What Gordon Brown Can Learn From Massachusetts and Chile

If British Prime Minister Gordon Brown didn't watch CNN International last week, let's hope that one of his staffers did. Two landmark elections in Chile and Massachusetts delivered stunning victories for right-wing political parties. And in my humble opinion, both elections have portentous implications for the upcoming elections in the U.K.

Let's start with the election most Americans probably didn't pay much attention to: the Chilean presidential elections. For those of you who haven't tuned into Chilean politics since -- oh, I don't know . . . the 1998 arrest of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in London? -- last week's elections were a milestone. Center-right candidate Sebastian Piñera defeated the center-left candidate, former President Eduardo Frei, by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent.

It was the first time since the end of Pinochet's dictatorship in 1989 that a party on the right has won the presidency. It's worth noting that Piñera is not a far-right ideologue. He's a moderate, longtime businessman/politician who famously voted no in the 1988 plebiscite over whether or not Pinochet ought to remain in power for another eight years. What makes his victory particularly impressive is that Chile's outgoing president -- the socialist Michelle Bachelet -- is hugely popular, leaving office with an 81 percent approval rating. And yet, after 20 years of left and center-left rule, the Chilean people were apparently ready for a change.

Jump to the second election, one with which most Americans will be quite familiar. Last Tuesday -- to the shock and chagrin of many Democrats -- the well-spoken, pickup driving, once-upon-a-centerfold Republican Scott Brown came out of nowhere to defeat the odds-on favorite, Democrat Martha Coakley, in a Massachusetts special election to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat.

According to the ongoing postmortem on the vote, Coakley lost for a variety of reasons. She was a bad candidate; the Democratic leadership was distracted by the health care debate; and -- as Joanne Weiner reminds us -- "it was the economy, stupid."

But another reason Coakley lost was the complacency (arrogance?) that she -- and the Democratic Party -- displayed in believing that the seat was "hers to lose." Democrats have dominated Massachusetts politics for so long (a Republican senator hasn't been elected there since 1972) that they forgot that Massachusetts is now a competitive state with a majority of registered independent voters. After coasting through much of this campaign, Coakley found out the hard way that this really was her seat to lose.

So what does all this mean for Gordon Brown and his Labour Party, which must hold elections by early June? I can think of several lessons, and none of them is particularly encouraging for Labour.

First, as in both Chile and Massachusetts, Labour has been in power a very long time (13 years and counting). There's a growing sense that it's time for a change. The latest opinion polls show the opposition Conservative Party ahead by a comfortable margin of 8-10 percentage points. Even people who can't stomach a Conservative victory are thinking of jumping ship. Several of my friends have privately told me that even though they've always voted Labour in the past, they'll be voting for the Liberal Democrats (Britain's smaller, third party) this time around. Heck, I've only lived here for 3½ years and I'm sick of Labour!

Second, and, as in Massachusetts, this is an economic situation that favors a challenger: As of the last quarter of 2009, the U.K. was the only major G-20 country still mired in a recession. And while things may be finally turning around, the overall picture remains grim. More to the point, Gordon Brown -- who presided over the economy for 10 years before becoming prime minister -- is rightly or wrongly given a fair share of the blame.

Third, like Massachusetts, you also have an incumbent party candidate who, while undoubtedly a devoted public servant, is also lousy at retail politics. Unlike Massachusetts, it's not that the Labour party is taking this election for granted (if anything, it is portraying itself as the underdog). But Brown is perhaps the one candidate who can really give Martha Coakley a run for the money in the Department of Tone Deafness. The most recent debacle concerned a private letter that the prime minister mailed to a woman whose son died fighting in Afghanistan, in which he misspelled the woman's name. And that comes on the heels of a series of missteps last summer, including a rumor that Brown was addicted to painkillers.

Finally, and also as in Massachusetts, Gordon Brown is facing a formidable opponent in Conservative Party leader David Cameron. Like Scott Brown, Cameron is young, handsome, well-spoken and fiscally conservative. But he's also socially moderate on things like gay rights and the environment.

Add this all up and things don't look so great for Labour this spring. So here's one piece of advice, Gordon. I think we can all agree that a centerfold is out of the question. But you might want to think about investing in that pickup truck . . .