When David Cameron and Barack Obama reported on their cordial meeting at the White House this week, they didn't reveal whether they'd discussed their respective domestic politics. If they did, Mr. Obama must have been green with envy. For at home, the British Prime Minister has the politics the U.S. President both wants and needs.
Mr. Obama, like Mr. Cameron, is a politician of the liberal centre. He has tried again and again to reach "across the aisle." Talking of his deficit reduction and economic stimulus plans, at their joint press conference, he said "my hope is that we are going to get a bipartisan solution to this thing." He would die for the kind of solid parliamentary majority that a bipartisan coalition (of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats) gives the British PM.
Despite many compromises, Mr. Obama's health-care bill received no Republican votes in the House of Representatives. His financial oversight bill picked up only three Republican votes in the Senate; this week's extension of unemployment benefits got two. On television, radio and the Internet, Americans are bombarded by a polarized two-party politics that makes the shouting match of prime minister's questions in Britain's House of Commons seem like a genteel tea party. And here, even "tea party" now stands for a populist political movement of the Sarah Palin kind.
One stereotype has it that U.S. politics is like this because America is like this - a divided country. There's blue America and red America, and ne'er the twain shall meet. This is what Mr. Obama set out to disprove during his presidential campaign. There aren't blue states and red states, he insisted, just the United States of America. And detailed polling shows many shades between red and blue. It also shows an increasing number of voters describing themselves as independents - although Mr. Obama is not doing well with them at the moment. The Pew Research Center talks of a "growing political middle."
So why isn't this reflected in the politics we've witnessed in Congress and the U.S. media during Mr. Obama's first 18 months as president?
One answer offered is simple: gerrymandering. British Conservatives may be mildly unhappy with the way parliamentary constituency boundaries have been drawn, but this is nothing compared to congressional districts being redrawn to produce safe Republican or Democratic seats. Since all House members have to stand for re-election every two years, and since they need to raise lots of money from partisan donors or special interests, the incentives are tipped toward consolidating their core vote and offensive, point-scoring partisanship. Ironically, the Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm elections removed some of the moderate Republicans who might otherwise have been Mr. Obama's across-the-aisle partners. To be sure, the British electoral system hasn't represented the scale of the liberal centre properly, either, but the distortions are less extreme than in the U.S.
Then there are the American media themselves, particularly TV and radio. For years, it was Fox News leading the way. Today, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC is almost as relentlessly partisan from the left as Fox's Glenn Beck is from the right. The so-called Fairness Doctrine, by which America's broadcast media were once officially constrained, looks as antiquated as a manual typewriter. One of the most visible (and audible) differences between British and U.S. politics can be summarized in three letters: BBC. Having a dominant public-service broadcaster preserves an environment in which Mr. Obama's kind of nuanced, liberal centrist politics can flourish. In Britain, that is.
America's "culture wars," fought over issues such as abortion and gay marriage, may be less virulent than in the past two decades. But as Sarah Palin skits around endorsing "pro-life" Republican candidates for November's midterm elections, they are still salient. This is a cultural politics unimaginable in contemporary Britain. With his socially liberal views, not to mention his support of the National Health Service ("socialized medicine," in the parlance of the American right), Mr. Cameron could never secure a Republican nomination. The nearest thing you could find to him in today's American politics would be one of the fiscally conservative "blue dog" Democrats.
In real life, lots of Americans have moved beyond these Manichean cultural dichotomies, or never fell for them in the first place, but you wouldn't know it by turning on the TV or listening to most U.S. politicians. Except, that is, the President.
During the Cold War, a significant measure of bipartisanship was achieved on foreign and security policy. Since the Cold War was also a competition between social and economic systems, some of that spilled into domestic policy, too. To a limited degree, it still exists on issues of national security and counterterrorism. Yet, there's little sense that America is again engaged in a multidimensional international competition, where what its entrepreneurs do at home is as important as what its soldiers do abroad. But it is.
America is a challenged power. China and other emerging giants of the global east and south may yet prove more formidable competitors than the Soviet Union ever was - or violent Islamism ever will be. Modernity is no longer self-evidently present in America. There are still fantastic examples of technological, commercial and design innovation, but they're islands of modernity in a torpid sea. Mr. Obama wants America to lead the world in clean, green energy technology, but China is stealing that lead. To release its native forces of private innovation, the U.S. needs the right framework of public regulation and, in some fields, a government kick-start. To get there, Mr. Obama needs Republican votes in Congress. And he'll need them even more after the expected Democratic losses in November.
At the moment, it seems unlikely that America will get the new politics it badly needs. But then it seemed unlikely in Britain, too, until it happened in a most unexpected way.
Timothy Garton Ash is a professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.