Us politics

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Yesterday’s big speech

I suspect that the most important political speech delivered yesterday was not Ed Miliband’s address to Labour conference, but Chris Christie’s one at the Reagan Library in California. The governor of New Jersey is coming under mounting pressure from the Republican establishment to run for president; they view him as the party’s best chance of capitalising on President Obama’s electoral vulnerability. This speech was striking for its political dexterity. It is not a base-pleasing red-meat speech, but rather one designed to reach out to those who voted for Obama last time; those who grown disillusioned by how he has governed. Perhaps, the most effective part of it came when he

Friday

James Forsyth

Preparing for the US Presidential election

One thing British politics has yet to rise up to is how possible it is that Barack Obama might lose next year. All the pollsters have his approval rating in negative territory, Gallup has him down by ten, and the American economy looks likely to deteriorate between now and November 2012. But the big thing in Obama’s favour is the weakness of the Republican field. Bill Kristol’s cry of pain about the quality on show in last night’s primary debate sums up Republican establishment worries that none of the candidates cut it. We can now expect another push to get a new candidate into the race. Chris Christie, the governor

Thursday

Daniel Korski

The new Israel and Palestine question

The halls of the UN are packed with presidents and foreign ministers. But for all the thousands of subjects under discussion, this year’s General Assembly will be remembered for one issue only: the Palestinian statehood application. Mahmoud Abbas has made clear he wants to proceed, despite the reality of a US veto. In the end, it may not come down a showdown. If an application is made to the UN Security Council, the issue will likely go to a sub-committee of the full UNSC and take quite some time before it comes to a vote, whatever the Palestinians may want. That is why the US prefers the option to a

Friday

Daniel Korski

The Israel Palestine question

After a hiatus, the Middle East Peace Process is about to return to the international stage. The Palestinians are pushing at the UN for recognition. Nobody knows yet what they will actually ask for: full statehood or just upgrading their UN status to “non-member”. But, whatever the language of the resolution, the issue will be contentious. By some estimates, 126 states are poised to back the Palestinian request, including France, India, Brazil, Spain. The US will not support a Palestinian move, nor is Germany likely to. Britain remains undecided, hoping to help the Palestinians draft a resolution that other Europeans can sign up to. It’s not clear what Britain and

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Authenticity or bust?

Mitt Romney won the Atlanticist vote last night by saying he’d bring back a bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office. That’s a reference, obviously, to Barack Obama’s decision, soon after moving into the White House, to have the bronze removed. That decision caused a lot of bother. When the story broke, the Obama machine insisted that the bust’s removal was part of a routine changeover between presidents. But British hacks shouted ‘Anglophobia’ and pronounced the Special Relationship dead. The British embassy in Washington received masses of letters from Americans apologising for this great slight against Britannia. Never in the field of human history has so much been made

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Obama’s plan B: tax cuts

Washington, DC The clue is in the name. A stimulus is supposed to stimulate, and Obama’s first attempt stimulated nothing more than the American national debt. So he’s trying again, with a $447 billion package (he’s careful not to call it a “stimulus”) in what will probably be his last roll of the pre-election dice. But $245 billion of it would be debt-financed tax cuts.  Not sales tax cuts, the type of which Ed Balls is prescribing for Britain. It’s all payroll tax cuts: reducing the tax on jobs in the hope of encouraging more hiring. Given the temporary nature of the tax cuts, I doubt this will be the

Jonathan Jones

Rubio for VP?

Just under a year from now, Republicans will meet in Tampa, Florida for their National Convention, at which their candidate to take on President Obama will be nominated. So too will that candidate’s running mate: the man or woman hoping to oust Joe Biden and become the 48th Vice President of the United States. The choice of VP candidate will be one of the biggest decisions facing whichever of the Presidential hopefuls emerges victorious in the primaries. Right now, the clear favourite to be selected is Marco Rubio. The betting markets give him around a one-in-three chance of being chosen, making him at least four times as likely as anyone

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Obama’s field of dreams?

The striking thing about last night’s Republican Party debate was just how bad the leading GOP candidates are. Rick Perry, the new favourite, isn’t terribly bright. (“Perry is like Will Ferrell doing Bush, but on half-speed,” is how David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, put it.) Mitt Romney is an oily cheese merchant who keeps contradicting himself. And Bachmann is bonkers. With the USA in such a poor state, you might think President Obama would be in danger of losing the White House. But the Republican party is incapable of offering a coherent and sensible alternative. The most interesting candidates are Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul, but they don’t seem

Daniel Korski

Newsflash: Americans and Europeans like each other

A decade has passed since the attacks of 9/11 and so much water has flown under the proverbial bridge. Today, ordinary Americans don’t want to have a leadership role in the world, and Europeans aren’t too keen on it either. And having dithered over what to do about Guantanamo Bay, most people in the US and Europe don’t trust President Obama’s counter-terrorist policies. Right? No, actually wrong. According to the tenth-annual public opinion survey of the general public in the United States, Turkey, and 12 European Union member states – the Transatlantic Trends – 54 per cent of respondents from European countries surveyed want the United States to show strong leadership in world

Friday

Freddy Gray

Gripped by ‘Dominion’

What on earth is ‘Dominionism’? Lots of Americans who first heard the word just a few weeks ago are suddenly feeling very angry about it. Liberals say that the US constitution is facing a ‘Dominionist threat’ in the form of Michele Bachman and Rick Perry, two Republicans running for president in 2012. Christian conservatives, meanwhile, cry prejudice: they accuse a secularist elite of conducting a witch-hunt against Christians in politics.   What’s the fuss? Dominionism is, we are told, a school of evangelical thought that aims to impose Biblical law over secular government. It is to nutty Evangelicals what Shariah Law is to Islamists,­ a way of achieving theocracy on earth.

