THEIR OWN NEWT AND BILL:

Don't Underestimate Britain's New Coalition: While Americans might find the sudden Conservative-Liberal Democrat marriage unbelievable, the union makes sense in less-polarized Britain. Clive Irving on why Cameron and Clegg are just what the country needs—and why their partnership will work. (Clive Irving, 5/12/10, Daily Beast)

Like most of the rest of Western Europe, the Brits have become far less polarized according to old party dogmas. Thank Tony Blair for this. He crafted a viable new political center—partly from the moderate rump of his own party and partly by luring defectors from both the Tories and Lib Dems. That gave him his three electoral victories.

Under Gordon Brown, New Labour lost that ground. Some of the unreconstructed apparatchiks of old Labour regained influence in Brown’s circle and their ideas began to sound dangerously statist, arousing old memories of overmighty bureaucracies. Worse, Brown failed to get away with the idea that by managing his way out of the economic meltdown he was absolved of having helped to engineer it in the first place.

What Britain is interested in now is managerial competence. Nothing concentrates the mind like staring into a great, yawning black chasm. That’s the economy the new Conservative/Lib Dem alliance inherits and will have to manage. And in the way that the new Tory Prime Minister David Cameron and the Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg are presenting both themselves and their ideas, these two 43-year-olds look like just the kind of guys you would want to take over a sick company.

For sure, each of the coalition parties has its lunatic fringe. But the real dynamic that has magically materialized in the past 24 hours is the force of reason at the center. Cameron and Clegg were both able to confidently disregard the balking of their more extreme factions.