Us politics

Briefing: Obama v Romney, three months out

It’s coming up fast: there are now just three months to go to Election Day in the United States. And right now, Barack Obama’s looking a good bet — although certainly not a safe one — for re-election. The forecasting model designed by the New York Times’s Nate Silver — which accounts for both polls and economic data — currently puts Obama’s chances of victory at 72.4 per cent, his strongest position so far. Interestingly, though, Obama’s lead in the polls is not all that big. Silver’s model, which includes national and state-level polls and takes into account the house effects of each pollster as well as the difference between polls

The Tea Party claims another scalp

They may have failed to install one of their candidates as the Republican’s presidential nominee, but the Tea Party is having better luck in other elections. Last night, Ted Cruz — backed by Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul — beat Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst 57-43 in the Republican primary for Texas’s senate election in November. Despite being outspent nearly three-to-one, Cruz — who has never run for office before — achieved a remarkable turnaround. In the first round of the primary just nine weeks ago, Dewhurst beat him 45-34 (as neither got more than 50 per cent it went down to last night’s run-off). In the second round,

Romney’s foreign tour isn’t derailing his campaign

Mitt Romney arrives in Poland today on the third and final leg of a foreign tour that has already taken him to London and Israel. While he may not have the obvious charm of Obama, predictions of his campaign being derailed by this foreign tour misunderstand Romney’s strategy. Foreign pundits are perennially guilty of ascribing too much importance to the foreign trips of prospective presidential candidates from the United States. When Obama visited Europe, the Middle East, and Afghanistan in the run up to the 2008 election – to mostly fawning press coverage – he only enjoyed a short-lived boost in the polls over his Republican candidate. His lead grew

Briefing: The fight for the House of Representatives

A couple of weeks ago, I took a look at the tight battle for control of the United States Senate. This week: the House of Representatives. The fight for the lower chamber of Congress is much harder to assess. There are, after all, 435 individual contests — each with its own unique candidates, characteristics and electorate — compared to the 33 Senate races. At the moment, Republicans have a strong majority, holding 242 seats (if you include the Michigan one recently vacated by Thad McCotter) to the Democrats’ 193 (including two vacancies). After a terrible set of results in the 2010 midterms, the Democrats have a mountain to climb to

A tale of two economies

While our economy was contracting by 0.7 per cent, America’s was growing by 0.4 per cent, according to the first estimate just released by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. But, as the graph below shows, those 2012 Q2 figures just represent a continuation of the divergent economic paths the two countries have been on since 2010. In America: steady if unspectacular growth. In the UK: stagnation followed by a second recession. P.S. The Americans report GDP figures as ‘annualised growth rates’ — that is, the percentage GDP would grow by if it grew for a whole year at the same rate as it did in the quarter — which

Freddy Gray

Romney isn’t just a clumsy diplomat: his foreign policy is bonkers

What have we learnt about Willard Mitt Romney since he arrived in Britain? Not a lot. He’s a plonker, that’s for sure, but most of us knew that. The UK leg of his world tour will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, for the gaffes. And as Isabel suggested yesterday, Mitt’s diplomatic clumsiness is a real weak point in his candidacy. It’s not just silly slips, his foreign policy ideas seem positively bonkers. Last year, Romney and his neocon advisers published a white paper called An American Century. It talked of Turkey as if it were part of the axis of evil, rather than a member of Nato.

The Romneyshambles road show

David Cameron broke with Downing Street tradition today by meeting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But Romney might now be wishing that, like François Hollande, he’d been snubbed by the Prime Minister until the elections were over. He started his day with forgetting Ed Miliband’s name, calling him ‘Mr Leader’ instead when the two met. That wasn’t too bad: it’s not as if British people, or indeed the media, can remember what the Labour leader is called half the time, anyway. But once in Downing Street, he decided to get out a spade and dig a rather large hole for himself in the back garden (which he accidentally described as

Cameron to meet Mitt

Downing Street confirmed today that the Prime Minister will meet US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Downing Street this week. It sounds like a sensible plan, given Romney is so close to Obama in the polls at present. But there’s just one tiny little problem. I have, in my shorthand notes from a lobby briefing on 5 March 2012, a quote from the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, which says the following: ‘As a general rule we do not meet candidates in foreign elections.’ Then the spokesman was talking about David Cameron’s failure to meet François Hollande, who was in Britain while campaigning against Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency.

Bookbenchers: Jamie Reed MP | 22 July 2012

Over at the Books Blog, the Labour MP and shadow health minister Jamie Reed has answered our questions about his summer reading. He is taking Joe Bageant’s Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir on his travels. It’s one of 4 non-fiction recommendations about US politics, supplemented by some Herman Melville, The Grapes of Wrath and a novel about Abraham Lincoln. It’s an American dominated list, but none the worse for that. You can read it here.

