Nat's Blog

US Elections: Special 2009 Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:54:00 +0000

Republicans are rejoicing in their victories, but the details tell a more ambiguous story.

The Republican party has had an exceptionally bad few years, reeling from a stint in control of Congress that can charitably be described as an abject abandonment of conservative principles, and descending from there into a morass of ideological retrenchment and electoral collapse. No wonder, then, that Republicans are delighted with the results of this year’s elections: governorships won from Democrats in Virginia (where the popular incumbent, the Democrat Tim Kaine, was not standing because of term limits) and New Jersey (a blue state if ever there was one). Mayoral elections provided further success, and the icing on the cake was Maine – one of the most liberal states in the Union – voting in a referendum to repeal a law legalising gay marriage. Only a couple of off-year House seats spoiled the party.

But national Republicans are wrong to be overjoyed with these results. True, they provide much-needed momentum for the party; true, too, that they are egg in the face for the Obama administration, which had sent the President to campaign in both Virginia and New Jersey (the latter more enthusiastically than the former) for the Democratic candidates. But they are hardly the repudiation of the Obama administration that its critics had hoped for. Exit polls in both states showed a majority of voters approving of the President’s performance thus far. (Both states voted for Obama last November.) The victorious Republican candidates generally distanced themselves from the socially-conservative hardliners ascendant in the party’s internal debates. And the election for the House seat in New York state provided a nasty little surprise for the party.

The relevant district in New York has been represented (in one form or another) by Republicans for over a century, and the election was forced by President Obama tapping its incumbent Congressman to be Secretary of the Army. The district should have been a lock for a resurgent Republican party – and it might well have been, had Republicans stuck with their original candidate, Dede Scozzafava, a local Republican whose moderate tone on issues like abortion and gay marriage matches the general attitude in New England. Unfortunately for the party’s establishment, local capital-c Conservatives were appalled by some of Ms Scozzafava’s opinions and started jumping ship for Doug Hoffman, running for the local Conservative Party. The race quickly became the talk of the blogosphere and Mr Hoffman picked up numerous endorsements (including from potential 2012 Presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty, and media personalities Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck). As he gained steam, Ms Scozzafava found her campaign being completely undermined by her own side, and by last weekend she had had enough, announcing that she was dropping out of the race. She then stunned party bigwigs by making a White House-facilitated endorsement of her Democratic challenger over Mr Hoffman. Mr Hoffman duly lost.

The race had shades of the moronic attempt by the Democratic “Netroots” to oust Joe Lieberman from his Connecticut senate seat in 2006: a very moderate party member castigated by the fringes for being too soft, leading to a perverse outcome in which a suitably hardline candidate is duly defeated, handing a very winnable seat over to opponents instead. The reason why Republicans should remain worried at the national level is that the party’s strategy for a 1994-esque congressional sweep in 2010 could very easily be the same strategy that led to defeat in New York. Certainly, the Democratic mess in Connecticut in 2006 occurred in the context of a broader Democratic victory, with Democrats successfully broadening their party’s base by running candidates who were pro-gun and anti-abortion (hence the strength of “Blue Dog” democrats in Congress today). The Republicans have indeed been trying to attract moderate candidates for the House and Senate to run in swing states. But some of them – like Florida Governor Charlie Crist, now running for the Senate – are facing hard line primary challenges. Too many Republicans are still stuck with the illusion that the return path to power lies in embracing supposedly neglected basic principles – i.e. becoming more hard line, not less. Candidates like Ms Scozzafava – the precise sort of moderate candidate that Republicans will need to run when they eventually begin winning seats in blue states again – are currently being hounded out of contention.

In line with this, this week’s victorious Republican gubernatorial candidates distanced themselves from big-C Conservative principles and won largely because of local issues, not national ones. In Virginia, state Democrats sabotaged themselves by nominating a little-known figure ahead of a party heavyweight, Clinton stalwart Terry McAuliffe, who had a significant edge in fundraising and campaigning panache but ran into trouble before the primaries. The candidate, R. Creigh Deeds, was lacklustre and underfunded and would have had difficulty winning in the best of times. Robert McDonnell, the Republican candidate, kept quiet about social issues and hammered Mr Deeds on the economy; the surge of voters who turned out for Barack Obama last year stayed at home, and Mr McDonnell romped to victory. In New Jersey, meanwhile, the incumbent governor Jon Corzine had a lacklustre term in office, failing to achieve very much and conspicuously not bringing to bear the skills he had allegedly picked up as a Wall Street bigwig. (Governor Corzine used to be a senior executive at Goldman Sachs.) With Wall Street bigwigs being fairly unpopular anyway right now, Corzine was also facing an uphill battle, and engaged in an unpleasantly negative race. His opponent, despite being light on policy details, had won respect as an effective federal prosecutor who had several big corruption cases under his belt. He also benefitted simply from not being Corzine.

Republicans should not count on these factors presenting themselves again in 2010 at the national level. (They have a much better chance at picking up State governorships, where local issues predominate and Democrats have more to defend.) Democrats will be led by President Obama, an altogether different figure from the ineffective candidates Democrats fielded this time. And by that point, the political landscape may have changed significantly. Republicans need to change with it if they want to get anywhere.

In any case, they will have to be lucky, as the ball is mostly in Obama’s court at present. Less than a year in to his presidency, it’s unsurprising that he hasn’t achieved a vast amount yet – but the size of his pile of work in progress issues is impressive, and at some point in the next few months he will start to deliver. The economy is already picking up: thanks to the timely and effective stimulus and bailout packages started by the Bush administration and seamlessly continued into the Obama administration, the threat of a catastrophic failure in the financial system has faded and the imbalances in the American economy are beginning to unwind. Many bailed out banks have already paid back the government (at a hefty rate of interest), and more are doing so all the time; the car industry has also passed its nadir, as evidenced by GM’s decision this week to reverse its panicky sale of its main European subsidiary. Unemployment is currently the biggest factor contributing to economic misery, but it is a lagging indicator that will probably reach its nadir within the next six months. The broader economy is already starting to grow again. After a difficult winter, the Obama administration will be able to announce a string of good pieces of economic news through the summer and into next autumn.

On other initiatives, too, the benefits lie somewhere just around the corner. The flagship post-stimulus effort has been on healthcare reform, which has now tortuously emerged from committees and is close to being put to the floor of the House and Senate. It needs to be passed in both places, reconciled between the two chambers, and then passed by both chambers again. This will take several more months. In the meantime, passions will run high. The eventual form that the reform will take is unclear, but it is likely to be unsatisfactory to just about everyone. (Conservatives will be dismayed by the growth of government and the failure to reform horrendous medical tort laws, liberals appalled by the apparent retreat from the promise to make sure that provision is universal.) Nevertheless, a final version will likely be passed at some point this winter. Once the battle is over, passions will cool, and even the limited reforms that are achieved will be hailed – quite rightly – as considerably better than nothing. Health care will not be a hot-button issue in the 2010 campaigns.

The other signature legislative initiative moving forward at the moment is climate change legislation. The US is under intense international pressure to have a plan of its own (after the disgraceful, deliberate non-activity of the Bush administration), and the sentiment is shared by a large and growing swathe of American society. Although Congress will probably not be able to pass anything before December’s global climate-change summit in Copenhagen, most likely some sort of bill will make it into law before next summer to establish a cap and trade scheme. Like healthcare – and similar to comparable international efforts on climate change, like the European Union’s cap and trade scheme – this bill will likely be flawed in several important ways. But when it passes, Democrats will have three major pieces of progress under their belts (the economy, healthcare, and climate change). Republicans can influence the narrative on how these achievements are perceived, but without any sort of constructive policies of their own they will struggle to rival a party in power which is actually getting things done.

The main risks faced by Democrats, then, relate to a failure to deliver rather than to a resurgent Republican party. If the economy takes a turn for the worse – or if there is some sort of general tax hike to address the budget deficit before a recovery is safely entrenched – then they will lose credibility on their economic management. If the health care or climate change bills fail to pass, the initiative will have been lost and grave doubts will surface over Democrats’ ability to pass important legislation.

