Us politics

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Was Santorum’s tantrum phony?

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Did you see the presidential candidate Rick Santorum lose his cool with a New York Times reporter? If not, you can watch it above. It was a trivial incident, really, but we live in a trivial media age in which politicians think that embarrassing moments are something to boast about. Losing your temper shows that you are human, rather than a politician. Santorum and his spinners have tried to whip up the little row for all it’s worth ahead of his ‘last chance’ primary in Wisconsin. Santorum’s anger, they say, shows he is a ‘real Republican’ — i.e. not like the fake Mitt Romney.

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Obama reiterates his commitment to a nuke-free future

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajuq5u3IoSQ As leaders from 53 nations gather in Seoul for the second Nuclear Security Summit, President Obama spoke of his ‘vision of a world without nuclear weapons’. It’s a vision he described during his 2008 campaign, and which was later the focus of his 2009 speech in Prague. Today, as then, he talked about the ‘obligation’ he feels to act on this in strikingly personal terms: ‘I say it as a father, who wants my two young daughters to grow up in a world where everything they know and love can’t be instantly wiped out.’ Obama detailed his efforts to reduce America’s arsenal, to get other countries to reduce theirs, and

Friday

Jonathan Jones

Romney can’t shake off his ‘Etch A Sketch’ label

Presidential candidates are used to having all sorts of derogatory monikers hurled in their direction. But they don’t expect them to come from one of their own senior advisers. And yet that’s exactly what’s happened to Mitt Romney this week. On Wednesday, just after Romney had won the Illinois primary and secured the endorsement of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Eric Fehrnstrom told CNN: ‘Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch — you can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again’ The point he was making isn’t a particularly novel one: candidates

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron and Obama bargain over fuel

No wonder David Cameron and Barack Obama were being so chummy: they both knew that they could help each other. The Times carries an intriguing story (£) on its front page this morning, about how the two men discussed a plan to get fuel prices down in the UK and the US. The idea is that both countries — and perhaps more — would release some of their oil reserves. And so supply would go up, and prices would come down. As would our reliance on the oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Apparently, we’re some distance from a deal yet, but you can see why both the PM and

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Rand Paul as Romney’s Vice President?

American hacks have been mystified by what seems to be a ‘non-aggression pact’ between Republican presidential candidates Ron Paul and Mitt Romney. The two men are in many ways opposites. Paul is the favourite of anti-establishment conservatives — principled, dismissed by the media as too radical, critical of the Grand Old Party machine and US foreign policy. Romney, on the other hand, is a typical American politician — rich, lacking clear convictions, happy to talk about bombing the enemies of freedom. And yet — as Jonathan noted a few weeks ago — Paul, though he has repeatedly attacked Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, has been strangely mute when it comes

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Romney still can’t seal the deal

Poor old Mitt Romney. He just can’t win. Every time it looks as if he’s finally closing in on the Republican nomination, he slips again. Rick Santorum triumphed yesterday in the ‘dixie primary’, winning in Mississippi and Alabama. Romney finished third in both states. He wasn’t expected to win in the south, admittedly, but the extent of his defeat will trouble his campaign team. Yesterday’s win was doubly good news for Santorum because he looks to have seen off Newt Gingrich, the other ‘authentic’ conservative. If Gingrich accepts defeat and pulls out — most right-wingers are now begging him to — Santorum should be able to mop up most of

Peter Hoskin

Cameron and Obama, sans yellow mustard

Above is what they call the ‘raw video’ of David Cameron’s and Barack Obama’s trip to a basketball game last night. It’s the unrefined version of what Downing St hopes will be refined, packaged and sent to your television screen at hyperspeed: images of the PM and the President dressed casually and chatting away as the game goes on. Like I said yesterday, it’s political theatre — designed to benefit both men. They were then both interviewed at halftime, which you can watch here. This was more about sports than about the political intricacies of the special relationship (Cameron: ‘It’s hard to follow,  sometimes, who’s done exactly what wrong’) —

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Cameron lands in America

David Cameron’s plane has just landed in Washington. The next few days should provide him with a set of images that will portray him as a significant figure on the global stage. The Obama administration is giving Cameron the full works: a huge event on the White House lawn and the kind of banquet that is normally reserved for heads of state. This is an arrangement that benefits both sides. The Obama re-election campaign wants to foster the sense that the President is friends with a Conservative British Prime Minister given that their Republican opponent in the fall will accuse him of being a left-wing radical. I suspect, though, that

Peter Hoskin

Will Obama and Cameron discuss a faster pullout from Afghanistan?

The political theatre of David Cameron’s trip to America will have Downing Street drooling. The PM is, today, not only going to become the first world leader to fly aboard Air Force One with Barack Obama, but then they’re also going to take in a game of basketball together. It’s a carefully calibrated blend of statesmanship and down-to-earth-ship that will suit both men. Obama, because it might appeal, in some way, to conservative voters ahead of this year’s presidential election. Cameron, because, well… does Ed Miliband do this sort of thing? The theatre carries over into print too, with a joint article by Cameron and Obama in today’s Washington Post.

