Us politics

Rape is rape and abortion is abortion. Except when they’re not. – Spectator Blogs

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

Fraser Nelson

Six to watch at the Republican Convention

The Republican National Convention is properly underway today*, where Mitt Romney will try to introduce himself to an America that still doesn’t really know him. The race is close: Romney leads 47-46 in a Gallup poll. Both sides have been spewing out attack ads, which seem to be working: not for 20 years have both the president and challenger had such dire approval ratings. Not many Brits will stay up to 3.30am to watch all this, but we’ll be keeping you fully briefed here on Coffee House. Here are the six people that we have our eye on: Anne Romney (Speaking today): She’s auditioning for first lady, and hasn’t been

George Washington: Gentleman warrior

It is easy to forget that the dignified eighteenth-century gentleman whose image appears on the one-dollar bill, the first President and father of his nation, owed his position entirely to his prowess as a soldier. Stephen Brumwell’s book charts the two phases of his military career, firstly fighting for King George II, then fighting against King George III. George Washington was born into a landowning family in Virginia and was expected to become a gentleman planter like his forebears. But the appeal of adventure on the frontier drew him to enlist – with no formal military training ‒ as a militia officer. Five years of tough campaigning followed, defending the

Risky Ryan will give Romney’s campaign the pep it needs

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

Paul Ryan, the right choice

Congressman Paul Ryan (R – Wisconsin) has not courted much of a profile outside America, so I doubt many CoffeeHousers will be familiar with him. But rest assured: he is an excellent choice for vice-president. Here’s why. The 42-year-old is not a neophyte, having served in the House of Representatives for 13 years. He has cross-party appeal: he represents a Democratic district that he nonetheless has won comfortably on seven occasions. Ryan knows how to listen to and speak to Democrats. This is a priceless skill for a Republican running for the second highest office in the land. Two traits define him: his striking command of public policy (especially on

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s big idea

Mitt Romney has broken the habit of a lifetime and taken a risk. But it’s an intelligent risk. That at least is the view of some commentators on hearing confirmation that Romney has appointed Paul Ryan as his running mate. Niall Ferguson tweeted earlier: ‘Romney gets it right with Ryan. Now this election gets serious. It’s a straight fight between radical fiscal reform and Europeanization.’ David Frum makes a similar point (albeit with a clear note of scepticism) in a blog post for the Daily Beast: ‘This election—which Romney once intended to make a referendum on Obama’s record—will now become a referendum on Paul Ryan’s bold budget ideas.’ Frum provides

Mitt Romney picks Paul Ryan

Mitt Romney will announce his choice of running mate at one o’clock this afternoon, but members of the campaign have already confirmed his identity: Congressman Paul Ryan. I reported yesterday that the Republican right has been pressuring Romney to pick Ryan, and it looks like he’s bowed to that pressure. Despite having served as chairman of the House Budget Committee for the past year and a half – and his high profile role in budget negotiations – Ryan is still relatively unknown. A new CNN poll shows that only 27 per cent of Americans have a favourable view of the Congressman and 19 per cent an unfavourable one, which means

Romney’s not-so-boring white guy

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

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