Another risk comes from foreign affairs, which the Obama administration has placed on the backburner (and has not been especially adept at managing thus far). A crisis, handled badly, could hurt a lot. Afghanistan is the likeliest place to generate such a crisis. While it would be disingenuous to accuse the Obama administration of “dithering” over Afghan policy (as Dick Cheney has), at some point a new policy will need to be announced. There are no good options on the table. The present situation is untenable. An Afghan surge could fail, and there is little enthusiasm for it after the awful mess of Hamid Karzai’s rigged re-election. But a retreat to a more surgical attitude towards eliminating al-Qaeda operatives risks abandoning the rest of the country to the Taliban (making the task of fighting al-Qaeda considerably harder), and has the added risk of making Obama look soft on security. Any right-thinking person ought to grit their teeth at such awful oversimplification of complicated strategic choices, but the simple fact of the matter is that a drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan that is followed by a terrorist attack in the United States – even if the two are unrelated – will destroy Obama’s presidency in an instant. The Obama administration will need to be both wise and lucky to manage Afghanistan successfully.

But assuming that Afghanistan doesn’t blow up, that the economy is once more gathering steam by next summer, and both health care and climate change go through by the end of next Spring – all, on balance, more likely than not – Democrats will actually be in a pretty good place going into the 2010 midterm elections. It was memorably pointed out – I forget by whom, though it may have been Joe Klein – that when pundits talk about spending political capital, it’s opinion poll points that they’re talking about. As soon as rhetoric begins its journey into reality, it is inevitable that some starry-eyed supporters will find their hopes dashed. By taking on so many big issues all at once, Obama has been playing a dangerous game with his support base – meaning that the real story in American politics at the moment is that he is winning it. It is striking how well his polling numbers are holding up. The President is consistently given a majority approval rating, and although this has been eroding down into the low 50s, it is line with past successful presidents at equivalent stages in their presidencies. It will improve when results flow in. The Democrats have all of the policy-making initiative at present, and are making good use of it; it is up to them how well positioned they will be by next summer.

Republicans, meanwhile, are not full of ideas, and don’t really know what they stand for at present. Opposition to whatever legislation is on the table is all very well, but a party looking to retake control needs to have credible alternatives, which Republicans largely don’t. Their opposition will be meaningless when the eventual bills get passed. More importantly, the Republican party at the moment is ideologically exhausted and retreating to its fringes. Its most charismatic leaders seem to be people on the rabid fringe like Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal; loons like Michele Bachmann are getting their moment in the sun; responsible, competent administrators are either bending towards the loony end (Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney) or keeping their heads down and trying not to get too involved in the in-fighting (Charlie Crist, Arnold Schwarzenegger). Glenn Beck seems to be taking over from Rush Limbaugh as the most visible voice on the right.

Naturally, such figures on the far-right advocate a return to core principles. For ideologues on both ends of the spectrum, such a move is always the answer: it’s what Howard Dean and the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic party advocated so strongly in 2004 (hence the Lieberman fiasco), and in a comparative context (of 2-party systems) it can be seen as a fairly normal course of action for parties who have lost their way. In Britain, it was a major factor in making Labour unelectable in the 1980s (too far left) and in keeping the Conservatives unelectable after 1997 (too far right).

Such a strategy is an illusion. People haven’t gone off Republicans because they have been insufficiently anti-government, insufficiently anti-abortion or insufficiently anti-gay. It’s because Republican policies to fight the government have failed to shrink it but succeeded in hobbling its effectiveness; policies to restrict abortion have gotten nowhere; and policies to fight gay marriage have become tone-deaf in an era where a battle that is primarily symbolic has to compete for the attention of people who have bigger things to worry about and are increasingly tolerant of homosexuality anyway.

In short, Republican strategy is still stuck in Reagan-era mindsets and Bush-era tactics. But Reagan succeeded in a different time and place, and in any case had a mainstream charm and feel-good factor that no current Republican can even come close to replicating. And Bush’s political tactics succeeded so well in 2000, 2002 and 2004 because they stuck it to a divided, demoralised and chaotic Democratic party while maximising turnout by turbocharging the loony fringe.

Nowadays, the loony fringe has captured the party: the bedrock of moderate voters who reliably leaned Republican, especially outside of the South, has been substantially eroded. In large part this has happened because of the Republican agenda whilst in power; Republicans had eight years of President Bush in which to enact their agenda, and their failure to do so with successful results is what alienated so many moderates. The Republican agenda right now is substantially unchanged. It may continue to turbo-charge the loony fringe, but so long as Democrats manage to generate decent turnout of their own (a major issue for them in Virginia and New Jersey), that loony fringe will not be able to capture the country. (Even if it did, it would be turfed out before too long: voters outraged at Bush’s policies but jaded in a post-Obama funk would rediscover their passion fairly quickly if faced by a resurgent Republican party in its current state.)

One day – within the next decade – a moderate Republican party will begin to re-emerge. Its main emphasis will be competence and pragmatism, it will have softened its stance on homosexuality and (perhaps) the primary importance of religion in the public sphere, and it will be fielding candidates like Charlie Crist nationally and like Dede Scozzafava in blue parts of the country. That party will take back Congress and the Presidency. Its radical elements will be sidelined.

Today’s Republicans are not that party. Its victorious candidates this week were fighting against the grain of the party’s present direction; the candidates who best represented its current ethos were defeated. As we look beyond this week’s elections towards 2010 and 2012, the ball is mostly in the Democrats’ court. And Republicans won’t have a chance of sustainably returning to power until they raise their game a lot more than they have so far.

About the Japan posts...

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:57:00 +0000

Now that I've moved to Japan to work in schools, it occurs to me that blogging in public about the experience might be a tad unprofessional. So I'm afraid the Japan blogs will only be appearing on Facebook.

If you'd like to receive email copies though, let me know and I'll add you to the list! Just drop me an email.

Any more general blog posts will doubtless end up on here as well.

Why charities are businesses – and should act like it

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:37:00 +0000

I finished my internship at Intelligent Giving last week, and one of the more interesting debates (of many) that came up was on the subject of precisely how much organisations in the charity sector can learn from for-profit businesses. The answer I would tend towards – “a lot” – actually resolved itself in my mind into a more controversial conclusion: that charities are, effectively, businesses themselves.

Is a charity a business? At first blush, the question seems obvious: of course a charity isn’t a business. Businesses are out to make money. Charities are out to help people. They’re entirely different concepts.

But look closer, and the differences blur away. There are commercial organisations which don’t set out to make profits – according to the Guardian, Aravind Eye Hospitals in India does around two-thirds of its cataract operations for free, and still manages to comfortably cover its costs. Meanwhile, there are charities which run up large annual surpluses - ORBIS Charitable Trust only spent about three-quarters of its income in 2007, equivalent to a massive 24% profit margin. Some businesses run loss-making divisions with charitable purposes, such as the pro bono work done by large law firms and consultancies. Some charities run large commercial subsidiaries which set out to profit-maximise in a classically businesslike way.

The key factor in deciding whether a given organisation is a charity or a business seems to be how it sees itself: pretty much any given organisation will define itself in one way or the other. To the extent that you can tell charities and businesses apart simply by asking them how they define themselves, the distinction seems to be safe.

But the distinction is overrated. Businesses and charities are both formal organisations. Many charities are registered companies. And a charity with its own legal personality has a formal responsibility to use its resources for a specific purpose. It therefore needs to organise itself in such a way as to effectively raise the money to carry out its work and to effectively spend that money to achieve its result.

In this regard, at least, there is no difference whatsoever between a charity and a business. Charities have their charitable objectives; businesses simply have a responsibility to maximise their profits while behaving in a manner acceptable to their owners. Both organisations need to manage themselves internally in order to achieve their objectives.

And the simple truth is that a lot of the organisational activities that charities carry out are identical to those carried out by businesses, as are many of the organisational problems that they face. How do you attract, retain, and train the best people? How do you structure your organisation’s workforce? How do you use technology so as to be most effective? How do you make sure that you have adequate controls over your spending, and how do you make sure that it’s all properly accounted for? All of these questions are faced by both charities and businesses.

