weeks to go, but the 2015 UK general election is already redefining the word tedium. This has barely even counted as a campaign, more an opportunity for some of the world’s least charismatic nimrods to squabble over a maximum of about 10 seats with a mixture of empty buzzwords and gaspingly insincere stop-offs at regional scotch egg factories. Related: The Guardian view on Hillary Clinton: hammering the glass ceiling (again) | Editorial But, on Sunday, something miraculous happened. A political leader stepped up and managed to galvanise the electorate. A leader, beloved and respected in equal measure, somehow scooped up all the ill-feeling and apathy in this country and effortlessly transformed it into something fast approaching actual hysteria. It was wonderful to watch. Except it didn’t happen in this country. It happened 4,000 miles away. And the political leader was Hillary Clinton, who simply said that she’d quite like to be president. Deep down, you just know that the exuberant reaction to her announcement will have cheesed off our lot something rotten. One of the most persistent themes to crop up online in the wake of the Clinton announcement was “I wish I was American so that I could vote for Hillary”. Now, imagine that happening the other way around. Imagine an idealistic teenager somewhere deep in the American heartland, taking out their laptop to write: “I wish I lived in the British constituency of Brentwood and Ongar so that I could vote for Eric Pickles”, before slamming it shut again and resuming their daydream about performing a skimpy-loinclothed duet of Endless Love with Pickles, possibly on a gilded rowing boat floating in the Berners Hall Carp Fishery. It seems unlikely. The colossal discrepancy between Hillary’s rockstar aura and the increasingly threadbare humdrummery of the British political scene must be galling for our political leaders. Americans have got Clinton slamming a flagpole into the ground and declaring herself to be America’s champion. We, meanwhile, have got Ed Miliband begrudgingly revealing a mumbled, low-level appreciation for the professional career of Geoffrey Boycott. The worst of it isn’t even that everyone’s getting excited about an announcement from a woman who isn’t even her own party’s choice of presidential candidate yet. The worst of it is that Clinton managed to get everyone frothed into a tizzy with a video so unstoppably bland that, the first three times I tried to watch it, I involuntarily tuned out in the mistaken belief that I was watching a pre-roll advert for over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. That’s all it takes. A single video that’s had all the life kicked out of it by months of focus group testing has singlehandedly overshadowed the sum total of everything that all British politicians have done this year combined. Hillary wants Americans to vote for her, but you suspect that British politicians would be pretty jazzed if anyone actually managed to vote at all. It’s a depressing thought, that our electorate is so unmotivated by the prospect of choosing the least bad leadership that they’d rather emotionally invest in an American campaign rather than their own. But, really, things aren’t that bad. After all, we might be apathetic and lazy, but at least this campaign will be over in three and a bit weeks. Americans, meanwhile, have got to deal with this guff until the end of 2016. Now that’s tedium. |