Yes we can! Hamish Nairn talked to award-winning author, historian and Paul Keating’s former speechwriter Don Watson about America and the prospects of an Australian Obama
Don Watson is the Australian political equivalent of the Emperor’s clothes: those that don’t know him are wise to pretend that they do for fear of seeming ignorant. Paul Keating’s former speechwriter holds a special place in any budding Australian political aspirant’s knowledge. His biography of his time as advisor and speechwriter in the Keating administration has won numerous awards. Yet whilst he will always be known as the man behind several of the best Australian political speeches in history he is not a politician, which is immediately obvious when you meet him. Watson’s choice of a rundown family-owned café in North Bondi as the venue for an interview with Honi Soit reflects his primary occupation is not so much political pundit as erstwhile historian.
Watson’s charm, good looks and passion for knowledge are immediately obvious when you meet him. There is no hint of arrogance or superiority as he recounts stories of adventures from around the world and spews oodles of historical knowledge. He has released a new book, American Journeys which is based on his travels around the United States, mostly by train. It covers the entire country and reminds you just how enormously diverse the United States is. This is not a Bill Bryson-esque travel diary: his focus is not the actual journey but the people and the destinations.
The book covers many aspects of American society and politics, from the disastrous disaster management of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (where he assisted as a volunteer) to the weird and wacky American obsession with gun rights and abortions. His training as a historian combined with astute political awareness make for entertaining reading.
Throughout America, Watson finds sweeping differences in the people he meets but also some constants: zealous patriotism, evangelical righteousness and a rock-solid belief that America is the greatest place on earth. His writing style is infectious, filled with anecdotes and analogies so regular that every page is another story. The vivid imagery he uses is never static, describing action as it happens rather than pictures.
Of course, most university students have too much reading just to pass their subjects to bother with any more books on the side. Happily, with American Journeys you won’t notice the pages flying by. There are so many references to American history mixed with current events that you finish the book feeling as though Watson has painted a huge canvas of modern America from a stranger’s perspective. You don’t need to be a fan of America either. Watson himself points out that most Australians have a strain of anti-Americanism within them. His book is far from praiseworthy of Americans, whose frequent ignorance of the world around them is regularly noted.
As with his book, interviewing Watson is a haphazard journey across plenty of topics in rapid succession. He has a healthy obsession with America, a country that is the source of so much of Australia’s cultural education. The enormous influence that the United States has over most Australians’ upbringings inspired Watson’s desire to get to know the place personally, one story at a time.
I asked him about the American Presidential contest which he labels “the most interesting thing to watch in the world at the moment.” He sees many similarities between the exuberant populist campaigns of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and that of Barack Obama. The excitement coming from ordinary people who don’t usually vote has astounded political commentators. As a speechwriter, he’s also a fan: “I love the way he talks, the way he speaks directly to people …. I love all that.” I asked him whether he thinks Obama can actually deliver on his lofty rhetorical promises of hope and change and Watson seemed positive. “It might be that America is the sort of place as rare as it is that it can be moved by the course of a personality, which is part of the American dream of course,” he said. “It’s part of the mythology of the place.”
Yet that mythology may not be enough. “The thing that worries me about him talking about hope all the time is that on the one hand it’s what the country needs at the moment, it’s bringing out people who have never voted before and it’s energising the country.” But, “what’s a little bit frightening about that is, if he is running entirely on hope, if he loses, what happens to that hope? And if he succeeds but then he doesn’t live up to that hope, what then? Can America deal with that disappointment?”
Australians have never seen a politician mobilise the public with a message of hope like Obama’s – at least not since Gough Whitlam. The excitement and festivities of the Presidential primaries are a long way from the ‘me-too’-isms of the Howard/Rudd contest.
Could Australia ever get swept up by real political leadership in the tradition of Obama and Clinton? Can we one day find genuine inspiration in a political leader? Complete with Youtube clips of Australian celebrities mimicking the words to his or her speeches? Watson thinks so. “Australia’s capable of more than we give ourselves credit for being.”
“If the timing’s right and things go your way, you can make a difference” he thinks. “The difference here is that we’re not used to those dramatic changes and life’s pretty comfortable.” Australia has suffered at times from “small time pollies with no ideas, or worse, small time pollies with bad ideas,” though he won’t name names.
“You could change this country quite dramatically if you have sufficiently good ideas and sufficient force of will… if the timing’s right and things go your way, you can make a difference to the way this place thinks about itself.”
In a series of symbolic steps, Rudd has done his best to fit into the role of dramatic change agent. The apology to the Aboriginal population, signing Kyoto and above all, the 2020 Summit are big picture ideas designed to make Rudd’s public figure transcend ordinary politics. So, does this former advisor to Keating buy into all of the symbolism?
Yes and no. “I think it’s a good effort to draw out ideas but it’s also an effort to sort of release the pressure a little. I think it’s good politics, but I have a feeling that if you asked Paul Keating to come up with ideas over a weekend he’d come up with more ideas than one thousand people and ideas you could do something with.”
Indeed, Watson clearly maintains a lot of respect for his former boss, likening him to Bill Clinton. “It was never going to take much for Paul to become a mythic figure,” he says. “It’s also because of the power of his mind, he writes very well and he has a very good brain… Every now and then he knocks the country, sort of mesmerised by the news cycle, into realising there’s something else to think about. Thank God he’s still around.”
Keating is different to other politicians because he has never followed the polls or the opposition, according to Watson. “He’s old fashioned. He doesn’t respect the news cycle, he’s not governed by the news cycle. He’s a big brain that’s used to thinking… most of politics limits what you’re trying to do and limits you to simple phrases like ‘working families.’
“The difference between Keating (and a few others) and your run of the mill pollies was that he would never, ever, ever give your opponent anything. Even if you made yourself sound silly at times. You have to stand for something or you end up looking like a dill. That’s Hillary’s problem.”
For Watson, good politicians embrace their positions no matter what. “I hope Rudd, as Keating did, fashions an idea for a role of Australia in the region and the world… I think Labor would have been back in office earlier had they not been so nervous of sounding like Hawke and Keating … They had a coherent position. There was room to manoeuvre within that position but washing yourself from the originality and coherence and power of that idea is stupid without a better idea.”
The Labor Party’s attempts to distance itself from its history and pretend to be almost the same as the Liberals was never a good idea. Watson argues, “the moment Rudd allowed himself to say that Labor had actually reformed the labour market he was suddenly free! He was like a rabbit out from a hat and he didn’t have to worry about it anymore. The moment he suddenly said, ‘no we’re proud of what we did’ the story was all on his side.”
In Watson’s reckoning, unwavering confidence even in the face of public hostility is a political virtue. These must be comforting words for Morris Iemma. Whilst we wait for our own Australian Obama (as an inspirational ordinary-person candidate, rather than as a black candidate) hopefully Australia will still have an ongoing supply of gutsy leaders.
American politics and society are vastly different to Australia’s. Yet studying the States can teach us volumes about what we’re not and what we might be.