Even in the crucial activities which form the core of any given organisation’s work, the differences are smaller than you think. The main difference is that charities don’t expect their customers to pay for the goods or services rendered. The difference between Oxfam’s famine relief and companies selling food? Oxfam’s food is paid for by people who don’t eat it. The difference between ORBIS and local ophthalmologists? Patients have to pay for their cataract operations at local ophthalmologists. Sometimes, companies which donate goods or services are essentially behaving like charities: when a law firm does pro bono work, it’s doing the exact same thing as charities are: providing help to people who can’t afford to help themselves. And charities which derive income from their charitable activities are essentially behaving like businesses.

In short, the provision of goods or services, whatever they may be, is done both by charities and by businesses. The only difference lies in the revenue model. Generally speaking, with businesses, customers pay for goods. With charities, donors do.

It’s even possible to overstate the importance of the profit motive as a crucial difference. Businesses certainly do work to maximise their net income, but as a great many people in the non-profit sector would tell you, the work that a charity does is rewarding in a different way. People working for charities are still being rewarded – they just derive their reward from the knowledge that they’re helping others, rather than from the prospect of a fat paycheck at the end of each month.

The implication from this is not only that charities are, essentially, just businesses which have a specific type of goal. It’s also that charities have a lot to learn from commercial businesses because of the implications of their different revenue structures. A business whose “beneficiary” is also its “donor” will tend to behave differently to a charity where the two roles are separated.

Consider a private individual buying a car: after getting as much information as possible about which car is best, the individual will then find out for themselves exactly how good a car is simply by driving it after the purchase. The car dealership therefore has an incentive to make sure that the cars it sells are of as high a quality as possible, and will engage in a number of activities to make sure that it does this as well as it can. If the car it sells is of a bad quality, the customer won’t return.

Compare this to a (totally made-up) charity which operates a car dealership where donors buy cars for poor people. The donor can still come to the dealership and get as much information as possible about the car, but after they pay for it, they have no idea if it turns out to have been a good car or not. Only the beneficiary can tell you that. But if the only way that the donor can find out about the quality of what they’ve paid for is by asking the dealership, then the easiest path for the car dealership is to just tell the donor that all the cars it sold were fantastic and that all the beneficiaries were really happy with them. This charity car dealership wouldn’t really have an incentive to be completely transparent to the donor about the quality of the cars it sells. It could get away with selling rubbish cars, and would still keep its income so long as it told a good story to its donors. And if beneficiaries can’t get a car anywhere else, they’ll keep accepting cars from the charity dealership no matter how bad their cars are.

Which is why charities can learn a lot from business. If a charity genuinely wants to operate responsibly, it doesn’t just need to be completely honest with its donors – which is what Intelligent Giving works to encourage – it also needs to strive to be as effective as possible. The organisations which have an incentive to be the most effective are the profit-making ones. Charities should therefore take a strong interest in how commercial businesses delivering similar goods or services operate. The charity car dealership, for example, has the potential to greatly improve the quality of its service by copying the activities that the commercial car dealership carries out to maximise its own quality standards.

This applies to pretty much anything that a charity can do, especially if it’s a large one. Medical charities can learn from private clinics. Famine relief charities can learn from private supply chains. Grant givers can learn from venture capitalists. There will, of course, be many things that commercial businesses do that charities would not wish to emulate: in our example, if the commercial car dealership puts mahogany panelling and surround sound speakers in its cars, the charity could reasonably decide that it has no reason to emulate that. But there will be many things that the commercial business does that the charity could usefully copy, for example advanced methods of quality control in relation to the car parts it uses. And commercial organisations which have figured out methods for cutting costs can often be copied wholesale.

(Naturally, charities can sometimes be more efficient than for-profit organisations. This is particularly true when it comes to reducing waste: charity workers do face certain incentives of their own, particularly the moral incentive not to waste money on non-charitable activities. Where this is the case, for-profit organisations can learn from the ways in which charities do things. The learnings need to go both ways.)

None of this should really be controversial. Many charities are already working hard at making sure that they hold themselves accountable to their beneficiaries, precisely because of the disconnect between donor and beneficiary as discussed above. (This follows critiques such as William Easterly’s 2006 book The White Man’s Burden.) But attitudes towards the commercial sector which continue to caricature it as grasping, greedy and faintly immoral need to change. Charities and businesses often do similar things, and can learn from each other. Charities are finding that commercial standards of organisation, career models, branding and customer service can make a big difference to their effectiveness. Businesses are finding that employees who can take part in ethical or charitable activities through their work will be better motivated, happier and more loyal. In both cases, the eventual winners are the people who the organisations serve and the people working at those organisations.

The difference between a charity and a business, in short, is mostly in our minds. That doesn’t mean that it’s not real: as I mentioned above, we can distinguish between the two pretty easily just by asking organisations what they consider themselves to be. But it does mean that people working for charities shouldn’t be closed to ideas from business. After all, if we’re doing similar things, maybe we have things to learn from each other.

Another set of quotes from Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:00:00 +0000

I've run out of space again. Here's the latest selection!

"And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright: tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals -- democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope." - Barack Obama

"People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." - Bill Clinton

"Russia has found little support for its actions. A pat on the back from Daniel Ortega and Hamas is not a diplomatic triumph." - Condoleezza Rice

"Just remember: the best thing about this town is me." - Helen on her hometown
"I prefer the ones with jam in them. You know, so that it squirts out all over your face when you bite into it." - Helen on doughnuts
"...and I'll have two shots of sambuca as well, please." - Helen, making the most of a civilised lunch in a country pub

"On only two scores can The Economist hope to outdo its rivals consistently. One is the quality of its analysis; the other is the quality of its writing." - The Economist Style Guide, modestly

"We humans are now playing lead electric guitar in Mother Nature's symphony orchestra." - Heidi Cullen, quoted in Thomas Friedman's latest (Hot, Flat & Crowded)

"They are badly dressed, badly equipped, and many of them are drunk. There are just a lot of them." - Mikheil Saakashvili on the Russians invading his country

Nat: "Where *is* all the culture in America?
"Una: "It must be in New York."

"There's a French version of bullfighting, but instead of fighting the bull, they just run away." - Chris

"I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention." - Jane Austen on History

"I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass." - Sir John Falstaff

"We sent our DS off to Nintendo to get the screen fixed, and we left the Nintendogs cartridge in it by accident. When it came back, all of our puppies had been washed and fed."

"I really love being here in the gym, where you can just work out without anyone talking to you, you know? I FUCKING LOVE IT" - Fat man on the exercise bike next to mine, to me, apparently without irony

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones"

"Karma's going to get the guy who did this, but our attorney's going to get him first."

"Big Cheese"

"Teflon Shoulders"

"Do the needful"

The Guardian Guide to making Dubya look good

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:20:00 +0000

So, his time in office is up; we've all been watching the new president wander around for over a week now, and it certainly has been fun. Articulate speeches! Sensible policy decisions! Politicians being courteous with each other! Yes, it certainly is wonderful. But we've also seen one last swansong for the old guy, in the form of the inevitable crowing over the long-awaited departure of George "Dubya" Bush.

"The gaffes, the gibberish, the gurning. Admit it: there's a part of him you're going to miss." So says Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian's G2 supplement on January 8th. (I know, I'm a little behind.) Miss him? Really? As it happens, I can tell you one group of people who sure as heck are going to miss him: everyone who works on the Guardian's G2 supplement. Why, you may ask? It's right there in the title: "the gaffes, the gibberish, the gurning". Everything that you need for a successful piece of political analysis in the British media, right there in that sentence. How on earth will Britain's political journalists get by with someone intelligent in the White House?

