This op-ed appeared in the Boston Globe on June 11, 2001

There is a warning for George W. Bush in the outcome of the British general election on Thursday. The sweeping victory of Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Labor Party, a 167-seat majority in Parliament, a second consecutive landslide, signified a profound repudiation of the policies Bush is proposing in the United States.

The British voted decisively for public sector investment over the tax cuts of the Conservatives, who picked up only one seat. The political cultures of the two countries are obviously different, but last year the Bush campaign consciously adapted to a public mood similar to the prevailing mood in Britain.

Bush ran as a ''compassionate conservative,'' deemphasizing his massive tax cut in the fall campaign while attempting to shadow Al Gore on issues like health care, education, and even, occasionally, the environment. Bush portrayed himself as a domesticated Conservative who, as he relentlesly said, would restore honor to the White House. But as the bipartisan mood music of his first weeks in office faded, Bush moved to the right, battling for the tax cut as his overriding priority despite the reality that Americans, like the British, prefer investments in education and health care over tax-cutting by a ratio of almost 2 to 1.

Unlike candidate Bush and more like President Bush, Conservative Party leader William Hague never accommodated that reality. Hague campaigned as Bush has governed. In the first week, Hague's Manifesto called for 8 billion pounds of tax cuts, a number that soared to 20 billion. The Tory manifesto pledged not one new teacher for the state schools, not one more doctor or nurse for the National Health Service.

Unlike the Bush campaign, the Conservatives disdained even a token alternative to Labor's commitment of 10,000 new teachers, 10,000 new doctors, and 20,000 new nurses.

Labor instead focused on its economic policies, refusing to give tax guarantees and arguing that Conservative policies that did not add up would take Britain back to the Tory boom and bust of the early 1990s, when interest rates reached 15 percent.

The press verdict was nearly unanimous: Hague had won the first week hands down. There was one little nagging detail to be explained away: Labor's lead had gone up. The commentary was trapped in a paradigm shaped by the British general election victories of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. There was an almost automatic assumption that people want tax cuts and largely discount arguments about economic stability.

The campaign that followed increasingly centered on the explicit choice between tax cuts and public services. As the Tories said ''tax cuts,'' focus groups showed that what voters were hearing was ''cuts in health and education.''

As Labor hammered away at the trade-off and its lead held steady, Hague jumped from one bandwagon to another - from denouncing illegal immigants to running his own version of the 1988 Bush campaign's Willie Horton ad.

Labor's final push sharply drew the dividing line between tax cuts and spending. Tony Blair cast the last week of the campaign as a crusade to put schools and hospitals first. He raised the stakes by asking the British people to send a message that the era of Thatcherism is over - that no party should ever again attempt to lead this country by proposing to cut Britain's schools, hospitals, and public services. This call was reinforced by the most arresting ad of the campaign: a poster that showed Hague wearing Thatcher's hair and earrings.

The result was a landslide so trumpeted in advance that voter turnout was down, especially in safe Labor seats, but the verdict was clear.

We sometimes forget, as Bush obviously has, that the same force was felt in the 2000 presidential campaign. In all the exit polling, Al Gore won on the economy, health, and education, and voters preferred investment to the Bush tax cut. Despite Bush's efforts to domesticate his conservatism, the center left - the Gore and Nader votes together - reached 52 percent on election day.

Since then, Bush has thinned the veneer of his legitimacy by governing as Hague campaigned. Pushing his tax cut and his right wing policies on energy and the environment, the president lost control of the Senate.

Ironically, he will soon be facing the very issues he pretended to favor in the campaign - from the patients' bill of rights to a demand to match his rhetoric on education with new federal resources.

Hague found out that the era of Thatcherism is over in Britain. Bush is now finding out that the era of Reaganism is over in the United States. Less than five months in the White House, he has to reinvent his presidency or plod on as a minority president representing a minority viewpoint, increasingly out of touch not only with the mood of the country but with the strategy of his own campaign.

Robert Shrum has served as a senior strategist for the 2000 Gore Campaign, the 2001 Blair Campaign in Britain, and for Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry

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