Britain's latest saga: Obama and Clinton

LONDON
BRITONS ARE mesmerized by what one journalist called a "nomination race that is now closely approaching one of those Victorian bare-knuckle fights that went on for scores of rounds." Their own prime minister, Gordon Brown, may be under daily attack for allegedly being a muddle-headed failure, but the knock-down, drag-out fight going on across the Atlantic has more dramatic potential. "Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our" - for "English" substitute Democractic "dead," to borrow from the bard.

Visiting Americans are pumped for any inside dope they may have, but few can give satisfaction, because the British press is giving American politics its all.

"Obama has taken off the gloves," said The Telegraph, carrying on with the boxing metaphor. "And in so doing has left critics wondering whether he is not just another politician grubbing for votes."

Being British, they reach into their own martial past to come up with inspired imagery. "Obama must combine some of the early Cavalier flair with a bit more Round-head pragmatism," intoned The Telegraph, referring to the English Civil War of 1642-1648, culminating in the beheading of Charles I. "Come June it may be (Obama's) head the superdelegates chop off."

But if Obama is no longer the shining knight of yore, Hillary Clinton is emerging as Lady Macbeth, the "monster" that former Obama aide Samantha Power said she was to a reporter from the Scotsman. Power may have said "off the record," but not in time for the take-no-prisoners British press.

Jenny McCartney of The Telegraph uses the war between the sexes metaphor to describe the "mortal combat" now headed for Indiana and North Carolina. Clinton and Obama, "locked together in mortal combat, are now like a recklessly warring couple revealing the elemental core of their characters," she wrote. Clinton's is the "ruthless feminine psychological" manipulator. "Just when you think she's finished, the apple-cheeked destroyer comes roaring back up like Glenn Close emerging from the bathwater in 'Fatal Attraction.' " Clinton is described as playing the "plucky underdog, but one that still pounces like a heavyweight Rottweiler on any slip of her opponent's."

The Bosnian sniper fire incident is cause for much merriment here. The Scotsman recalled that Clinton once told Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mt. Everest, that she was named after him. "It was later pointed out," the paper said, "that Sir Edmund topped Everest and gained global fame six years after Hillary Clinton was born. Oops."

In the Independent, Rupert Cornwell evoked the deities to describe the destruction the Democratic Party seems to be inflicting upon itself. Clinton's win in Pennsylvania "could have been calibrated by a Republican god to maximize her party's discomfort: large enough to keep her in the race," but not enough to clinch the nomination.

Gerard Baker of The Times savaged Obama by writing that "the mask has slipped." Under pressure Obama has "revealed himself to be a member of that special subset of the party's liberal elite - a well-educated man with a serious superiority complex."

As for Clinton, she "has been shedding the final vestiges of shame and honesty in her desperate attempt to save her candidacy," according to Baker. "She has abandoned any pretence of a message . . ." preferring, instead, just to tear away at Obama.

Simon Jenkins, in the Sunday Times, however, wrote that all was fair in politics and war, and that "the cup of nomination" might yet be "torn from Barack Obama's lips."

"Foreigners may look on this saga with horror," Jenkins wrote. "A bruised and uncertain America . . . tearing itself apart." But "compared with the synthesized, centralized elections of Europe's political clubs, it is politics raw and intimate and real."

The Clintons, according to Jenkins, were giving "the old Democratic party an echo of the tough old days, of men who play mean and hard. There is a touch of Margaret Thatcher to Clinton at present."

Clinton might be pleased if she knew she was being compared to the greatest female politician England has seen since Elizabeth I. But then again, Thatcher's opponents used to dub her "Attila the hen."

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.