KEY POINTS:
Politics is rough, we're always told, and would-be politicians who enter the arena do so at their own peril. This conditions us to believe that we can never be too cynical about politicians, or expect too little of them. We expect the spilling of blood, the clinical dismantling of reputations, and the ritual humiliation of opponents to go with the territory.
And yet, few of us like it. In spite of it all, we still yearn to be inspired. We want stirring words and ideas that lift us above the political sandpit that our parliamentarians seem to inhabit.
And somehow "diddums", the PM's retort to John Key in an unedifying week, and the anti-Key adaptation of a Kenny Rogers song sung by four Labour women MPs at the party congress (which really should have been saved for the after-conference drinkies), just didn't do it. Key emerged unscathed; the damage was all Labour's.
It's no wonder we're looking elsewhere for inspiration. I'm with the wit on bFM radio who suggested the other day that we should all be allowed to vote in the American presidential elections and not just because of the impact the US has on our lives, but because, let's face it, we're far more interested in the American presidential race than our own looming elections.
At dinner last week, friends and I spent more time talking about Barack Obama, whose speeches we'd devoured, than we did about John Key and Helen Clark. Why is that? And how come we know more about Obama and what he thinks than we do about John Key?
Perhaps one reason is that Obama understands the power of words, and the need to lift and inspire voters. You get the feeling with the Illinois senator that he feels called to the presidency. Martin Luther King once talked about "the fierce urgency of now"; Obama tells his supporters "our moment is now", that "we are the ones we've been waiting for".
And it is easy to be cynical. Hillary Clinton accuses him of being all words, but, as Larissa MacFarquhar wrote in the New Yorker in May 2007, "Despite the criticism he has received for being all inspiration and no policy, Obama has so far stuck to what appears to be an instinct that white pages belong on web sites, not in speeches. It is surprising, given the recent electoral record of Democratic policy wonks, that he is not given more credit for the astuteness of this approach, but it's true that it is not just strategy - it's who he is."
Which is not something that can be said about Key.
Obama has written two books spelling out his philosophy. No one really knows what Key stands for; not even Key, it seems. Though to be fair to Key, that's not unusual for an untried leader.
As Mike Robinson wrote in the Spectator, he'd had a similarly difficult time nailing down Tory leader David Cameron for a BBC documentary. And 14 years before Cameron: "I struggled to pin down what another young Opposition leader really thought. People said he didn't believe very much at all. Pinning down Tony Blair proved so tricky that Panorama scrapped its planned profile."
Like Cameron perhaps, Key is a man learning on the job. He's a work in progress, a blank canvas, as Labour likes to portray him. He is neither charismatic nor inspirational, and doesn't seem to have been particularly passionate about much of anything. I imagine him at school, too busy focusing on the goals he'd set himself to stop long enough to notice the 1981 Springbok Tour that tore the country apart; or even what he wanted to do with the country once he'd finally added the job of Prime Minister to his CV.
Matthew Parris wrote recently in the Spectator that, unlike the "shallow reasoning and moral monochrome" of the British political class, both Obama and Republican John McCain's speeches had convinced him that "alongside the cynicism and shallow populism that democratic politics always brings, there can still subsist depth and integrity, and discernment and style."
Obama in particular seems to mean what he preaches when he talks about a new direction for American politics. Nothing illustrated that more cogently than the very long, nuanced race speech he gave about his former pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, whose "incendiary" race comments embarrassed Obama's campaign.
Acknowledging the complexities of race and human beings, Obama condemned Wright's comments, but not the man or his church.
"As imperfect as [Rev Wright] may be, he has been like family to me. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother ... a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
"These people are a part of me."
