Tony Blair to Resign

Tony Blair to Resign

The British Prime Minister had announced last year that he would not seek another term so today's announcement was not surprising but it's still too bad. Greatness is Tony Blair's legacy. He has served an unprecedented three terms as P.M., fulfilling predictions that he was Britain's equivalent of President Clinton, whose advisers helped Blair, in being a "New" kind of left-of-center leader not beholden to the rusty thinking and policies that had made both the Democrats and Labourites near unelectable in national elections. Both Clinton and Blair turned their electorates around, making their party the favorite in "normal" times. In 1996 it was the Republicans who had the tired, unappealing candidate, and who got trounced. Likewise Britain's Tories never have had anyone who could compete with Blair.

The Clinton transformation began accidentally though, through the political deus ex machina of Ross Perot. There was no asterisk attached to Blair's first election. Clinton (to his disappointment) never got 50% of the vote. Lyndon Johnson remains the last Democrat to get it. Tony Blair decimated and demoralized the Tories. Shockingly, the party that looked invincible under Margaret Thatcher had to thrash about to try to find someone willing to run for P.M. in the Blair years.

The Clinton transformation lasted only eight years. Tony Blair outlasted his American counterpart and forged a new partnership with George Bush. Of course that partnership has caused Blair nothing but problems at home. When the attack on Baghdad began news correspondent Arthur Kent famously predicted that Blair "might be the first casualty of the Iraq war." He wasn't. He trounced the Conservative candidate in the post-war election. Blair has been in more danger from within his own party.

A year ago in these pages we wrote enthusiastically of the strength of the Bush-Blair-Ariel Sharon leadership front in the clash with Islam. A year later Prime Minister Sharon lies all but dead and his successor already has botched a military crisis. President Bush is increasingly a lame duck, and Tony Blair now has announced that he is too. These are dangerous times. Needed from whomever the new leaders will be is a clear strategic vision of the clash with Islam, a vision begun to be articulated by Blair in his August 1 speech in Los Angeles and by Bush in his "Islamic Fascism" comments on August 10 --and immediate military action to defeat the Islamic enemy. This is Public Occurrences.