We must be cautious in trying to apply lessons from America

By Stanley Grossman

I have been a loyal Democrat (with a big D) since birth. My family has always been on the left. I have an uncle who, while organising for the Communist Party at Syracuse University in the 1950s, was arrested on a trumped up assault charge that resulted in his conviction and eventual expulsion. He appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court and, unsurprisingly in the McCarthy era, lost.

I have lived in London on and off for about 20 years and now hold both US and UK passports. In 1999 I got involved with Democrats Abroad. DA is essentially a state party of the Democratic Party representing Democrats living outside the US-with members in more than 100 countries . I became International Treasurer in 2004 and, in April last year, was elected to the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

My involvement in British politics has been a bit more modest. I first arrived in the UK in the middle of the Thatcher era-certainly an interesting time. I followed the rise of Tony Blair and was a strong Labour supporter until the invasion of Iraq. I even ran for Camden Council in a “safe” seat-safe in the sense that I had no chance of winning.

I have been asked to detail “the differences between the British Labour Party structure and the Democrats in the US, and your involvement campaigning over recent years with both” An obvious underlying question is something like “what can the Labour Party learn from the recent successes of Barack Obama and the Democratic gains in the House and Senate?”

I can answer the second question very easily: not much. There are basic structural differences between the two systems of government to make it difficult to apply successes in one country to potential success in the other.

The biggest difference is money. Let me illustrate with an anecdote. In December 2006 Kirsten Gillibrand, a newly elected Congresswoman from New York was in London with her British husband. A friend of hers-who was a member of Democrats Abroad-hosted a fundraising reception for her. To British ears, this must sound absurd. After all, she had just won a hard-fought election and had certainly earned the right to relax for a bit before even thinking about the 2008 campaign -two years in the future. But, as she explained, the sums of money needed to compete in even a House election are so great that one has to start to raise money for the next election as soon as the votes are counted in the current one. Kirsten did win re-election to the House in 2008. To do so she raised ,649,664 and spent ,448,475. That’s almost million raised and spend to contest one out of 435 seats in the House of Representatives! Much of the money raised came from individual donations that were capped by law at ,300. And Kirsten’s campaign-like every campaign-had to issue monthly reports that are available online. (Kirstin was recently appointed to fill out the remainder of Hillary Clinton’s term in the Senate and will run for re-election to the Senate in 2010. She’ll need a helluva lot more than million for thatrace.)

I just spoke with a friend who will be running as a Labour candidate in the next election. I asked her how much it would cost to run the campaign. She gave me a number of answers but they all boiled down to a range of between £10,000 and £50,000 and with the statement that you could run a very good campaign if you had £20,000 on hand. At current exchange rates, that’s a bit under 30,000 dollars. This means that competing for a seat in Congress costs more than a hundred times as much as running to be an MP. Moreover, any Labour candidate can count on an injection of funds from the unions. The bottom line is that Labour MP candidates do not have to concentrate their efforts on fundraising-unlike their American counterparts.

And the entire process of running is very different.

• The biggest expense in the US is buying TV time. Obama had much more cash in hand than McCain and so could afford to buy mush more TV time and get his message across much more effectively. By contrast, in a British general election all three principal parties get equal time on TV and then only during the relatively short campaign period.

• In the US campaigns pretty much begin after the old one ended. Sarah Palin-that voice of intelligence and reason-is already touring the country and making speeches before groups of right wing Republicans (yes, I know that’s redundant). She’s running for the Republican nomination in 2012. By contrast, election campaigns in the UK last for the few weeks between the calling of a general election and the actual polling day-at least of theory.

• The nature of the campaign is very different. In the US much of the campaign is run in the media-primarily on TV. Every candidate has a large staff for coordinating fundraising and media exposure. Personality, charisma and even good looks are important. In the UK, people are competing now for selection by going door-to-door among the party faithful and those who have been selected are campaigning principally by leafletting. I was initially excited about running for a Council seat but soon got discouraged by the huge amount of time people put in on evenings and weekends. The next general election is probably more than a year off but the door-to-door hard work has already been going on for some time. In this system hard work and intelligence are key. This might explain, at least in part, why elected American officials are, on average, better looking but less intelligent than their British counterparts.

• The American parties have mastered the internet. Barack Obama has 40 million names-with email addresses-of people who contributed to his campaign. He reached out to them during the campaign and is reaching out to them now to help get his stimulus package passed. But, more important in the long run, each party has detailed intelligence on potential voters. The details are astonishing. A campaign worker can now access files that give him the demographics of every single block in virtually every city of interest. Thus, for example, a Democratic campaign staffer can look at the 100 block of Main Street in Cleveland and know at a glance the political leanings of every resident sorted by house number. He can tell which people are likely to vote and, if so, whether they are likely Democratic or Republican voters or are in that somewhat mythical group of undecided voters. If undecided, they will send a campaigner over to try to persuade and, if Democratic, they will make sure he or she actually votes on election day. The latter can and often does take the form of sending a car over to drive the voter to the polls.

• There is no such process going on in the UK-at least as far as I am aware. There is no database of millions of small donors. Everyone knows which seats are “safe” for Labour or another party. But there is no capability for knowing who might be swayable in a marginal constituency. Any party who developed this capability first would have a huge advantage. They could target possible votes before the election and, on election day, they could get out their vote.

• Americans participate more in party politics than Brits. I do not have the numbers but I have been told that Labour, the Conservatives and LibDems combined have fewer members than there are Americans in the UK chapter of Democrats Abroad. That gives American parties a much greater pool of volunteers to assist in campaigns.

I would like to close by pointing out that, while the Labour Party can certainly learn something from the Democratic system of targeting voters, they should not be too anxious about emulating American fundraising successes. The reason is simple: the American system is, at heart, corrupt. The big word on the US streets now is “earmarks.” Every senator and representative needs huge amounts of money to run a successful campaign. The people who raise that money expect something in return. So you get bridges to nowhere virtually everywhere and no one benefits except the folks who build those unnecessary bridges. After eight years of economic rape by the Bush administration, no one sane could wish to adopt the system here that allowed that rape to continue.

So, yes, Labour should find ways to identify its individual voters on a ward by ward basis. And it should use the internet to widen its base of small donors. But the British people are much better off with a system that makes it much more difficult for a few wealthy crooks to buy favourable legislation.