Well, well. Opportunity knocks — and with the broad smile of Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party: The UKIP has stunned just about everyone by eclipsing both Labor and the Conservatives in the elections for a new European Parliament.
But will Republicans here answer the knock?
British voters, with a general election a year hence, have just signaled that they’re worried about the warnings on the European Union that Margaret Thatcher issued a generation ago.
They’re worried about taxes, over-regulation, the loss of their sovereignty.
This ought to be made to order for a Republican Party looking for opportunities to make friends across the pond.
But it’s hard to think of one Republican who seems alert to the GOP’s advantage here or senses that there is an issue for America in the turn away from Europe that Britain is considering.
President Obama, never one to let a good crisis go to waste, has had two of his heavies in London trying to exploit the situation.
That’s the report in The New York Times, which caught ex-White House aide David Axelrod at the Labor Party headquarters, “rallying British progressives” with the spirit of Obama.
Meantime, the Times reports, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, was holed up at 10 Downing St. with Prime Minister David Cameron of the Conservative Party. Cameron wants to try to compromise with the statists in Brussels.
So Obama’s aides are working both sides of the fence.
Axelrod and Messina aren’t acting overtly for Obama. They’re looking for paid work. But the candidates they’re cozying up to are advocates of Britain staying in the European Union, which is precisely the strategic aim of the Obama administration (which loves Euro-socialism).
Obama has said that if Britain pulls out of Europe, it will hurt its standing in America. What hooey: If Britain pulls out of the European Union — which is what Nigel Farage wants — it will mean it is prepared to bet on a more American style of political and economic liberty.
For all Farage’s good cheer — he celebrated his victory in the European elections by going to a pub for beer and cigarettes — he is desperately in need of allies. All the dark forces of the continent are trying to either tempt or outflank him.
One of them is Marine Le Pen, scion of the rightist French party known as the Front Nationale. Farage has rejected her overtures, saying, the Financial Times reported Wednesday, that her party had “anti-Semitism and general prejudice in its DNA.”
Good for Farage. He’s not a hater. He wants out of a Europe that is crawling with them, from Hungary to Italy to the Netherlands.
So why doesn’t someone in the Republican Party — Paul Ryan, say, or Chris Christie or Rand Paul or Ted Cruz — reach out and give him a hand?
In addition to being the right thing to do, it would be good politics. Obama, after all, is in the midst of his “pivot” to Asia. This has always been a cover for his retreat from the Middle East.
But who has his eye on the possibility in Britain?
Think back a bit. At Westminster Palace in London in June 1982, President Ronald Reagan gave one of his greatest speeches. It’s where he unveiled his plan to roll back Soviet communism.
“From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy,” Reagan declared. “But none — not one regime — has yet been able to risk free elections.”
Out of that speech came the National Endowment for Democracy and our alliance with the anti-communist trade unions — most famously Solidarity — that cracked Soviet rule in the East bloc. What a tragedy that since then the European Union has itself become a satrap of socialist pessimism.
In 1988, Reagan’s British partner, Prime Minister Thatcher, warned: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
Were he president today, Reagan would be looking for a partner. Someone who started far back in the pack, who said he didn’t want to work with the anti-Semites, who had a ready smile and a sense of optimism.
He would have recognized the knock of opportunity.