The answer: it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference who's in the White House. Our political hacks have brought this travesty of reporting upon themselves. The schtick is so tired that they don't even feel like they have to try any more. "You can, of course, call him a warmonger, or a liar, or a stooge of the super-rich, or someone with reckless disregard for his compatriots faced with natural disaster. But these are labels, not descriptions of his internal life. Despite countless bioraphies and speculative newspaper and magazine articles, we're barely any closer to answering the question that seemed pertinent back before Florida, before 9/11, before Iraq or Katrina: what, exactly is going on in there?" Very well said, Mr Journalist. And whose fault is that? Yours. Eight years on, and you - along with EVERY SINGLE OTHER PERSON in the British media - still haven't figured out how the guy thinks? How he makes his decisions? What his priorities are? What his value system is? It's not as if there hasn't been plenty of information around about it. Books have been written. Lengthy profiles have been penned in quality American journals. The man has made speech after speech in which he has articulated his policy goals and their rationales perfectly clearly. And members of his administration have circled the world explaining themselves. Hell, there are tens of millions of Americans who are - or at any rate, were - on his wavelength. And you're telling me that you still can't comprehend how he thinks? There's only one reason for that, buster, that it's that you haven't been trying. Not that you haven't been trying hard enough; just that you haven't been trying. That's incompetence, and relative to the size of the responsibilities that you shoulder, Mr Journalist, that makes you more incompetent than dear ol' Dubya by a pretty damn long margin.

And that's before we even get into the Guardian's own sneaky meta-Bushisms, which can be defined as careless journalists mangling perfectly good misstatements. I'm not just talking about the complete failure to distinguish between genuine manglings and the amusing moments in which he sends up his own tendency to mangle. For crying out loud - how can you possibly manage to get wrong the title of My Pet Goat? That was immortal. And you mangled it. But the real scandal doesn't have to do with the fact that he keeps saying things wrong. It has to do with the fact that journalists in this country seem to be unable to comprehend the difference between the way in which the statement is articulated and the content of the statement itself. "You forgot Poland!", apparently, is funny: it was blurted out in a 2004 debate with John Kerry to refute Kerry's false accusation that America's only coalition partners in Iraq were Britain and Australia. "'He forgot Poland!', the incumbent president crows, as if that made all the difference." Well, as it happened, America had dozens of allies going into Iraq: not just the four countries mentioned, but also Spain, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Georgia, and several dozen more. Bush is dead-on, and Kerry is wrong; but who cares, right? The stupid man made a funny! The truth is, the fact that he was right DOES make a difference.

The Guardian is like a monkey sitting in a tree, pointing and jumping up and down because it's seen something amusing below that it doesn't really understand. Rather than get down there and try to figure it out, it prefers to just chatter away with the other monkeys and smugly rest on its haunches. Meanwhile, Bush has spent the last eight years getting on with the task of being the most powerful man in the world. Now, I would be the first to argue the case for the prosecution in an honest debate about the Bush Administration's failings: the incompetence, the espousal of the most divisive sort of religiosity, the 50%+1 politics, the ideological dismissal of science, the cronyism. The list goes on. But to assume from all this that Bush is stupid is lazy. To assume that he got nothing right is wrong. To refuse to engage seriously with him on his own terms, and to attempt to explain how he reached the conclusions that he did, is exceptionally poor journalism. And to waste column inches pointing your fingers and laughing at a man who suffers from being inarticulate is, frankly, not just insensitive but incredibly foolish: if you conflate being articulate with being intelligent, then you damn well are "misunderestimating" the man.

Worst of all, if you do all those things, you're as bad as he is. One of the reasons Obama is so beloved is that he promises to reach across the aisle and restore civility to American politics; it's easy to forget that before Sarah Palin came along, Obama and McCain were (mostly) having a very grown-up and respectful dialogue. One of the reasons why so many people dislike Bush is that he came to office promising to do the same thing after the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton years, and then reneged. But standing on the other side of the aisle shouting at him and refusing to show any interest in how he thinks is EXACTLY the same strategy that he took. All these jibes at Bush, then, are a part of the problem. It seemed to me that it was with considerable relief that Bush welcomed Barack Obama into his White House to help coordinate what is possibly the smoothest transition in history (coming hot on the heels of possibly the most efficiently-run White House that America has ever seen): the sight of the two of them graciously discussing the nation's future was gratifying and pleasant. This is the promise, and this is hopefully the future; the undisciplined carping at Bush is part of the past, and good riddance.

As it happens, the journalistic sneers at Bush's frequent misstatements are just the tip of the iceberg, and you could forgive them if they were humourous asides in the context of a rather more nuanced analysis elsewhere. Some hope. The Guardian on the 17th of January carried a retrospective on "The Bush Years" that managed the rare feat of making the Bush Administration look smooth, sophisticated and sympathetic in the face of the sheer brutish ignorance being hurled in their direction. Professionalism is thrown out the window. "So, we're left here at the bitter, congested end of the long Bush calamity", begins one profile of Bush. "Eight years in the White House have the ability to turn any man into a narcissistic monster", starts another one. "Were she not complicit in so much destruction..." starts the piece on Condoleezza Rice. Another: "The question of which member of the Bush administration will be held in lowest repute by history will not be easily settled, so vigorous is the competition. Permit me, though, to make the case for Donald Henry Rumsfeld". Sure, Douglas Hurd does his valiant best to redeem Colin Powell, but the telling quote that is pulled out and blown up is, naturally, the most critical one in the entire piece. Cheney, Ashcroft, Rove: I don't need to tell you how they go. That a supposedly quality newspaper can produce such vile hatchet jobs ought to be scandalous, but in reality we're so inured to this lowering of standards that it doesn't even make the reader lift an eyebrow.

Where is the objectivity? Where is the acknowledgement that a man who got degrees from Yale and Harvard Business School, who ran a series of businesses spectacularly well, who was a hugely successful governor of Texas and who crafted a new political order might just not be a dunce? Where is the realisation that the same ideological impulses that led to the Iraq War and the abortion gag rule also led to an immense foreign aid programmes and the establishment of vast swathes of new natural parks? Where is the scepticism of the all-too-easy blame game that falsely attributes all of America's economic woes to the Bush Administration? Where is the discussion of the controversies swirling around No Child Left Behind (part good, part bad) and the reflection on a second term legislative agenda that included a brave attempt at Social Security reform (partly good and very necessary) and immigration reform (very good indeed), both of which were foiled not just by Bush Administration failings but by the venality and populism of Congress? How do we reconcile the gap between the perception of Bush as a blundering oaf on the world stage and the fact that he drew up a foreign policy doctrine of penetrating insight which grasped the strategic imperatives of the "war on terror" and melded them with firm and attractive ideological underpinnings to produce America's first genuine joined up foreign policy doctrine since Reagan?

And it's not just Bush. How can we let journalists get away with slapping up Rumsfeld over the occupation in Iraq without mentioning his successes in modernising and reorganising the US armed forces, or the huge achievements of the initial military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq which he masterminded? How can we dismiss Condoleezza Rice out of hand when her foreign policy speeches and vision are actually a fairly close match for Obama's in plenty of important ways? Why do we call Karl Rove by his frat-boy epithet "boy genius" and not by the adjective that he actually deserves, however much we dislike him: plain old genius? Dick Cheney is a two-term Vice President of the United States of America, and you write for the New Yorker. Much as it pains me to say this - I am rather partial to the New Yorker - this makes you smarter than him why?

The thing that nags, the thing that bugs, isn't that these writers are wrong. This has been one of the most incompetent administrations in history, and for every success there have been a great many failures, some of them so large as to overshadow anything else. The thing that gets me is that these writers don't even try to explain. If all they do is condemn, then no-one learns anything: readers who already agree with their assessment will nod smugly, feeling vindicated; readers who disagree with their assessment will shake their heads sagely, their belief in the irredeemable bias of the Guardian confirmed. The best journalism seeks to explain what's going on, and explanation is in short supply in Britain. All the condemnation in the world will be of limited benefit if we fail to enquire into how it is that honourable men with the best intentions of their country at heart made the poor decisions that they did; all of the derision poured at Dubya misses its mark if its aim is off. You can't beat something that you don't understand. There is plenty to understand about George W. Bush. His value system and his way of working should not be dismissed out of hand; his policymaking process should not be ridiculed unless it is genuinely understood. Like everything else in this world, the 43rd president is not a caricature in black and white, and the journalists at the Guardian do a disservice to themselves, to their employer, and to their profession when such puerile, shallow trash is allowed to roam free.

But the best is yet to come. For just there on the same page as Alan Greenspan - apparently responsible for ruining the world economy - we find not one, but two profiles of Osama Bin Laden: soft, respectful, contemplative, exculpatory, understanding, and restrained. It is at this point, dear readers, that I sign off, before I have the opportunity to descend into a torrent of obscenities whose level of discourse might just be at an appropriate level to have a shot at appearing in the Guardian itself.

Reflections on the Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:50:00 +0000

After all that's happened in the campaign, it seems hard to believe that it’s all over. Following this election has been fascinating and entertaining in equal measure, and I very much doubt that another one will come close for many years to come in terms of excitement. The real work, of course, actually starts now.

But to make the most of the slightly dazed feeling, a retrospective seems in order. I’ve been writing about the campaign from the time of the first primary, and going back to the beginning means going back over ten months. There are a great many highlights from the campaign which stand out in my memory. You'll find them below, in roughly chronological order.

- Rudy Giuliani’s daft strategy of sitting out all the primaries until Florida, hoping that “momentum” didn’t exist. It did. At least he prompted Joe Biden’s famous remark that “There's only three things [Giuliani] mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

- Barack Obama’s victory speech after the Iowa caucuses. Suddenly, the rest of the country understood that this was a powerful new voice in politics who really could go on to win – and started to understand why maybe that would be a good thing.

- Hillary Clinton’s rebound in New Hampshire. Although she couldn’t hold her campaign together with a consistent style, her “that hurts my feelings” response to a hostile question about why she was so unlikable, and her refreshingly honest moment of choking up suddenly put her back in the running.

- At the same time, Obama’s amazing speech after his New Hampshire loss showed what the qualities were that would propel him to victory. “We have been told we cannot do this, by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check; we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds, we’ve been told that we’re not ready; or that we shouldn’t try; or that we can’t. Generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can. Yes we can. Yes, we can.” Still sends shivers down my spine.

- John McCain’s win in New Hampshire: the honest, independent guy won. It was awesome.

- Mitt Romney’s win in Michigan. Momentum be damned – here was a candidate who would spend his way to victory as far as he could! Not to last, though.

- Mitt Romney’s nasty negative tactics. Not great in themselves, but they did produce a great quote. "Never get into a wrestling match with a pig", said John McCain, in an earlier life, about his opponent. "You both get dirty, and the pig likes it."

- The rush of Obamamania. Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can”, Obama Girl, and all the rest.

- The febrile response to Obamamania, which somehow didn’t quite work: the spiky Hillary Boy, the unsettling McCain Girls, the perhaps slightly insincere Giuliani Girl, and even some of the mash-ups that followed.

- Hillary Clinton’s negative turn in South Carolina. Not so much taking the gloves off as revealing her nasty side, it suddenly became apparent to lots of her fans that the lady was perhaps not above stooping to be horrible. Another nail in the political coffin, and a thoroughly deserved one. Obama’s South Carolina victory speech rose above it.

- The McCain win in Florida which knocked Giuliani out of the campaign. The Republicans, too, were looking for change, and one by one the ineffective (Thompson), the nasty (Giuliani), the loony (Huckabee) and the hardcore conservative (Romney) dropped by the wayside, one by one, and it suddenly came to seem like the autumn contest would be one between two worthy candidates for the first time since 1992.

- Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday non-win. The strategy was simple: get through to Super Tuesday, then hoover up delegates from winning massive states, enough to knock out Obama once and for all. Clinton was so confident about this that she didn’t even have significant teams in place in the states that followed February 5th. And she did indeed win all the big states, as predicted. The problem? She somehow missed that the Democrats this year were dividing delegates proportionally. Her increase in the delegate count was thus pathetic, and as a result she was stuck for the next six weeks as Obama gathered delegates and momentum in states that he had been preparing for all along. This was the point where her inevitability disappeared and Obama became the leading candidate.

- Hillary Clinton’s March 4th victory. Bill Clinton said that she needed to win Ohio and Texas on that day to stay in the campaign. The Obama campaign gleefully announced that "three weeks ago, when they led polls in Texas and Ohio by 20 points, the Clinton campaign set their own test for today’s primaries." So it did. And it passed it. Clinton’s big win on that day pushed her onwards towards the very end.

- The Reverend Wright controversy and Obama’s speech on race. In a tight spot, did Obama resort to tried and tested political tactics to control damage and make a problem go away? He did not. His response to the controversy over his former pastor was a decision to treat the American people as grown-ups and to give a speech articulating the complexity surrounding the issue, and the result was a speech that was complex, thoughtful, empathetic, and extremely moving – a speech that recognized black concerns and white concerns alike, putting them into the context in which they are properly understood and reaching beyond that, soaring away from the mundane denunciations characteristic of the subject into the realm where his own candidacy and the turmoil it has occasionally created is seen as a necessary stepping stone towards a more perfect union. This was the moment when the rhetoric of change came together with the intelligence of his books, and Obama the statesman left his competitors comprehensively in the dust. Maturity, intelligence and respect one the day.

- John McCain’s natural-born-citizen controversy. He came into this world in Panama, when his parents were stationed there with the US military. Did that make him a natural born citizen for the purposes of the presidential election? A group of lawyers was interested to find out. What did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do? Did they jump on the opportunity to hobble their opponent? No – they co-sponsored a non-binding Senate resolution reaffirming their opponent’s eligibility to run. It’s easy to forget after the nastiness of the McCain campaign in the autumn, but for much of the year the campaign distinguished itself through how noble and nice it all was.

- Hillary Clinton’s Pennsylvania win. This was remarkable as an abject lesson in how perseverance could pay off. A lengthy campaign in which Obama distinguished himself mainly through gaffe and scandal ended in a resounding Clinton victory. Naturally, she had already lost the nomination by this point; but as an exercise in politicking – wow.

- Obama’s speech on winning the Democratic nomination on June 3rd. It’s another speech, but again, boy, what a good one.

- Hillary Clinton’s concession speech four days later. She waited long enough to give it, and she talked about herself rather a lot, but when she got around to making her endorsement it was about as forceful as Obama could have wanted.

- Obama’s overseas trip. Not been to Afghanistan, Iraq, or European allies enough, you say? Fine, let’s visit. McCain then found himself being pictured in a golf cart with George H.W. Bush while Obama took helicopter rides over Baghdad with General Petraeus and gave a speech before 200,000 cheering people in Berlin. Never in my lifetime has an American president been well-liked enough to command those sorts of numbers overseas; more usually they have commanded vast hordes of angry protestors shouting at them. This transformation is one of the most inspiring things about the new president.

- Paris Hilton’s contribution. Obama a celebrity, eh? Unfortunately for “that wrinkly white-haired guy”, the real celebrities sometimes fight back.

- The usual Jib-Jab contribution, set appropriately enough to the tune of “The Times, They Are a’Changin”.

- The Biden VP pick. Inspiring? Let’s be honest – not really. But a sound, solid choice that would establish Obama as a candidate serious about governing.

- Obama gets nominated. Another great speech. Looking back, it seems remarkable quite how many great speeches there actually were in this campaign.

- McCain picks Palin. Initial reaction: who? But the great stagecraft of the announcement, the thrill of finding out about her, and the spectacular speech that she gave to the Republican convention quickly marked her out as a rising star that would boost McCain’s ticket and let him overtake Obama in the polls…

- …until her drawbacks became so obvious as to hobble the McCain campaign permanently. These were best embodied by Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live routine, meaning that Palin now lives on in our minds for her initial announcement, for her debate performance against Joe Biden, and for her interview with Katie Couric more in the form of the resulting parody than of the original (although this may in fact be because the original verged on parody in any case). (Unfortunately, since the election it appears to be impossible to get hold of these clips outside the US. Talk about annoying. Seek them out on YouTube or elsewhere.)

- The Daily Show. Jon Stewart provided a great many funny moments during the campaign and was a regular highlight. My favourite has to be the examination of sexism in American society following the Palin pick.

