Is David Cameron learning tricks from Richard Nixon?
Political speechwriters of all persuasions are often ‘inspired’ by their predecessors, and BBC Radio 4 talked about David Cameron’s election launch speech about the ‘great ignored’ have palpable similarities to Richard Nixon’s creation of the phrase the ‘silent majority’; indeed the whole speech had similarities.
Leaving aside for a moment that the 37th President of the United States was merely employing the phrase and didn’t coin it, is this someone any wannabe political leader wants to be compared with? While he went a long way to rehabilitating himself and pioneered good relations with China, Nixon is ultimately remembered for Watergate, so borrowing from his speeches is not so clever.
More crucially, Nixon originally lost out to John F Kennedy in 1960 and it was his performance on a televised debate that is said to have cost him the close fought battle. The grizzled Nixon sweated and looked every part the second hand car salesman while the suave JFK shone. I suspect Gordon Brown is more at risk to comparison than David Cameron.
The televised debates are one of the most exciting prospects of this general election and no doubt the votes of millions may be won or lost on these. Will Brown exhibit the gravitas of leadership, the economic know how? Will Cameron seem too posh and lightweight? Will Nick Clegg actually come out on top in the way Vince Cable did when the Chancellors met recently for their own debate?No-one knows, which is why the debates will be so important.
We get what David Cameron is trying to do with his ‘great ignored’ but apart from having the air of sounding like a tribe in Narnia or inhabitants of a distant land that neither Bilbo nor Frodo ever reached in Tolkien’s books, the ‘great ignored’ is much more clumsy that the ‘silent majority’ and loses the suggestion that it is, well, the majority who feel this way.
Nixon had inherited the Vietnam War and had originally increased resources to the conflict before negotiating a ceasefire with North Vietnam. It was later, speaking about those who had objected to the war but had not demonstrated against it, that Nixon used the phrase ‘silent majority’ and brought it popular appeal. So using it for the majority of the population who want the troops home from Afghanistan would have worked, less so some notional idea of disenfranchised group of potential voters.
Actually, Nixon didn’t invent ‘silent majority’, and it was in use, according to Wikipedia, way back in 1874 to refer to the dead, who outnumber the living, a full 100 years before Nixon resigned to avoid being impeached over Watergate.