This year I’ve visited 8 countries, and everyone is talking about the American election.  Everyone has an opinion of what’s happening.  However, we get very resentful if any American has an opinion of what’s happening in our domestic politics.  Most fashions originate in the US.  Watch for local politicians now talking of hope, mirroring Senator Obama’s magical ability to connect with a once weary and cynical American public.  For misty-eyed liberals like myself, Senator Obama’s message reminds us of the heroes of our youth.  In New York, I watched the primary results with Democratic friends, someone asked, “What if something happened to him?”  Memories of the mindless murders of earlier heroes, the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., still raw.  Our dreams crushed.  Political courage is to be cherished, every now and again leaders emerge who appeal to the better angels of our nature.  Calling for sacrifice and, by the evidence of their own lives, ask us to be better.

Clinton cannot mathematically win the Democratic nomination by elected delegates, BUT she could win with the heavy support of super delegates, unelected party insiders.  The motto of the New York Yacht Club, “Old age and treachery always beats youth and idealism” haunts the process, and Republican McCain is an attractive anti-establishment, authentic figure.

It’s been hard to be a friend of America recently, it’s going to become easier.   Imagine President Barack Hussein Obama visiting Cairo or Capetown.  There would be hundreds of thousands of people in the streets.  Huts in South America, Timor and Africa still have faded photos of President John F. Kennedy pinned to the wall. 

JFK’s Pulitzer-winning book, ‘Profiles in Courage’, recorded the lives of 8 US Senators who broke with their parties and constituents over matters of conscience. Most paid the ultimate political price.  Defeat and oblivion.  A Parliamentarian is not just a delegate or a representative, a Member of Parliament owes his constituents both his industry and his judgement.  This was famously explained by Edmund Burke, a great British Parliamentarian who bravely supported the American Revolution and stood against the populist mob by opposing the French Revolution, predicting it would all end in blood and tears.

Why, then, do we not have great moments of political courage in New Zealand?  We did, for a while, when a Government in the 1980’s ignored opinion polls and reformed our economy.  Not many people supported abolishing 400 units of local government, GST, waterfront reform, forcing competition into telecoms, and making education an export winner.  Governments thereafter have distanced themselves from the very policies that have given us our present-day economic success.  The Kirk/Rowling Government went down in flames, putting Labour out for almost a decade with, among other things, a compulsory savings/pension scheme.  Twenty years later most economists now say our economy and society would be fundamentally different had that scheme been able to grow.  We now have KiwiSaver, a good thing, but it will only cover half the people, and the wrong half at that.  Opinion polls make cowards of all politicians.  You can talk yourself out of anything.  The Auckland Airport saga represents the worst opinion poll politics and political cowardice.  Thousands of New Zealanders lost big money because overnight the Government decided this was a strategic asset.  This is control of the ‘commanding heights’ theory, beloved by Lenin and Muldoon.  Widely popular and nationalistic.  No economic advantage, but a populist challenge to the National Party, a set-up, which National, in their cowardice, failed.  The Airport is mainly in private hands now, it owns assets offshore - shame!  The question of monopoly rents being extracted is real, but that’s true of whomever owns it, and is answered best by regulation.  Even more sensible is competition, a new airport where the land is available in northwest Auckland.  Auckland will have a million people on either side of a congested isthmus within 30 years.  A new airport, which doesn’t need taxpayers’ money is obvious.  But that will upset people, cowardice and polls win and NZ’s needs ignored for political short-term advantage. 

Leadership must be more than finding a poll and agreeing with it.  Politicians don’t often lie, their fatal compromise is to say nothing.  A number of politicians are privately aghast at the Electoral Finance Act.  Even those MP’s who voted for it can’t work out their own local expenditure, such is the confusion.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”  Politicians can be too good at politics, maintaining unity at any cost.  ‘Unity’ being the most important word in political management.  This kills debate and scrutiny, which always improves decision-making.  Questioning in itself becomes treason !

MMP compounds this tendency, it has created systemic, chronic cowardice.  Unless you are high on the party list, you are ‘road-kill’.  Therefore the incentive is to tell party leaders how wonderful, indispensable, how loved they are, becomes endemic and unhealthy.  The American system can excite up to 20% of the public to vote on who will be their party nominee.  You can’t name the NZ party officials who decide, who will speak in your name, for your party brand.  Electorate MP’s once stood for local interests, but now they seek the safety net of a list placing.  Electorate MP’s could once build a firewall of local supporters, their independence rewarded by loyal locals.  Those days are over.

Politics is now so well-managed that it takes all the risk and courage out of politics.  At a critical meeting in 1940, when yet again Conservative grandees wanted more appeasement, another peace deal, Winston Churchill growled, “Nations that go down fighting rise again, those that tamely surrender are finished.”  This is very true of politicians.

To those who live by opinion polls, who have their backbones removed by focus groups, the most profound words on political courage go to Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“Cowardice asks the question - is it safe?
 Expediency asks the question - is it politic?
 Vanity asks the question - is it popular?
 But conscience asks the question - is it right?
 A position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular,