BRITISH POLITICS
Viewed from abroad, Tony Blair looks larger than life just about now. The Economist describes Blair's spectacular triumph in his struggle for top-up fees, and then in the Hutton report. An American feels like congratulating the British on conducting their politics in the style of their most famous playwright. (Shakespeare, that is.)

Liberating Iraq was relatively easy for Bush, who always had strong public support in doing what was right. For Blair it was a heroic, all-or-nothing gamble, putting an extremely promising career on the line for the sake of another nation's freedom. The imperial media is a chronic danger to democracies, capable of bending the truth to destroy those who oppose it. Ronald Reagan called them the "lynch mob;" and Blair, too, has experienced their wrath. The British Broadcasting Company did not stop short of implicating him, falsely as it turned out, in the suicide of a scientist, David Kelly. He has now been vindicated, and the BBC received a humiliation.

At the tender age of fifty, Tony Blair is has seven years' tenure as prime minister; he has courage, vision, and integrity (once again proven); he has the right ideas, and presides over the large European economy that persistently performs most impressively; he has outflanked France and Germany diplomatically, and at home has carved out an enviable position for himself in the center of the political spectrum, between unelectable Tories and unelectable Liberal Democrats. He has the greatest stature of any politician in Europe-- almost Napoleonic.

Is Tony Blair somehow *too* brilliant? He's not very popular with the British. This is hard for Americans to understand. If only we had such a brilliant leader! Still, what is his career path now? Britain has no term limits, and no one is well-placed to beat Blair. He has transcended his party, and represents a body of ideas in his own right. Is that appropriate in a democracy? Maybe we Americans should be thankful that George Bush is clumsier, more obviously imperfect. And term-limited.