Friday, May 11, 2007
Farewell Tony
If there was an election for President of Earth, I think Tony Blair would have a pretty good chance of winning it.
I'm sure statements like this must be infuriating to many British people, who had to live with the guy as a regular old human politician. But in the image he projected abroad, he always came across as a true leader. Few other politicians of this generation can boast that.
Those who work in politics in democratic countries (at least those that don't have term limits) live every day with the knowledge of their inevitable, horrible doom. The end, when it comes, will always be bad. No matter how popular and heroic you were in the beginning, no matter how much good you managed to accomplish in your time, your final days will be mired in scandal, back-stabbing and discontent.
Blair learned this the hard way. Hell, we all learn it the hard way. Is there an easy way?
Thanks Tony. Best wishes for all your future endeavours.
posted by Mentok @ 12:47 p.m.,
2 Comments:
-
At 1:32 p.m.,
said...
-
i've been waiting for someone to say something about his resignation.
whenever he appeared on tv with bush, i was always envious that they had a leader who could speak the english language and sound so intelligent. even if i disagreed with what he was saying, he still sounded good.
i always felt a little bond with him, too, because we had our last babies around the same time--although he and his wife were MUCH older than me and my husband. : ) -
At 1:03 p.m.,
Mentok said...
-
marcy - it's certainly true that Blair had the gift of being able to connect with ppl through TV, which is perhaps the greatest gift for a modern politician.
As for Bush's English, I think he screws himself up with his whole plain language schtick. I've heard he's one of the strongest adherents of the notion that a politician should never speak above a Grade 6 vocabulary, since that's the North American adult average. Allegedly Bush re-writes his own speeches to stick to that range. So I think he sometimes self-edits so much while talking that he ends up tripping over his own tongue. I certainly don't want to sound like an apologist for the guy, 'cause he's clearly not a good president, but it's not really credible that a guy could be Harvard educated and still sound that dumb.
JC - Now, don't hold back...tell us what you really think of Tories ;-)
I knew that any comment on Blair would sound superficial to someone who had to experience him as a domestic politician.
As for the internal partisan ideological debate...was he left enough, was he too far right, etc... every party has those debates and to me they are mostly meaningless. All effective governments are centrist.
Since all parties have to build big tents, at the end of the day they become little more than brand-name labels, like Coke and Pepsi fighting it out for market share.
7 out of 10? That's pretty good for a hairless ape trying to corral millions of other hairless apes ;-)
