It struck me the other day that, in Britain at least, we’re witnessing something of a Wizard of Oz election… Now please forgive the crude charaterisations here, it’s certainly not intended to wound or make light of profoundly serious matters, but it seems to me that the three party leaders roughly approximate to the characters of scarecrow, the tinman and the cowardly lion…
So for starters, you have Gordon Brown as the lion wishing he had the nerve… Then Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems as the strawman wishing he had the brains to run more than just a Cable chancellory… And David Cameron, ah, well, if he only had the heart…
Squeezing the implausible analogy even further, who’d be the chief candidate for the Wizard? On Labour’s side none other than the mastermind of the 1997 ‘wall of spin’ election, Lord Peter Mandelson… And for Tories, Lord Michael Ashcroft, progenitor, funder and organiser-in-chief of the party’s hugely expensive campaign in marginal seats of which probably half are no longer marginal…
In this ‘unspun election’ it seems, you cannot buy or spin your way to power…
And for the Lib Dems, well not having a dark Machiavellian counsellor of his own to call upon, Nick Clegg is reduced to double jobbing as Dorothy all by himself… It remains to be seen whether two clicks of the heels of his ruby spangled slippers will take us all back to Kansas…
Somehow, with the Greek crisis smouldering over the horizon, I doubt it…
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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