Bookbenchers: Jamie Reed MP

This week, Jamie Reed, the Labour MP for Copeland and Cumbria and shadow health minister, is in the hot seat. He is big on books about American politics, and reads poetry occasionally. 1) Which books are at your bedside table at the moment? Most books now on my iPad… but Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is always present on the bedside table. Have just begun – finally – Team of Rivals. 2) Which book would you read to your children? They have different tastes. The Fantastic Mr Fox is always loved, along with The Hobbit. 3) Which literary character would you most like to be? Nick Clegg…

Clinton’s Cairo visit reveals limits of US influence

Hillary Clinton is holding talks in Israel today after a turbulent weekend in Egypt, ending a diplomatically fraught trip with little obvious benefit. Officially, Clinton was there to open the American consulate in Alexandria after it closed in 1993 due to budget cutbacks, but the subtext was to manage the conflicting aspects of America’s strategic interests in the country. Clinton met with Mohammed Mursi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who is now Egypt’s new President, assuring him of the ‘full authority’ of his office. This was a subtle endorsement at a time when Mursi finds himself locked in tug-of-war with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces for power.

Department of lapdogs

Via Kevin Drum, this is really rather remarkable: ‘The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative. They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name. Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review. The verdict from the campaign — an operation that prides itself on staying consistently

The fight for the Senate

The battle for control of the White House is, of course, the big US politics story of the year. But what about the building at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue — the Capitol, which houses Congress? All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for re-election, as well as 33 of the 100 Senate seats. Currently, the Democrats control the Senate, with 51 Senators and two independents who caucus with them. But it will be tough for them to retain control, as they are defending 23 seats this time to the GOP’s 10 — and most of the seats up this time were last up for election

Romney’s risky campaign focus

There’s a belief among the strategists surrounding Mitt Romney that his campaign should focus almost exclusively on the state of America’s economy. It’s an obvious battleground with unemployment figures hovering around 8 per cent, a sorely depressed manufacturing sector, and soaring petrol price. Sacrificed to this belief are a broader spectrum of policies. Throughout his entire campaign, for example, Romney has given just one major foreign policy speech. The single-issue approach adopted by Romney’s team – essentially turning the election into a referendum on Obama’s handling of the economy – is a risky strategy, and one the campaign is not playing as best it could. Romney was heckled the other

Invented racial ugliness

I wasn’t especially impressed by Mitt Romney’s speech to the NAACP (nor, frankly, by the way Romney was booed, though that’s a different matter) but at least I wasn’t driven demented by it. The same, alas, cannot be said for poor Michael Tomasky who sees something rotten lurking in the dark heart of Romney’s, er, standard stump speech: Oh please. This is guff. Guff on stilts, in fact. It’s true that being booed by the NAACP won’t hurt Romney with the wilder, nastier corners of the Republican base. Nevertheless, to presume Romney set this speech up so as to perform and benefit from this kind of trick shot is to

Alex Massie

The paranoid centre and life in the American fever-swamp

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, told Fox News Sunday last weekend: ‘The fact is, it’s not a question of whether can Mitt Romney win. The statement is, Mitt Romney has to win for the sake of the very idea of America. Mitt Romney has to win for liberty and freedom. We have to put an end to this Barack Obama presidency before it puts an end to our way of life in America.’ There you have it, the conservative movement’s flammable combination of hysteria, hyperbole and cynicism in a single soundbite. Verily, American politics has become an ugly thing, dominated by boors and scoundrels animated by a

Romney’s pitch for the new America

Tim Stanley says Mitt Romney’s speech to the NAACP’s annual convention was his campaign’s first ‘moment of magic’. Up to a point. It’s true, as Stanley observes, that Republicans once had a better record on civil rights than Democrats (it was once the Party of Lincoln after all). True too that Mitt’s father George, governor of Michigan, was one of those northern Republicans who agitated for decency before it was popular or politically-expedient to do so. Romney has a story to tell here and it’s not a bad tale either. The speech had two chief aims. First, Romney wins pundit-points for being ‘brave’ enough to speak to a largely-hostile audience.

Obama’s Romney money war

Barack Obama’s latest email appeal for campaign funds – entitled ‘we could lose if this continues’ – doesn’t seem altogether sincere. The president’s re-election team wants more money, of course – who doesn’t? – and they must be concerned by the fact that Romney and his plutocratic committees are beating them in the fund-raising stakes. As Obama says, ‘we can win a race in which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more’. Yet anyone with half a brain can see what Obama and his strategists are trying to say (again): Romney is a super-rich agent of the super-rich. He represents big business, not ordinary

Burning Man and the Republicans

Grover Norquist, a leading voice of American conservatism, is cross about the date of the Republican Party convention. He tweets: ‘Which idiot put the GOP convention the same time as ‘Burning Man’ in Nevada? Is there time to change this?’ Burning Man, in case you didn’t know, is a festival in Nevada where ‘freethinkers’ flock in their tens of thousands to spend a few days being individual. Money is not allowed, natch. It attracts thousands of British trendies — ex-public school types, on the whole, trying too hard to carve an artsy identity for themselves. They come back considerably more smug than they left, if the ones I know are

The Obamacare battle is far from won

The US Supreme Court’s decision to uphold ‘Obamacare’ and the so-called ‘individual mandate’ will have brought a little relief to President Obama. If his administration’s hardest-fought legislative victory had been struck down by the high court, the president’s admirers would have started to wonder whether he had achieved anything at all. But Obama and the Democrats will know that their healthcare battle is far from won. Republicans have pledged to carry on trying to repeal ‘Obamacare’ in its entirety. And there are bound to be all sorts of complicated and tedious state-by-state legal challenges over various technicalities before the most of the law is brought into force in 2014.  And