So, it's always slightly hard for me to tell, with big news stories here, how much play they get in America. But if you're following along at home, or if you're not, yesterday our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, out on the campaign trail, had a very pleasant, smiling chat with a local woman, then jumped in his limo with his wireless mic still attached, and proceeded to completely slag her off. It was all captured, and beamed around the island of Britain instantly. Here it is:
To my mind, this is absolutely perfect. It precisely underscores, at a time very helpful to voters, Brown's three most prominent qualities: mean-spiritedness, duplicity, and incompetence. It's really almost as if Bill Clinton had come back with no sense of humour, missing those several good-hearted bones in his body, and as a statist idealogue rather than a centrist pragmatist. It's that bad.
One ardently hopes this seals his richly deserved political fate ten days from now.
Gordon Brown prostrated himself as a 'penitent sinner' yesterday after a brush with a voter triggered a calamitous chain of events that threatened to derail Labour on the eve of tonight's pivotal TV debate…
He emerged from her house smiling fixedly, saying that he had misunderstood her earlier words. But a more telling image showed him in a Manchester radio studio earlier, head in hands, the full horror of the episode dawning as he listened to a tape of his remarks.
