JUST LIKE BILL?

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Blair saw it differently. He said at the time that "it was absurd that the one guiding value the Labour Party has in its constitution is wholesale nationalization, when, in fact, the party no longer believes in it." He traveled the country selling his view and was again vigorously opposed by the unions. "We didn't like the idea that Blair was hijacking the party by changing Clause IV," says John Cogger, president of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. "It's our party, created by my union in 1899." It took two tries, but Blair finally won. Instantly, the man some thought of as smarmy and whom the press had nicknamed "Bambi" instead became known to his party opponents as Stalin. Today the prospect of victory mutes all criticism. "You will not see any hostility between the trade-union leaders and Blair either publicly or behind closed doors," says Cogger, "because it is so important to win this election."

With Labour's leadership in hand, Blair began borrowing from abroad. The shift toward the center by left-leaning political parties is a worldwide phenomenon, and Blair has gone to school primarily on the examples offered in Australia and the U.S., both of which he has visited and whose centrist politicians he knows well. In Australia, Blair was charmed by Robert Hawke, who had said when he was Prime Minister that "you have to be an idiot or just plain blind with prejudice not to understand that you've got to have a healthy and growing private sector if you're going to look after the majority of the people." Blair's version goes like this: "It is the public interest that is important. What counts is what works. The presumption should be that economic activity is best left to the private sector."

Blair's appropriations from America have included the need to get tough on crime, the desire to end welfare as a lifelong entitlement and some of the notions associated with Clintonomics. After visiting the President and his aides in January 1993 (a trip that included stopping by the Democratic Leadership Council, from which much of Clinton's platform emerged), Blair began peppering his speeches with attacks on "trickle down" economics. Both men speak about most people having six or seven jobs in a lifetime instead of just one, which has led Blair to favor the kind of education and training reforms Clinton has pushed in the U.S. Only a scholastic can tell whether it's Clinton or Blair speaking when the Labour leader says, "The countries that will achieve the highest rates of growth and employment in the new information age are those which make the investments in the new technologies and skills...and whose governments see their role as working with industry to equip people for change." The same similarities surface when Blair talks about "rights and duties going together." Or when he says he wants welfare to be "a hand up, not just a handout." Or when he goes on about charting a political path that "is between and ahead of the old left and the new right." On at least one occasion, Blair was actually first with the cliche. Two months before Clinton uttered a virtually identical formulation in his 1996 State of the Union address, Blair said, "The era of centralized government is over."