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Rising gas prices hurt Obama

Barack Obama’s re-election has been looking more and more likely in recent weeks. His approval rating has risen fairly steadily, economic forecasts have improved and he’s opened a nice lead in head-to-head polling against Mitt Romney, as the Republican primaries have taken their toll on his most likely opponent. But the latest polls show things moving dramatically in the other direction, for the first time since early October. A Washington Post-ABC poll conducted last week shows Obama’s approval rating dropping from a healthy 50 per cent last month to 46 per cent now. It also shows Romney leading Obama 49 to 47, compared to 51-45 to Obama last month. These

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Why Cameron should pay heed to Romney

Cameron flies out to Washington on Tuesday, and when he gets there he’ll have no need to play the infatuated teenager. The days of Gordon Brown-style adulation are over, and Cameron has a more mature, less needy relationship with Obama. The truth is that there’s precious little he can learn from Obama, but there might be a thing or two he can learn from Mitt Romney. I look at this in my Telegraph column today. Cameron has never loved America, in the way that so many people in SW1 do. He toured America in his youth, but had never been to Washington until he became Tory leader. Cameron is more

Thursday

Freddy Gray

McCain’s on the warpath (again)

Senator John McCain was on the radio again this morning, urging us to intervene on behalf of Syria’s rebels. ‘It’s not a fair fight,’ he said, as if that were a good reason to wade in. McCain, a former prisoner of war, is to humanitarian intervention what Mother Teresa was to helping the sick. He never misses a chance to promote a good scrap in the name of freedom and democracy. He cheered on western involvement in the wars in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In McCain’s worldview, there is no conflict or international problem which cannot be solved by the application of American military power. When running for president in 2008, he

Wednesday

Nicole Hemmer

Like father, like son? | 7 March 2012

Given all the buzz around Super Tuesday, we thought CoffeeHousers might care to read this piece from tomorrow’s edition of Spectator Australia, which compares Mitt Romney to his father George, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968: After a career as a business executive, a handsome Mormon becomes the Republican governor of a Democratic state, then runs for President. He gets a reputation for flip-flopping and, as a moderate, has an uneasy relationship with the party’s conservative base. It’s a pretty specific biography, yet it describes to a tee two men: Mitt Romney, one of the leading contenders for the GOP nomination, and his father George, who sought

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Republican ‘negativity’ has improved Romney’s campaign

In the wake of Super Tuesday, lots of British journalists are saying that the Republican nomination race has been too ‘negative’ — i.e. the candidates have attacked each other too much ahead of the real contest in November. Mitt Romney may now be close to victory but he’s been badly damaged. This is thought to be an indication that American conservatism is tearing itself apart. But that isn’t necessarily right. Nobody thought that the Democratic party was in decline when Hillary Clinton and Obama were at each other’s throats in 2008. Hillary, if you remember, even flirted with racist tactics in an attempt to derail her rival. And yet the

Jonathan Jones

Obama wins Super Tuesday

It wasn’t a great night for Mitt Romney — but it wasn’t a particularly bad one either. He won by big margins in the four states he was supposed to: Massachussetts, Vermont, Virginia and Idaho. He also won Alaska by a four-point margin and managed to beat Rick Santorum by just one point in Ohio. The fact that he finished way behind Newt Gingrich in Georgia was no surprise, nor was his losing to Santorum in Oklahoma. He could have done with better results in North Dakota (third, 16 points behind Santorum and 4 behind Ron Paul) and Tennessee (second, 9 points behind Santorum), but six wins from ten states

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

A super Tuesday in store for Romney

After regaining the momentum with victories in Michigan and Arizona last week — and another in Washington State at the weekend — Mitt Romney looks set to enjoy a pretty good Super Tuesday. He’s very unlikely to win all ten states voting today, but will probably substantially strengthen his position in the all-important delegate race nonetheless. Much of the focus has been on the two biggest states: Georgia and Ohio. Georgia should provide Newt Gingrich with a much-needed and fairly comfortable victory — it is the state he represented in Congress, after all, and he’s focused a lot of his efforts there. The polls suggest a 20-point or so win

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

Will Democrats decide the result of Michigan’s Republican primary?

Tonight’s another very important night for the Republican presidential hopefuls, with primaries in Arizona and Michigan. Mitt Romney seems assured of a decent win in the former, where the latest two polls put him 16-17 points ahead of Rick Santorum. But Michigan is looking incredibly close — with the poll results of the last two days ranging from a four-point lead for Romney to a five-point lead for Santorum. It could go either way: Nate Silver’s model gives Romney a 55 per cent chance of victory to Santorum’s 45 per cent chance. With the polls this narrow, it will all come down to who’s best at getting their voters out

Friday

Jonathan Jones

Romney’s little helper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgNJBdTaKE8 The Republican primary is dragging on longer than Mitt Romney had hoped — and it’s hurting him. His poll ratings have begun to plummet, and his war chest is feeling the pain too. In January, he spent a whopping $18.8m while raising just $6.5m. His campaign still has $7.7m ‘cash on hand’, but you don’t have to be Rain Man to see that even that won’t last long at this rate. Of course, multi-millionaire Romney could easily self-finance his campaign (as he did in 2008), but that isn’t a story that would make his candidacy look strong. Even so, Romney does still have more than enough to outspend his

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Obama breaks clear

The rejuvenation of Barack Obama’s re-election hopes continues apace. He’s added seven points to his approval rating since November, improving it from the low 40s to around 50 per cent now. After months of polling neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney, he now boasts a six point lead. Just four months ago, the bookies thought he was more likely to lose the election than win it. Now Intrade gives him a 60 per cent chance of victory. Nate Silver has a great article on Obama’s chances in this week’s New York Times Magazine. He’s built a model to forecast the election results based on the three most important factors at this stage:

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

Rombo vs Santorum

Having reclaimed the mantle of ‘Anti-Romney in Chief’, Rick Santorum is now surging in the polls. He’s moved into a narrow lead at the national level and – more importantly – looks likely to win two of the next big states on the primary calendar: Michigan and Ohio. Of course, that makes him the new target of Romney attack ads. Restore Our Future – the pro-Romney Super PAC – has already released a video slamming Santorum as a ‘big spender’ and ‘Washington insider’, which it will air in Michigan, Ohio and Arizona. A Romney advisor explained the strategy to Buzzfeed yesterday: ‘“Santorum’s a blank slate, so everyone’s projecting on to him what