Through a glass crudely

The New York Times has a piece on the British general election and its implications for the 2020 US presidential campaign.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. conjured the prospect of headlines like, “Look what happens when the Labour Party moves so, so far to the left.” Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that “Jeremy Corbyn’s catastrophic showing in the U.K. is a clear warning.” And Mayor Pete Buttigieg spoke of the need to “build a coalition and gather that majority.”...

David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s former chief strategist who also advised Britain’s Labour Party in 2015, called Brexit “a unique circumstance” and Mr. Corbyn “a uniquely weak candidate.’’

“But there’s no doubt that he also was further to the left than Britain wanted to go,” Mr. Axelrod added. “This is an election, a campaign. People are going to make those comparisons that they think are helpful to them, and do think a lot of Democrats are going to look at what happened there with some concern.”

Mr Corbyn certainly was a uniquely weak candidate, but while assessing the result of the general election it is probably useful to look at the outcome in crudely personal terms too. Perceptions of a candidate's personality are important and whatever the rationale, perception is frequently the source of the rationale rather than vice versa. 

Perhaps Corbyn is further to the left than Britain wanted to go, but perhaps he is also widely perceived as old, humourless and ineffective. Three major personal disadvantages when running against an obviously astute and comparatively youthful optimist such as Boris Johnson. Even worse, there was nobody in Corbyn’s immediate political circle to offset that. John McDonnell comes across as old, flinty and humourless, Diane Abbott as scatterbrained and hypocritical.

Old pictures of a younger, floppy-haired Corbyn hobnobbing with Gerry Adams like a radical student agitator will not have helped either. Soft on terrorism may be the obvious perception, but those images may also suggest that Corbyn has never had a "proper job". He doesn't come across as "one of us" - never did. Boris does at least try - Corbyn rather conspicuously doesn't. 

These things matter but political analysis doesn’t really tell us how much they matter. The result tells us that. Some may blame the Labour stance on Brexit, but it is not likely that many people trust Johnson on this issue either and he still he won a resounding victory. The NYT piece goes on to say -

Progressives took different lessons from the results, rejecting the idea that they were a harbinger of trouble for more liberal candidates like Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said it was “a completely made-up narrative that there’s any similarity between this very unique U.K. election and the dynamics in this country.”

US progressives may wish to take different lessons from the results, but in so doing they may mislead themselves. As ever there is the determination to class Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as progressives, but as with Corbyn both have personal disadvantages. 

Let us go back to crude personal issues. Bernie Sander is 78, somewhat humourless and politically extreme. Elizabeth Warren is 70, a known liar and also politically extreme. Trump is old too, but his optimist and general demeanour go some way to offset that. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren don't have that advantage. These things matter.