The Governor: "With his wing-collars up and his undergrad gown on, he looks like a cross between Dracula and Batman". Paul Gourlie wasn’t interested in the votes of the student “activists” who wore badges and carried placards. The votes he was after were those of the students who didn’t protest. The “scarfies” who saw life at university as an opportunity to have fun. The ones who found student politics “boring”.
PAUL GOURLIE broke all the rules of student politics. In
pre-student loans New Zealand, when the universities were still capable of
disgorging thousands of student protesters on to the streets, Paul re-defined what
it meant to be a student politician.
Not for him the varsity student uniform of jeans and
T-shirts. To the consternation of the Otago student body, “The Governor” (as
Paul styled himself) sailed across their campus in a starched wing-collar and a
flapping under-graduate gown.
His critics may have described him as “a cross between
Dracula and Batman” – but Paul didn’t care. He wasn’t interested in the votes
of the student “activists” who wore badges and carried placards. The votes he
was after were those of the students who didn’t protest. The “scarfies” who saw
life at university as an opportunity to have fun. The ones who found student
politics “boring”.
Paul’s crucial political insight was that student activism
was a minority sport, and that the left-wing rhetoric spouted by those
activists left most students cold. What he offered the “great silent majority”
of Otago students (who were neither active nor left-wing) was a wildly
charismatic, fun-loving alternative to the stereotypical student politician.
Paul’s flamboyant speeches were fast, furious, funny and almost completely
devoid of content. Ordinary students cheered him to the echo.
The left-wingers on campus were completely flummoxed. No one
had the slightest idea how to fight – let alone beat – a candidate who appeared
to have escaped from the pages of Tom
Brown’s Schooldays (or, for the benefit of younger readers, Hogwarts). The
Left’s obvious discomfiture only increased Paul’s popularity: his merciless
mocking of their candidates drawing wild applause. For a while, Paul Gourlie
was invincible: one of only a handful of student presidents to serve two
consecutive terms.
Though they unfolded nearly forty years ago, there is
something disturbingly contemporary about “The Gourlie Years”. The US
presidential election campaign of 2016 is stirring up old memories. Paul
Gourlie, the student anti-politician, and Donald Trump, the populist
anti-President, have more than a little in common.
Not the least of these commonalities is the challenge presented
to the Left by right-wing candidates of such uninhibited flamboyance. And, if
comparing Trump to Otago University’s student president of 1979-1980 seems just
a little too weird, then think instead of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. He, too,
built a political career on the insight that, eventually, a great many voters
become tired – even resentful – of social-democracy’s high-minded expectations.
Sometimes all the punters want is a little “bunga-bunga” – and lower taxes.
As the Democratic National Convention gets underway in
Philadelphia, the world is about to discover how Hillary Clinton and her
campaign team propose to counter Trump’s flamboyant contempt for the rules of
conventional politics.
The first indication of how she intends to meet Trump’s
challenge may be seen in her choice of Senator Tim Kaine as her
Vice-Presidential running-mate. Kaine is a solid Democrat of quietly expressed
liberal views, with a reputation for executive competence. In choosing the
Senator from – and former Governor of – the state of Virginia, Clinton has
opted for personal and political safety. Certainly, there is nothing remotely
flamboyant about Tim Kaine.
Those on the left of the Democratic Party had been hoping
that Clinton would nominate the Massachusetts Senator, Elizabeth Warren, as her
running mate. Their argument was that, in a year when the “Establishment” and
conventional politics were being rejected by an angry and disaffected
electorate, the novelty and out-there-ness of two women on the ticket (one of
whom, Warren, is an outspoken left-winger) would undercut the widespread
characterisation of the Clinton Campaign as both uninspired and uninspiring.
The “Clinton-Kaine” ticket suggests that the Democratic
Convention will be long on worthiness and short on spark. If this is the way it
plays out, then the Clinton Campaign will find itself in serious bother.
Conventional pundits may have slammed the chaos and confusion of the Republican
Convention, but in doing so they entirely missed the point. Trump wasn’t
interested in staging a well-run convention. What he wanted, and what he
produced, was a riveting political mini-series; replete with heroes and
heroines, hucksters and villains. For a whole week it was all anyone was
talking about.
What distinguishes Trump’s campaigning from Gourlie’s and
Berlusconi’s is the darkness and brutality of his rhetorical palette. The
latter exploited voters grown weary of the Left’s moral exhortations. They ran
on the alluring promise of exuberant amorality and laissez-faire administration.
Trump’s voters, by contrast, are driven by a toxic mixture of moral indignation
and the violent desire to discipline and punish an America they no longer
recognise as their own.
Trump’s campaign blends flamboyance, demagoguery and
recklessness in equal measure. My gut feeling is that the cautious Hillary
Clinton will fare as badly against “The Donald” as I did against “The
Governor”.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
26 July 2016.
