All Intensive Purposes

There is no American Blair at the moment, no Democrat prepared to attack the Republicans from the right, or to blast the Republican Congress for wasteful spending or insufficiently vigorous foreign policy, or even just to change the style of the political debate so rapidly that nobody in either party understands what's happened until it's too late. But there could be. Everyone's forgotten this now, but Blair himself was a fluke, becoming Labor leader after his immediate predecessor, John Smith, had a heart attack. And should a similar deus ex machina take place in the United States -- then, perhaps, we'll learn how head-swirlingly fast an apparently invincible political party can unravel here too.

// posted by t.s. @ 7:06 AM