Can you teach an Old Lab new tricks? One of the interesting notes as the Labour party prepares for live in opposition was David Miliband's opting to be on the back benches rather than be part of the shadow cabinet; that's the loose equivalent of ranking members in the house, for shadow ministers get to comment on what happens on their beat. His brother Ed was named party leader, but the two siblings are on different wings of the party; David was part of the more Tony Blair-style centrist wing of the party (New Labour or NuLab for short) while Mr. Ed is on the left side of the party.
David just missed getting the party leadership, so being outside the shadow cabinet both keeps away from any intra-cabinet intrigue and distances himself from any crash-and-burn that Labour might have as Mr. Ed moves the party left. The BBC folks seem to think that David's drop-out shows how NuLab is all but cremated.
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Green Tea Party? Environmentalists aren't happy with Obama and are looking for a serious challenger to him in 2012; Nader and Dennis the Menace don't quite fit the bill. That might not be bad for Obama, since that will give him a foil to work against, making him look less liberal by comparison.
However, once movements like that get rolling, you don't always get to step out of the way. If the civil liberties block on the left (who wanted more Patriot Act stuff ditched) and the environmentalists pool their resources, then you could see a viable challenger from the left; the trick is finding someone with the gravitas to pull it off but who also has the guts to go up against a sitting president.
Realistically, Obama couldn't have done much more on the environment; he didn't have the votes to cram a CO2 bill through Congress and likely opted to spend his political capital on health care instead.
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Interesting results out of New Brunswick, where a Liberal premier was ousted after botching a proposed sale of the provincial power company; normally, it would be someone of the right who would try something like that. Instead, the Conservatives took advantage of that and took a 42-13 advantage in the legislature.
That Conservative win probably has little to do with national politics, for the more moderate Tories in the Maritimes (if you superimposed Maine and its RINO sisters onto the Maritimes, you'd be in the ballpark) often have little love for the national party's more right-wing attitudes; Newfoundland's Tory premier is a loud critic of PM Harper, especially when regional pork starts to get trimmed.
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