David Brooks to US Conservatives: Mimic David Cameron

On Friday’s “NewsHour” on PBS, New York Times columnist David Brooks reacted to last week’s victory for Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron.

According Brooks, if conservative Republicans softened their approach and were more closely aligned with Cameron’s politics, they would be more competitive in liberal-leaning parts of the country.

Partial transcript as follows:

I do think British and American politics rhyme. They go in cycles. They go in Thatcher-Reagan cycles, Blair-Clinton cycles. Now they’re diverging a little. The British Conservative Party looks the way the Republican Party would look if it was a coastal party, if it was the sort of party that could do well in the Northeast, and in California and Oregon.

And I would say, if American conservatives want to know how to compete in blue America, look at what David Cameron is doing. It’s pretty much free market, but it’s not for slashing government. It’s socially pretty moderate, at best. It has got a strong environmental wing.

And so I would say for Republicans, if you ever want to compete along America’s coastline in the Upper Midwest or in urban and affluent America, what David Cameron is doing, which is more communitarian, it’s a very good model and it’s worked for him.

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