Helen's zeitgeist goes missing

FROM THE LEFT - CHRIS TROTTER

Prime Minister Helen Clark's fast-dwindling coterie of media allies tell us it would be madness. The throng of political journalists hanging around John Key agree. But what, exactly, is mad about the idea of replacing Helen Clark with Phil Goff?

According to the latest Fairfax-Nielsen poll, Labour is now more popular than its leader. That suggests the Government's catastrophic numbers are being driven by Miss Clark's unpopularity not the party's.

This marks an important shift in the electorate's response. For most of the past eight years the prime minister has consistently outperformed her party in popularity. She was Labour's greatest asset, the wind beneath its wings. She has now become the lump of lead on its back.

It's all about the zeitgeist: the spirit of the times; the ghost that flits between the letters of the daily headlines.

Back in 1999, Miss Clark and the zeitgeist were in harmony. After the seemingly endless upheavals of the 1980s and 90s, New Zealanders were tired of change. We'd lost patience with politicians touting big agendas. All we wanted was someone to slow everything down. A leader who would manage the country cautiously, calmly and competently.

Miss Clark was that leader.

But times have changed.

The ghost in today's headlines gibbers menacingly about global warming and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. It whispers of worldwide recession, wars against terror, and the violent collapse of social cohesion. It's a zeitgeist of unease: a spirit of inchoate longings and vague discontents.

At the level of day-to-day existence, however, the irritants are anything but vague.

We recoil in horror from rising food prices and falling property markets. The banks swallow more and more of our income, and the IRD seems to claim most of what's left. Our friends migrate (usually across the Tasman) from where they regale us with stories of huge salaries and unlimited career prospects.

People don't need to be told that, when a 1kg block of cheese cost $17, and a litre of petrol a buck-seventy, something has gone very seriously wrong.

But what? And why? Those are the questions New Zealanders would like their prime minister to answer.

For months they've been waiting for her to acknowledge their unease, and, if possible, offer an accurate diagnosis of it.

They have waited in vain.

Miss Clark is no Bill Clinton: she cannot look her supporters in the eye and say, "I feel your pain".

At heart, the prime minister is a diligent and rather uninspiring policy wonk, who has never really understood that politics is not about the head, but the heart.

The voters are simply not in the market for "tonnes of policy". What they're in the market for are tones of empathy.

In that respect, at least, Peter Dunne is right about New Zealand's race for the Beehive being similar to the Democratic Party's race in the United States for the White House.

In their affinity for political managerialism, Helen and Hillary are alike. But, do Mr Key's speeches echo our own electorate's hunger for "Hope" and "Change" in the way Barack Obama's echo America's?

Yes, in a strange way they do. Mr Key may not be as effective a speaker as Mr Obama, but his personal political narrative (poor boy raised by a solo mum, who transcends his humble origins to achieve remarkable success) is strikingly similar – and so is the way voters have loaded their deep longing for fresh explanations and new beginnings on to the young challenger's shoulders.

Labour's caucus needs to get its head around this – and soon. Because the longer it delays replacing Miss Clark as leader, the more time it is allowing for the voters to convince themselves (if they have not already done so) that Mr Key is the prime minister they are looking for.

But the electorate does not need to turn to National for "Hope" and "Change". Indeed, history suggests that the Right is incapable of delivering change or hope in ways remotely beneficial to working people.

But "Hope" and "Change" are Labour's stock-in-trade: it's what the party does, has always done.

Miss Clark admirably fulfilled the hopes, and proudly delivered the changes demanded by the zeitgeist of 1999.

If Mr Goff has the wit and the courage to embrace the zeitgeist of 2008, there is no reason why Labour shouldn't win its fourth term.