A to TAS commenter wrote yesterday, “Everybody KNOWS
who Jeremiah Wright is.” I’d like to tell a couple of little
stories about what people know. The first is set in Western
Australia, in a fairly affluent suburb whose inhabitants’ general
standard of education would, I guess, be at least equivalent to an
average fairly affluent American suburb. Their houses were the
houses of successful people. The state’s leading university was
nearby.
I was out campaigning with Sir Charles Court for a coming state
election. Sir Charles was premier of Western Australia (a position
roughly equivalent to a U.S. governor — an Australian state
governor is the Queen’s representative, a largely ceremonial figure
unless he or she needs to sack a government and call an election.
The premier is the elected chief executive.)
Before becoming premier, Sir Charles Court had been minister for
industrial development, largely responsible for bringing in the
huge iron-ore exporting projects in Western Australia’s North-West.
Actually, a West Australian state premier is probably better known
in that state than a US state governor is in his, because of WA’s
isolation.
In the case of Sir Charles, he was undoubtedly the best-known
face in West Australian politics. Probably no political figure in
the country had done so much to create employment and prosperity.
He had transformed the state’s economy and created whole new
industries — big ones.
We knocked on a number of doors. “Good afternoon, I am Charles
Court.” “Yeah?” It was obvious that at least a considerable number
of the people — who I emphasize were not hillbilly types, but had
shiny cars, well-tended lawns, and nature strips, and every
appearance of competence, literacy and prosperity — had never
heard of him, or at least did not recognize him. When I expressed
amazement at this to Sir Charles, he told me it happened every time
he went door-knocking. He sometimes deliberately took young
politicians with him to teach them humility.
Story No. 2: I am at present writing the biography of another
Australian politician, C. R “Bert” Kelly, another figure who
transformed Australian politics and transformed Australia’s economy
for the better. He was elected in the late 1950s and sat in
Parliament for about 20 years, fighting what was at first a
virtually single-handed battle for lower tariff-barriers. During
and after his parliamentary career he wrote well over a thousand
articles for major papers and several books, and made countless
speeches in and outside Parliament.
Tariffs were, at the time he entered federal Parliament, an
article of faith in the community and strongly supported by the
long-term deputy prime minister, John McEwen, who became Kelly’s
bitter enemy, as well as by the unions, the various Chambers of
Manufacturers, big businesses, and other vested interests..
Gradually, gradually, Kelly gathered followers to this
outré cause, explained countless times in every way he
could think of that tariffs were not panaceas against unemployment
but were doing enormous harm, and behind protectionist walls
Australia had grown a clutch of uneconomic and inefficient
industries with domestic markets too small ever to be economical at
the cost of rational development. He had other causes in the
general area of economic rectitude, but tariffs were the most
central.
He lost his seat in 1977 and died in 1997. He was able to see a
revolution in Australia’s economic culture and a radical lowering
of tariff barriers, but it had taken him a generation to turn the
political culture around like a great clumsy three-decker ship of
the line, even though he had overwhelming and unanswerable
arguments on his side, and, latterly, some able allies.
He was a sparkling writer and quite apart from the economic
lessons they contained, his brilliant articles, mainly on a dull
subject, would be worth studying by any journalist, writer, or
politician for their style alone. I recently traveled through a
large part of Australia collecting material on him — and found
that an amazing number of people even in the general economic and
intellectual classes had never heard of him.
One professor of history asked me how I was going to deal with
the three policemen he murdered. This was an aspect of his career
that was quite new to me and opened up whole new vistas for
investigation. No one else had told me about this. Gradually it
dawned on me that he thought I was writing about Ned Kelly, a
19th-century Victorian outlaw. But perhaps he was deaf.
The moral of these stories, as far as they can be transferred to
America, is this: outside the political, academic and intellectual
classes (and even inside them) an astonishing number do not know of
political figures who those who inhabit the world of politics think
famous and take for granted. The Mitt Romney campaign should not
take it for granted that voters know who Jeremiah Wright is or what
he has said. The stakes are important enough for me to break my
rule of not commenting directly on U.S. politics.
An exposure of him is as important as economic arguments may be.
Similarly, the Republican campaign should turn some of its guns on
issues like the gutting of defense and the U.S. abdication of Space
policy. My belief is that a large number of voters do not take in
subjects that do not concern them directly unless they are
explained repeatedly. This is even more the case when the U.S.,
unlike Australia, does not have compulsory voting. Ronald Reagan
understood that part (by no means all) of a campaign is a simple,
truthful, repeated message. Obama has made the presidential
campaign a culture war, and Republicans cannot afford not to hammer
every front, repeatedly.
