Three years ago, newly elected British Prime Minister David Cameron was seen as a possible model for Republicans looking to update their party after losing the 2008 presidential election. Today, he provides an object lesson in the stumbling blocks that can lie in wait.
Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, is a student of the public relations aspect of politics. He ran in 2010 as a modernizer, promising generational change and a more open and tolerant party. He presented himself as a moderate counterpoint to a succession of more conservative leaders who led their party to a series of defeats at the hands of Tony Blair and the Labour Party.
Cameron promised to attack Britain's budget deficit, which had swelled in the final years of Labour's rule under Gordon Brown. But he also implicitly offered a break with the roughest edges of the Thatcher era and of some of his other predecessors as party leader. His central idea was something he called the Big Society, a policy framework intended to give the party a more communitarian image and to contrast with the presumed alternative, Big Government.
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