- American cartoons weigh in. Both The Simpsons and Family Guy had something amusing to say about the election.

- The nasty autumn campaign. Whether it was misrepresenting Obama’s plans on just about everything or accusing him of “palling around” with terrorists, McCain’s campaign in the autumn was dishonorable and often revolting. Why was this a highlight? Because it made clear the difference between the two campaigns and made clear that one of the candidates – McCain – was willing to suspend his principles and unable to lead his campaign well enough to keep in full control of its tactics and narrative. The choice became clear.

- McCain suspends his campaign. It was the moment he lost his credibility: deciding that the magnitude of the financial crisis demanded a serious gesture, McCain decided to suspend his campaign and rush back to Washington to fix things. Unfortunately, not only did he not really suspend his campaign (prompting an entertaining diatribe from Letterman), couldn’t contribute to any sort of resolution, and ended up looking foolish and economically illiterate.

- The Al Smith fundraiser. Both McCain and Obama being funny? Well worth a watch.

- Election night. So exciting. The anticipation was immense as the results started coming in and it began to appear that Obama would win Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. When Ohio was called, it was a bit of a crazy feeling.

- John McCain’s concession speech. It’s as if suddenly, the old McCain was back. Shame he didn’t show his face between the nomination and the election.

- Obama’s victory speech. Sums it all up.

- Feeling dazed when it was all over. Wow. Hard to adjust.

- America suddenly becoming cool again internationally, with a President that non-Americans might actually like. Proof?

- The 2012 race starts hotting up. The Democrats already know their candidate. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee has booked dates in Iowa for his book tour and Mitt Romney has reopened his presidential fundraising committee. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is sounding out support for a run, and Florida governor Charlie Crist will most likely follow suit; Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty may as well after the amount that his name was bandied around for McCain’s VP pick. And the evangelical juggernaut that is Sarah Palin will now return to Alaska, most likely to spend the next four years producing policies that thrill the Republican base (including sorting out the troubled new pipeline that she’s always boasting about), writing a bestselling book about herself, and, naturally, catching up on some of those pesky policy areas (like foreign policy and economics) that she tripped up on this time around. It’s going to be a fun race. Let’s get started.

A Time to Endorse

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 21:44:00 +0000

Endorsements from the press are one of the signs that a campaign is reaching its final stages. There is a good reason for journalists, unlike politicians, to leave this until the last minute. Who would trust the impartiality of a reporter who had publicly declared who they support? And in any case, it can be highly unwise to come down on one side or another when there is still a lot of campaigning left to go. Who knows what might happen?

It goes without saying that I am not a journalist. But, as is my wont, I have tried to be evenhanded in all of my various bits of writing about this campaign. I firmly believe that the responsibility of any voter (or, as in my case, purportedly objective observer) is to allow themselves to be open to persuasion on matters of policy and character. It is the place of the campaigns to argue the issues, and, through their conduct, to demonstrate what sort of man or woman their candidate is and what style they would adopt in governing. It is the place of the voter to observe and to listen, and to weigh the candidates’ positions and personalities on their merits. For a political order to be optimistic and forward-looking, we the masses must banish our cynicism and be prepared to show respect to any person who is clever and hard-working enough to reach the pinnacle of their careers nearly at the top of the greasy pole; we must assume that they are in possession of impressive quantities of intelligence, pluck and charisma. Furthermore, we must be willing to give those people who we do not agree with the benefit of the doubt. It is possible for someone to be highly principled – and loyal to their principles – without professing policies that we personally would agree with. In a world where more and more we are able to choose our sources of information, and in a world where we increasingly only choose sources of information which profess views that we already agree with, it is easy to lose sight of this.

In light of this approach, I continue to see strengths and weaknesses in both candidates. But the race is drawing to a close, and it is time to make a decision. Objective or not, I doubt that my decision will surprise anybody. But nevertheless, it remains to be stated: on both policy and character, one candidate clearly deserves to win this race, and the other clearly does not. I rather doubt that I will be able to match the eloquence of the editors of the New Yorker in reaching a conclusion, but at the end of the day, this is where I stand.

John McCain won his primary battle as a man of principle who was unafraid to take on his party establishment when he thought it was wrong. Not for nothing does he call himself a maverick, and it is a label which is deserved. In his long and distinguished career, he has demonstrated courage and determination, standing up for his principles on issues such as torture, clearly breaking with his party when it was wrong on issues such as global warming and the Bush tax cuts, reaching across the aisle to forge productive compromises on issues such as the confirmation of judges, and seeing the bigger picture by calling for a surge of troops to prevent failure in Iraq long before it became administration policy. Crucially, he had sworn to conduct his campaign in an honorable way and had, by and large, always been a man who delivered when it came to treating his opponents with respect. On all of those points, and on many others besides, his judgment was sound. Here was a man above the fray of interest groups, it was thought; here was a man who could be counted on to do the right thing when it counted.

I have no doubt that John McCain is still the same man that he always was. But what has become clear over the past few months is that John McCain is not a man who is able to run a campaign, let alone a country. He has surrounded himself with advisors who don’t get along with each other, and he has allowed them to persuade him of the wrong things and to dominate his campaign’s substance and style in ways that John McCain the Senator would never have countenanced. John McCain the presidential candidate has lost control of his message and his overall narrative; he has pandered shamelessly; and he has made extremely poor decisions.

As a New York Times magazine piece made clear this week, no-one is really sure what John McCain’s central campaign theme is about. Was he the man of determination who kept on going when he knew he was right, even when he was left all alone with his principles? Was he a post-partisan proponent of good policy who was willing to break with his party whenever it was necessary? Was he a staunch conservative who was a champion of small government, tax cuts and balanced budgets? Was he a genuine American hero who survived unimaginable torment through his love for his country? Was he an honorable man who would fight an honorable campaign? Was he a fighter who would do what it takes to win? Was he the paragon of experience who knew how to get things done? Was he the agent of change who would sweep the corrupt old ways out of Washington? His campaign has attempted to be all of these things and more. Even when these various different narratives do not contradict each other, his campaign tactics have undermined them. His opponent, on the other hand, has had a single main message – change – and has stuck to it.

His decisions and stances throughout the campaign have done much to undermine his credibility. Is the man who spoke out so forthrightly against torture really the same man who condemned in the most outraged terms a Supreme Court ruling that was hostile to the set-up in Guantanamo Bay, and who now seems to think that it’s fine for US government employees to engage in acts of torture as long as they’re in the intelligence services and not in the military? Is the man who has opposed President Bush – and, crucially, his operating style and his mode of governing – so openly and proudly really the same man who picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate – a VP nominee whose social conservatism and contempt of limitations to her power resembles nothing so much as an even more extreme version of the sitting President? Is this man of such sound judgment really the same man who decided he was willing to put the grossly inexperienced Palin a heartbeat away from the Presidency and who bounced around in a panicky and impotent way when trying to demonstrate his statesman-like stature in the face of financial crisis?

This chaotic, counterproductive and entirely badly organized campaign has been hurt the most, perhaps, by the style by which it has put itself across. McCain’s original formulation was that he was a man of experience who would bring a change to Washington through his demonstrated commitment to a more enlightened mode of political discourse. Respect for your opponent and a focus on policy not personality were the McCain hallmarks. His decision to pick Palin as his running mate completely undercut his “experience” argument, and his decision to run a hideously negative campaign against his opponent undercut his argument that he would bring a new way of working to Washington. Attack ads like the “Celebrity” spot, comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, are par for the course (and may have had a point). But it is his policy-related ads that have done the most damage to his reputation. The infamous spot saying that Obama favored comprehensive sex education for six-year-olds fell at the extreme end of this spectrum, as did his repeated invocation of a mostly non-existent relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, a former domestic terrorist. But most insidious were the repeated and knowing misstatements about Obama’s core policies. Repeatedly pronouncing that Obama wants to “raise your taxes” and introduce “socialized medicine” were demonstrably untrue, and McCain’s statistics were repeatedly and comprehensively debunked. Yet he kept using them and continues to plug away at them, meaning that his campaign has knowingly pressed on in spreading what are, effectively, lies about his opponent. Such a strategy can charitably be called mendacious, and for a self-professed man of honor to engage in such behavior is very sad indeed. There are no two ways about it: John McCain has run a dishonorable campaign and ought to be ashamed of himself. So much for bringing civility back to political discourse, and indeed, so much for running a campaign based on policy.

