The Ardern enigma

Why did many New Zealanders turn so quickly on our most popular leader of recent times? And will the politics of compassion ultimately be her legacy?

- DENIS WELCH

Looking back once on the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American novelist Saul Bellow remembered a late summer evening in Chicago in the 1930s, when he was a young man. Roosevelt had become president at a time of enormous crisis, when the United States, like New Zealand and other countries, was gripped by its worst economic depression - so bad that one of Roosevelt's first actions in office was to temporarily shut down the entire banking system in order to stabilise it. In a political masterstroke, he also began what came to be called "fireside chats", evening radio talks broadcast to the nation from the White House, in which he explained what the government was doing, and why.

There was no television then, and most major newspapers were hostile to his presidency, so it was a brilliant (and pioneering) way of reaching voters without interruption or interference. The millions who tuned in were able to feel, in turn, that they had a direct line of communication from their president: it was as if he were talking to each of them individually.

That summer evening, when it was still light after 9pm, Bellow was walking along one of the tree-lined streets that runs through Chicago's Midway Park, and under the elms, he wrote, "Drivers had pulled over, parking bumper-to-bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice ... You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President's words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it."