David Cameron

Conservatives came in first in Thursday’s election in Great Britain, but it’s their failure to win a majority that Republicans should examine for the lessons it teaches.  If the GOP listens, they’ll improve their chance of winning control of Congress in the congressional midterm election on November 2.

I've been looking at the polls and playing around with the ways in which different national percentages can translate into seats in the House of Commons--and for what it's worth (not much!), I think the Tories have a very good chance to win a clear majority (perhaps 25 seats) in the Commons today in the UK.

On Wednesday morning, it looked as though Gordon Brown might have stalled Cleggmania, inching back into second place in some polls. But then he met Gillian Duffy. 

Duffy, a senior citizen and lifelong Labour supporter, bumped into Brown as the prime minister was leaving a meet-and-greet in the town of Rochdale. Duffy told him she was almost ashamed to say she was a Labour voter, and while she would vote for Brown, she had concerns about the national debt, taxes, and immigration. The exchange ended amicably, with Duffy wishing Brown good luck as he climbed into his car. But the prime minister forgot he was wired for sound and lashed out at his aides for allowing Duffy to speak with him. Brown branded the exchange a disaster and called Duffy a "bigoted woman" as his car was leaving the scene.

The closer Britain gets to election day, the more uncertain things become. One uncertainty, however, seems to have been cleared up - Gordon Brown and the Labour Party are out of contention. 

The first debate resulted in Nick Clegg and the third place Liberal Democrats surging into close competition with David Cameron's Conservatives for first place. And while Cameron got a bit of a boost in the second debate, Clegg was able to maintain his rising status. As for Brown, he's now seeing some of Labour's lowest poll ratings ever, and he seems to be losing any chance of winning the most seats despite finishing third in the popular vote.

On Friday, David Brooks wrote a column likening the Tea Partiers to the 1960s-era New Left. "Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence," he wrote. "Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures."

Then, over the weekend, Jonah Goldberg wrote a compelling rebuttal: 

One of the reasons all of this is relevant is that the basic arguments and outlook of the Tea Parties are simply and profoundly different from the outlook of the New Left. The Tea Partiers are not in any meaningful sense Rousseauians. They certainly don't reject original sin in any serious way. And I suspect if you asked many of them they would say that the American people deserve their share of blame for the financial mess we're in. They do believe, I would bet, that America is a basically decent nation that has drifted into a kind of soft-despotism or Nanny-statism. But that vision isn't Rousseauian, it's De Tocquevillian.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

In all likelihood, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will be gone by June, probably after having led his Labour Party to a singularly humiliating defeat at the hands of David Cameron and the Conservative Party. However, recent events indicate that his exit may be even messier than originally thought.