And it is policy that is the final straw. McCain has not been a policy-oriented candidate. He has promised solutions to problems that will not work (such as drilling for oil offshore to alleviate high petrol prices), and he has made impossible promises (such as his pledge to eliminate a $600bn federal deficit through controlling discretionary spending which only totals $18bn). His health care plan is of dubious utility. His tax cuts would mostly benefit the wealthy. And most importantly, his economic packages (which at one point seemed to change every couple of days) demonstrate a genuine lack of understanding of economic issues. He is not a candidate who is able to engage in meaningful conversations about economics or about the current crisis, and he certainly is not a candidate who has offered constructive solutions. Even his main strength, foreign policy, has become a liability. He is unable to offer any strategy for Iraq apart from keeping troops there until they achieve “victory”, a poorly-defined word that David Petraeus refuses to use and that even the Bush Administration has backed away from. He has called for an unworkable “League of Democracies” to confront tomorrow’s challenges, a concept that would be immensely counter-productive. Worst of all, he has blundered and gaffed his way through the campaign – hardly the sign of a candidate who is clearly on top of the issues, and a particular problem considering his age.

There is no doubt that McCain does understand foreign policy issues at a great level of depth and with considerable ability. But he has failed to put this across. And there are considerable doubts about his understanding of domestic issues, and even about the extent to which he would prioritize the difficult choices and domestic challenges that the next president will have a unique opportunity to address. His stumbling performance in debates and on the campaign trail, his inability to manage his campaign properly, his failure to behave in a statesmanlike manner, his willingness to employ the most distasteful tactics; all these things and more show that John McCain, a distinguished man of intelligence and integrity, is out of his depth and, quite possibly, just too old. Even after all of this, his record suggests that he might not be too bad as President, especially given the extent to which his powers would be constrained by a Democratic Congress. But after the campaign that he has run, he does not deserve to be given the chance.

Barack Obama, in the meantime, was not ready to be President in 2007 when he started running for it. The soaring rhetoric of his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention was not replicated in the surprisingly plodding stump speeches that he made on the campaign trail. His policy prescriptions were slight and shallow. His legislative achievements were minimal. By putting himself up against the formidable machine of Hillary Clinton’s campaign after just four years in the Senate, he seemed presumptuous and unready.

It is possible to argue that Obama did not so much beat Clinton as manage to stay in the game long enough for her to defeat herself; her campaign was marked by disorganization and waste. A formidable campaigner, she showed in places like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania that she had what it took to win when it counted. But to suggest that the election was hers to lose and she lost it through her own mistakes would be a grave mistake that discounts the organizational brilliance and strategic insight of the Obama campaign. This starts with the candidate himself.

Barack Obama is a breath of fresh air in politics, his past in Illinois as a local politician on the up notwithstanding. The reason why he inspires is not because he is a black man, nor is it because his policy prescriptions are particularly original or brilliant. The reason why he inspires is that he is that rare politician who seems utterly genuine, who opens up about how he feels and what he is thinking, who is not afraid to be intelligent and who is willing to treat voters as adults rather than fobbing them off with tried and tested political tricks and canned soundbites. His public persona is decent and open, and he is able to transcend his unusual upbringing by connecting to ordinary voters through his intelligence and openness. Capping this off is a gift for soaring rhetoric that puts one in mind of the great orators of the past: if elected, he is sure to join John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill on mugs, calendars and inscriptions on walls where great quotes lurk forevermore. He is young and somehow apart from the political scene that envelops most Senators, though opponents will forget that he is indeed a politician at their peril.

The greatest thing about Obama in this campaign, however, has been his response to adversity. His solution to unreadiness has not been the Sarah Palin approach of floundering around and being pictured next to great people, but rather a determined effort to turn weakness into strength. When his stump speeches were deficient, he overhauled them and created the reliably inspiring style that we are familiar with today. When his campaign was up against most of the Democratic party machine which Hillary Clinton had locked up in her favor right after the 2004 election, he came up with an approach to organizing a campaign that relied on young people, new technologies of social networking and broad-based fundraising, and determined outreach to specific people that he needed onside. When the thinness of his policies was clearly a liability, he bolstered his campaign staff with a new generation of policy thinkers and a framework for getting them to produce excellent plans that were politically workable. In short, when he didn’t know something or couldn’t do something, he learned about it and made it happen. By the time his primary campaign was over, he had a much more detailed policy platform than John McCain, and a much better thought-through one. His policies eschewed easy solutions in favor of complicated realities – no gas tax holidays here – while proposing a fundamental realignment of American political discourse away from the increasingly discredited conservative policies of the Reagan revolution on healthcare, education, social policy and taxation and a move towards a more caring, equitable society. By preparing with such meticulous detail, he has somehow managed to become the candidate of competency, with joined up policies and a command of the detail that have allowed him to calmly bat away the McCain campaign’s misleading allegations and respond with confidence and authority. When John McCain, in the debates, attacked Obama’s policies, it was astonishing that Obama could so calmly explain why McCain’s premise was unsound, what his policies actually were, and then pivot to what McCain’s policies were and how they were deficient – a remarkably effortless success in painting his opponent’s platform in his own terms. Far from coming away knowing that Obama would raise taxes, for example, most viewers will have come away knowing that Obama’s economic plan would lower taxes for 95% of taxpayers, even if this statistic has some caveats of its own.

He has responded well in other situations, too, demonstrating a calm and level-headed ability to respond to crises. When the Reverend Wright controversy kicked up in the spring, Obama’s idea of damage control was to make a major speech on race that defused the issue in political circles through its empathy and intelligence. As he explained later, he made a choice to treat voters as grown-ups rather than patronizing them with the usual political tactics of distancing and repudiation (although those, too, came later). When cornered in the primaries, for example after Clinton’s wins in Pennsylvania and Ohio, he calmly stuck to the game plan instead of panicking and changing course; similarly, when McCain enjoyed a post-convention, post-Palin bounce, Democrats screamed for Obama to go on the offensive and he refused, sticking again to the game plan and calmly waiting out the end of McCain’s unsustainable lead. His refusal to panic even when Republicans attacked him on the most outrageous basis or in the face of major shocks to the country’s situation, has marked him out as being above the fray and statesmanlike. While McCain has seen his approval ratings fall as a result of his negative attacks and his flailing around helplessly in the face of a financial crisis that he did not understand, Obama has been cautious and constructive and has appeared more in-control, more mature, and – crucially – more presidential. Slow but steady has put him in command of a race that just a month ago was looking very close indeed.

All of this steadiness has extended to his longer-term preparations too. His selection of Joe Biden as running mate, who has been of little use on the campaign trail and occasionally a liability, has given him a wise old Washington hand to advise him closely if he wins. He has been cultivating senior figures in both parties to join his cabinet. His detailed policies will form the basis for negotiations with Congress and are intended to actually solve problems in a sustainable way, not just to grandstand prior to the election. He has kept crucial flexibility even in areas such as his much-vaunted timeline for withdrawing from Iraq. And he has weighed in intelligently on current policy questions such as how best to implement America’s financial rescue package. His maturity, intelligence and understanding of the issues shows every sign of continuing unhesitatingly into a post-election world – should he manage to win. This is not presumptuousness, as the McCain campaign claims: it is simply good practice. If John McCain is not doing the exact same thing, then voters have another reason to hesitate before voting for him.

