Us politics

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

Right thinking

David Frum has spoken for American conservatism for a generation – now he despairs of it David Frum has been a major force in American conservatism for more than 20 years. He was a speechwriter in President George W. Bush’s first administration and is said to have coined the phrase ‘axis of evil’. In the last few years, however, he has fallen out with the leading conservative magazine, National Review, the leading conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and the leading conservative TV network, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. He is an active political blogger at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, where he regularly deplores Republican intransigence and bloody-mindedness. Rather

Romney’s Donald Trump problem

When Obama brilliantly skewered Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last year, you might’ve thought the billionaire would slink off the political field. But, to the great glee of Team Obama, ‘The Donald’ is still keen to keep playing. Ever since Trump’s endorsement of Mitt Romney back in February, the Democrats have been attacking Romney by association (‘They both like firing people’, they said, tying Romney’s ‘I like being able to fire people’ gaffe to Trump’s famous Apprentice catchphrase).   And yesterday, the Obama campaign put out an ad attacking Romney for not denouncing Trump’s claims that the President wasn’t born in the US, contrasting it with the

Obama vs Balls

What do Ed Balls and Mitt Romney have in common? They both want you to think that Barack Obama is spending government money like never before. For Mitt Romney, it’s an attack: he wants to make Obama a Big Government bogeyman who’s failing to tackle America’s deficit. ‘I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno,’ the Republican nominee promises. For Ed Balls, it’s an example for Britain to follow: ‘I will lead us into this debt and spending inferno’, the shadow chancellor promises. Well, essentially. But the Obama camp is pushing back hard against such claims, highlighting a Wall Street Journal article yesterday titled ‘Obama spending binge

Iran and oil are still on the agenda

For all the talk about Greece and France and the Eurozone, it’s telling just how much our politicians are focusing on Iran. Indeed, some of the most concrete political settlements of the past few days have concerned that turbulent state. On Friday, the US Congress approved a Bill which included the blunt reminder that, ‘It shall be the policy of the United States to take all necessary measures, including military action if required, to prevent Iran from threatening the United States, its allies or Iran’s neighbours with a nuclear weapon.’ And the G8 subsequently put out a statement about oil reserves that clearly had Iran in mind. ‘Looking ahead to

Romney seeks ‘incredibly boring white guy’

With just over three months to go to the Republican convention, what sort of vice presidential nominee is Mitt Romney looking for? Well, a Republican official ‘familiar with the campaign’s thinking’ tells Politico that what they want is an ‘incredibly boring white guy’. You see, the Romney campaign is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 2008 McCain campaign — including his choice of Sarah Palin as his candidate for the vice presidency. So they’re looking for a much safer — and more conventional — pick who won’t do any damage to Romney’s chances. This approach would rule out Florida Senator Marco Rubio (not boring or white enough), who

The folly of Cameron’s gay marriage culture war

For some time now, a growing number of Tory MPs have been quietly informing the whips that they will not be voting to support gay marriage. They’ve been getting letters from their constituents, and even those in favour of the idea know that they can’t afford to support it. When a cabinet member spoke to the whips office recently, he was given a startling reply: don’t worry, it will never come to a vote. The consultation is ongoing, but the agenda is being dropped. The effect it’s having on the morale of the Tory grassroots is calamitous. I look at this fiasco in my Daily Telegraph column today, and here

Obama comes out for gay marriage

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player It isn’t just this side of the Atlantic where same-sex marriage is very much on the political agenda. Here, the Prime Minister gave it his support in his October conference speech, and the government is pressing ahead with plans to legislate for it before the next election, under the leadership of Lib Dem equalities minister Lynne Featherstone. Meanwhile, across the pond, Barack Obama gave his support for equal marriage last night. In an interview with ABC News (above), he said: ‘At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same

Chen Guangcheng: a blind, Chinese Houdini

Even in a Beijing Spring of ceaseless surprises, the escape of the blind dissident lawyer Chen Guangcheng from rural house arrest into American protection was a sensation. The sensation soon turned into a catastrophe for him and humiliation for the United States. After his astounding escape 2 weeks ago from 18 months of house arrest and arrival at the US embassy in Beijing, Chen stated he had no intention of leaving China. Six days later he was assured by his American hosts, who now say he had cancer, that he must go to a Chinese hospital for treatment and be reunited with his and then would be free, perhaps to

Obama’s words meet with the Taliban’s bombs

Political theatre, that’s what Barack Obama delivered in Afghanistan last night. A year on from the death of Osama Bin Laden, and with the US elections fast approaching, here was the President reheating his existing timetable for withdrawal — and offering it up as reassurance for weary Afghans and Americans alike. There were some new details, courtesy of an ‘Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement’ signed with Hamid Karzai, but this was mostly about the symbolism and rhetoric. As Obama put it himself, ‘We can see the light of a new day on the horizon.’ Except this ‘new day’ quickly slipped back into night. A couple of hours after Obama had left

Blooper reels won’t dethrone Obama

This compilation of President Obama’s gaffes is going viral, as they say.     Quite amusing. There’s something satisfying about seeing that ‘President Cool’  isn’t such a smooth operator. Obama is good with teleprompters, but he blunders when extemporising. It’s mostly forgotten that, in the 2008 debates against Hillary Clinton, he often looked and sounded out of his depth.   Still, it is a bit hysterical — and humourless — for Gary L Bauer to call his video ’53 seconds that should end the Obama presidency’, in reference to Rick Perry’s infamous disaster answer in a debate.   Voters don’t really care about presidential bloopers. And is it wise for

America’s version of the ‘tax the rich’ debate

While the battle continues to rage over the government’s plan to cap tax relief, on the other side of the Atlantic the US bill that inspired it has been killed. The ‘Paying a Fair Share Act 2012’ — more commonly known as the ‘Buffett Rule’ after billionaire Warren Buffett — failed to get the votes it needed to be debated in the Senate. It was backed by a majority of senators, with 51 voting ‘Yea’ to 45 ‘Nay’s, but fell short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. Fraser explained on Friday how Obama’s efforts to ensure that — as the President puts it — ‘If you make

How Mitt Romney inspired the British charity tax debacle

How is Mitt Romney linked to the charity tax debacle? I thought I’d pass on to CoffeeHousers an explanation which passed on to me about the origins of this latest mess. It dates back to the point in the Budget negotiations where Nick Clegg had finally persuaded Osborne to introduce a Mansion Tax. A major coup for his party — but Cameron vetoed, thinking it’d hurt Boris in London. Clegg is annoyed, tells Osborne he can’t have his 40p tax, but he still has a problem. A Lib Dem spring conference is coming up — so what will he announce? He hunts for a new idea. The Thursday before the