The Tories may have appropriated Barack Obama's "vote for change" slogan but they remain the party of the status quo on a host of issues.
The coming general election has long been touted as the "change" election. Each of the three main parties has changed leader since 2005. Hundreds of MPs from all three parties are standing down this year - many as a direct consequence of the parliamentary expenses scandal. Faced with a Labour government exhausted by 13 years in office, the Conservative Party has seized on the idea of change as a cudgel with which to beat its opponents. "Vote for change" is the rather unoriginal campaign slogan unveiled by the Tories on 27 February - presumably on the advice of David Cameron's "guru" Steve Hilton, who was influenced by Barack Obama's election campaign while living in California.
In the week that Mr Obama was elected in November 2008, the Tory leader rose in the House of Commons to congratulate the US president-to-be and claimed that the change he promised contrasted with the offer of "more of the same" from Labour. So, for the next eight weeks, Mr Cameron's Conservatives, like Mr Obama's Democrats, will stand for "change". And indeed "Vote for change" could be a powerful message, but if the opposition cannot articulate what that change entails, it will continue to decline in the polls.
The deliberate co-opting of Mr Obama could be dangerous for Mr Cameron. As the first ever black presidential candidate, and one who had lived the so-called American dream, Mr Obama embodied the very "change" that so many Americans craved and demanded after eight years of the wretched George Bush and Dick Cheney. As one commentator who has known the Tory leader since his Bullingdon Club days at Oxford has pointed out: "Cameron, by contrast, is a born-and-bred Tory, an Old Etonian, a product of the stockbroker belt. Electing him prime minister seems less like a break with Britain's past than a restoration of the ancien r�gime."
Mr Cameron would do well to remember that Mr Obama caught the public mood with progressive positions on key issues. In the primaries, his opposition to the Iraq war galvanised the Democratic grass roots. In the presidential election itself, his criticisms of the free-market fundamentalism of the Bush-Cheney years helped him pull ahead of John McCain in the wake of the banking collapse of September 2008.
Moreover, it was Gordon Brown who worked with Mr Obama in early 2009 to co-ordinate a global fiscal stimulus programme to prevent recession from becoming depression. Mr Cameron opposed these progressive economic policies. As even David Marquand, a Cameron sympathiser, wrote in the New Statesman last week, if Mr Obama has "an ideological soulmate in Britain, it is Gordon Brown".
Is Mr Cameron offering a genuinely radical and progressive set of policies, as Mr Obama did in 2008? Not quite. The Tories remain the party of the status quo on a range of issues. Take electoral reform. Last month, Conservative MPs voted once more against a referendum on the Alternative Vote, despite even Tory voters supporting a referendum by a margin of 45 per cent to 32 per cent. "Vote for change"? Perhaps "Vote for no change" might be a better Tory slogan.
Meanwhile, the Electoral Commission reports that more than 3.5 million eligible people may not be registered to vote, a figure that includes more than half of 17- to 25-year-olds. This is an indictment of our leaders, who have failed to inspire the electorate. Mr Obama, on the other hand, energised a generation of young Americans who had never voted before to campaign on his behalf. Mr Cameron has had no such effect. One is reminded of Lloyd Bentsen's putdown of his Republican opponent Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate: "I knew Jack Kennedy - Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." We all know Barack Obama. We've listened to, and been inspired by him. Mr Cameron, you're no Barack Obama.
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