The dominant feature in Douglas Alexander’s parliamentary office is a bookcase packed with forbidding academic tomes. The only political memorabilia is American: small souvenir placards from a rally in Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. One reads “Fired Up”; the other says simply “Thank You”. The mix – slices of US-style electioneering evangelism, propped up with cerebral volumes of history, theory and strategy – says more than probably intended about the shadow foreign secretary and, as of last October, Labour’s general election co-ordinator.
Alexander shares a compulsive interest in Democratic Party politics with Ed Miliband. Both have spent time in the US and studied every slogan and speech that carried Obama and Bill Clinton to victory. Miliband is advised by Stan Greenberg, a former Clinton pollster. Greenberg is also the co-author, with his fellow Clinton strategist James Carville, of It’s the Middle Class, Stupid, an account of the living-standards crisis among average American households and a call to arms to the left to address their insecurity. It isn’t hard to make the connection with Miliband’s pitch to represent the “squeezed middle”, which feels that the “promise of Britain” to reward each successive generation with rising prosperity is broken.
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