Saturday

Jonathan Jones

Rick Perry soars in the polls, but for how long?

His presidential campaign is just a fortnight old, and already Rick Perry is soaring in the polls. The three major national surveys conducted since his announcement all give Perry double-digit leads over previous frontrunner Mitt Romney. He has also, importantly, taken the lead in Iowa and is now odds on to win both there and in South Carolina come February. This is certainly an encouraging position for a new candidate, but history suggests that Perry supporters should temper their optimism with a heavy dose of caution. Until the autumn of 2007, Rudy Giuliani led the Republican field by a similar margin to the one Perry has now. And Hillary Clinton’s

Saturday

Jonathan Jones

The Republican battle steps up a gear

This is perhaps the biggest weekend yet in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. The candidates clashed on Thursday night in their third televised debate, and will contest the traditionally important Ames Straw Poll in Iowa today. In truth, as Alex says, neither the debate nor the straw poll will have that big an impact on the race. More significant is an event taking place more than a thousand miles from Ames, in Charleston, South Carolina. There, Texas Governor Rick Perry will announce his entry to the race. And judging by current polling and betting trends, he will start out as joint favourite. Until now, Mitt Romney has

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Why we need a post-riot inquiry

Today we learnt that David Cameron is looking at the experience of Los Angeles’ recovery from the 1992 riots. The first lesson he should learn is the value of an inquiry, as Ed Miliband suggests. Californian policymakers held an inquiry, and it taught them plenty about the nature of modern poverty, urban unrest — and how to tackle it. Part of the reason that poverty in Britain is so ingrained is because so few politicians look at it in any detail, and even mentioning the word ‘underclass’ solicits squeals of disapproval. We remain aloof. As I argued in the magazine last month, we like harmless sketches about British poverty (Rab

Saturday

Jonathan Jones

Why Obama is still odds on for re-election — just

A credit downgrade, unemployment at 9.1 per cent, spluttering growth — the economic cards are certainly stacked against Obama for his re-election in 2012. But here’s the thing: American punters still think that he’s more likely to win next November than not. Perhaps that’s because, contrary to Clinton’s famous slogan, it’s not actually all about the economy. According to Nate Silver’s analysis of the last 25 presidential elections, a better rule of thumb is “it’s half the economy and half everything else, stupid”. So if Obama’s losing the first half, what about the “everything else”? The proportion of Americans telling Gallup they approve of Obama’s performance hit a new low

Peter Hoskin

Would the Darling Plan have satisfied the credit rating agencies?

Why have we retained our AAA credit rating despite, by S&P’s figures, suffering a larger debt-GDP ratio than America? The Taxpayers’ Alliance’s Matthew Sinclair answers the question in some detail here, but one passage from S&P’s own analysis stands out. They explain that: “When comparing the U.S. to sovereigns with ‘AAA’ long-term ratings that we view as relevant peers–Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K.–we also observe, based on our base case scenarios for each, that the trajectory of the U.S.’s net public debt is diverging from the others. Including the U.S., we estimate that these five sovereigns will have net general government debt to GDP ratios this year ranging from

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

America continues to unravel

The humbling of America — the cover theme of this week’s Spectator — continues with S&P stripping Uncle Sam of his AAA credit rating. The debt downgrade, it says, “reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.” In other words: Obama’s still addicted to debt, and it’s time to stop pretending that his government’s IOU notes rank among the safest investments on earth. Its analysis seems to be pretty much that made by Christopher Caldwell in his brilliant cover story. This move will, as today’s

Friday

Peter Hoskin

The markets wax and wane

CoffeeHouser ‘Ben G’ had it right in his comment underneath my earlier post: 24 hour news really does struggle in the face of economic crisis. This morning, all the talk was of a debt-induced apocalypse. Earlier this afternoon, the headlines were about the markets “rallying” after better-than-expected data on the US labour market. And now the BBC website’s main headline is that “turmoil in the stock market persists,” despite those very same labour market figures. Oh yes, it’s difficult to present a consistent front as the money merchants sway and buckle in the breeze. That said, the economic fundamentals remain discouraging. It shouldn’t be forgotten that yesterday’s losses were extraordinary;

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

An open letter to Will Straw about deficit reduction…

…or why the US cuts are actually faster than, and just as deep as, ours. Dear Will, We hope you don’t mind us writing a letter-form response to your latest post on Left Foot Forward, which argues that the “coalition government’s cuts are deeper and faster than the Tea Party’s”. But, as we see it, there are several problems with your figures which are easier to explain in a conversational format. Here they are, as best as we can express them: i) The first obvious problem comes when you say that Obama set out $83 billion of deficit reduction for 2012 in his March Budget. Actually, he didn’t. The Congressional

Peter Hoskin

The House of Representatives passes the debt deal, as Giffords returns

After all that, the House of Representatives has passed the bill to raise America’s debt ceiling, by 269 votes to 161. But, for all the economic significance of last night, it was the vote of one woman that really set proceedings alight. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords returned to the floor of the House for the first time since surviving an assassination attempt in January, to vote ‘yes’: And in less heartening news, Vladimir Putin has described America as a “parasite” on the global economy. 

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Apocalypse averted?

At last, signs that Washington’s lawmakers may have scrabbled together a debt deal after all. According to the overnight wires, the White House and Congressional leaders have alighted on a package that would raise the ceiling by $2.4 trillion, so long as the deficit is reduced by at least the same amount over the next ten years. There are more details here, but the key claim is that around $1.2 trillion of immediate spending cuts have already been agreed upon, with a Congressional committee to recommend further deficit reduction measures by the end of November. And although these proposals will still have to pass through the corridors of Congress, leaders