Us politics

Republicans like to say that Barack Obama’s 2008 slogan ‘Hope’ has been replaced by ‘Fear’. And they are right. If you listen to Obama and his campaign paladins, you might think that Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee is itching to take away your Medicare and break the sacred American promise of Social Security. Hell, a Romney presidency means you are more likely to get cancer. Or if you are a woman, you’ll probably die due to complications from an illegal back-street abortion. Everything will be lame again, like the 1950s. Vote Obama, or else. At the Democratic convention this week, President Obama will tell his supporters that he still believes

Traditionally – that is, for the last 50 or so years – Labor Day is considered the “official” start of the Presidential campaign. Since Labor Day is today t’s OK to pay attention now. The Democrats meet in Charlotte, North Carolina for their convention this week of which, I suppose, more later. I wrote a column on Romneypalooza in Tampa for the Scotsman. Here’s the guts of it: No-one will ever be inspired by Romney, but the convention did its best to present him as a real-life, honest-to-goodness actual human being. This unpromising project was more successful than seemed plausible before the convention began. The week’s most moving moment came

Way back in my debating days at Trinity College, Dublin we knew you could guarantee large crowds and impressively  – that is, pleasingly – bad-tempered debates twice a year. These were the annual debates on Northern Ireland and abortion. And they really were annual fixtures during which, for years on end, the same arguments were deployed with the same passion and no-one’s views were ever changed by anything they heard. In those days it was usually pretty clear who the bad guys were too. In the case of abortion it was anyone speaking as a representative of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child or, more generally, anyone

Paul Ryan is a solid if not sensational choice for the Vice Presidency – a reverse Sarah Palin, if you will. I know, I know, he is meant to be a gamble, but all Veep nominations are gambles. Ryan may not be deemed a ‘safe pick’ in the Tim Pawlenty mould, but a safe pick would actually have been risky for Romney, whose campaign is in dire need of conservative pep. Ryan is, as everybody keeps pointing out, a fiscal hawk. And he’s not just grandstanding against deficits. He means it. He was interested in reforming – and bringing down the cost of – American healthcare before the row over

The next big event of the US presidential election will be Mitt Romney’s announcement of his Vice Presidential nominee. For the past few weeks, the two clear favourites have been Ohio Senator — and Budget Office director under George W Bush — Rob Portman and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. Both certainly fit the description of ‘incredibly boring white guy’ that one Republican official said the Romney campaign was looking for. But in the last couple of days, Romney has come under increasing pressure from the Right to pick Paul Ryan: a white guy, yes, but not so boring. When the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in