The icing on the cake of all of this is the value of Obama as an individual who would bring together a nation that has been tearing itself apart for 8 years and who would restore America’s stature in the world. There is great value in symbolism, and an America which succeeded in electing anyone other than a white male would be an America that was looking forward and putting its past inequalities behind it. Obama is not a “black” candidate, but rather a post-racial candidate, one who understands division and prejudice and has chosen to rise above it, choosing to believe that people can get along and that America can improve. It is not simply racial reconciliation that he would deliver, however, but cultural reconciliation as well. Obama is too young to have participated in the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s, too young to have been either one of the hippies who protested against Vietnam or one of the stern conservatives who reviled drugs and loose morals and supported the war. He speaks to a generation that was not divided into those who served in uniform and those who didn’t, that is relaxed about drug use and sexual mores, and understands modern technologies and their many uses. He is the counterpart on the left of those Christian conservatives who choose to focus more on creation care and loving thy neighbor than they do on abortion and intelligent design. He represents a post-ideological generation that is intelligent, practical and results-oriented, and this appeal enables him – when he wants to – to transcend politics in a way that few politicians before him have been able to do. In short, a victory for Obama would redefine the terms of reference for American politics and herald a real change in political methods and values that would be important and long-lasting. This election is an epoch-making moment, much as the 1968 election could have been and the 1980 election was. A President Obama would catapult America into the sorts of political discourse that the rest of the world takes for granted, and could potentially change the game for good. And this is all before even considering the impact of America having a President that the rest of the world could look up to, an effect which would restore American stature to heights that it has comprehensively lost over the last two decades.

Now, I am conscious that it is easy to be taken in by hyberbole, and it may well be that much of the breathless optimism that characterizes much of the conversation about Obama (my previous paragraph included) will not come true. No President can ever implement the policy platform that they run on owing to the dominance of Congress. Idealism is inevitably tempered by the realities of governing, which involves considerable horse trading and many messy compromises. And America will never return to the levels of global leadership that it enjoyed during the Cold War, when it was the leader and protector of the free world and emerging economies had yet to begin emerging.

But the choice that faces the American people this November 4th is between a candidate who has a shot at pushing America in a forward-looking, optimistic, dynamic direction, and a candidate who does not. It is a choice between a candidate who has an excellently prepared set of policy proposals that might just be workable and would promote equity and economic dynamism, and a candidate who does not. It is a choice between a calm, clear-minded and detail-oriented candidate who understands the world in which we live and how it works, and a candidate who, regrettably, does not seem to. And it is a choice between a candidate who has the good judgment and organizational acumen to turn America’s polarized and unpleasant politics into something better – and one who does not.

The candidate who can do these things is Barack Obama, and the candidate who cannot is John McCain. McCain has run a poor campaign, and Obama has run an excellent one; McCain does not have the policies, the understanding or (apparently) the good judgment to turn the current situation around, and Obama does. Most of all, McCain is a candidate of the past, and Obama is a candidate of the future. For the sake of America and the world, when Americans make their decision about who should lead them for the next four years, they should choose Barack Obama, and I will join the hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world in hoping fervently that they make the right choice.

Spotted in an Alice Munro story in the New Yorker

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:02:00 +0000

Away
by Walter de la Mare

There is no sorrow
Time heals never;
No loss, betrayal,
Beyond repair.
Balm for the soul, then,
Though grave shall sever
Lover from loved
And all they share.
See, the sweet sun shines,
The shower is over;
Flowers preen their beauty,
The day how fair!
Brood not too closely
On love or duty;
Friends long forgotten
May wait you where
Life with death
Brings all to an issue;
None will long mourn for you,
Pray for you, miss you,
Your place left vacant,
You not there.

Melting Down

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:40:00 +0000

The drama and spectacle of the past few weeks has been a little bit terrifying, but for a lot of people it will probably also prove slightly mystifying. Companies that few outside of the City/Wall Street have heard of are suddenly going bankrupt, and it’s the biggest threat to the global economy since the depression? Here’s my guide to what’s going on – although necessarily a bit rough and ready (I’m not much of a finance expert), hopefully it will help anyone with questions make sense of the crisis.

The past two weeks have been a nightmare. Are these all new developments, or has it been coming for a while?
The past couple of weeks have seen a serious escalation of the scale of the crisis, but the economic crisis itself has two immediate causes. The first, which dates back to last summer, is the popping of the bubble in the housing market, known as the “Sub-Prime Mortgage” sector. The second is the rise in global commodity prices, which has been happening for a while.

What are commodities, and why have their prices been rising?
Commodities are raw materials – essentially, the stuff that’s taken out of the ground which will be used to make other stuff. This includes production inputs like metals and minerals, and energy inputs like natural gas and oil. Prices have been going up for some time, but unlike previous price rises the main reason why they have been increasing this time is that demand for them is way up. Economic booms in Asia, especially China and India, along with other regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe, have meant that a whole load more people are suddenly buying stuff that they couldn’t previously afford, while booming economies in the rich world have pushed up demand there as well. Increases in supply haven’t been keeping pace, and as a result, their prices are rising. This is especially true for oil, which has been rising to record prices before falling back a bit more recently.

So that’s one side. What about the credit crunch?
The other cause of economic pain is the bust in the housing market, which has been spreading its consequences throughout the economy. This originated in the mortgage market. Essentially what’s happened is that low interest rates in many countries, including the US, UK and Spain, have led to lots of people being able to afford mortgages. Rising prices in housing encouraged people to get into the market, in the mistaken belief that house prices could only go up; the result was a classic “bubble” where assets like houses increased in price far above what they were actually worth, with demand being sustained almost entirely by people buying houses in order to get house price gains. In short, people were buying houses because their prices were going up, and the only reason that their prices were going up was because people were buying them. All that it would take to burst the bubble was for a crisis of confidence: as soon as people stopped buying houses, prices would stop going up, and then everyone would want to sell and prices would crash.

What precipitated this crash, then? Did something ‘prick’ the bubble?
Yes. The thing that pricked it was “Sub-prime” mortgages. These were a type of mortgage that were sold to people who wanted to buy a house, but had a bad credit history: either they had a history of defaulting on loans, or they didn’t earn enough to be able to pay the prices that houses cost in the current market. Normally, mortgage lenders shouldn’t give mortgages to such people, as there’s a chance they could lose all their money, but over the past few years these “sub-prime” borrowers were able to get mortgages anyway. Often the poorest and least-educated members of society, a lot of these borrowers didn’t realize that they were getting discount deals whose interest rates would increase dramatically a couple of years after signing on the dotted line; they then couldn’t afford their mortgage payments, and a whole load of mortgages went bad very quickly. This mostly started in the US, but something similar happened in Britain and other European countries as well. Suddenly a lot of mortgage companies were foreclosing (taking ownership of the houses of people who couldn’t pay their mortgages), and the housing bubble was pricked. Buyers’ confidence sunk, and prices started falling; as a result, even more mortgages went bad. Home owners who found themselves paying unexpectedly large mortgage payments that they couldn’t afford, on a mortgage that was suddenly worth more than the value of their house itself, decided to just walk away, and the housing market got stuck in a downward spiral.

Couldn’t the government do anything about the housing crisis before it spread to the rest of the economy?
Here’s the thing. Rising house prices have underpinned consumer demand (people’s willingness to spend their money on things, rather than saving it) as they’ve made people feel wealthier. When house prices started going down, overall demand for purchases in the economy as a whole started to drop. The usual way that central banks help out in a situation like this is by reducing interest rates – when interest rates are lower, you get less return on money that you save, so you’re more inclined to use that money to buy stuff instead; also, when interest rates are lower, things like mortgage payments are lower too, so you have more cash in the bank as well. But central banks couldn’t do that this time, because this effect of increasing demand also pushes up a really negative economic indicator: inflation, or rising prices. (When people buy more stuff without the supply of that stuff increasing, the price of the stuff will go up.) Because of the rise in raw material prices through more expensive commodities, inflation is already running higher than most central banks are comfortable with, and after the awful experiences of inflation in the 1970s and 1980s most central banks (like the Bank of England and the European Central Bank) are tasked with keeping inflation low rather than with keeping economic growth high. As a result, central banks couldn’t do anything to boost demand (like they did in 2001 during the Dot-Com bust) in fear that it would push inflation out of control.

But how did the crisis spread from the mortgage market to the wider financial sector?
It’s at this point that we identify another culprit for the crisis: the big investment banks (which in the US included the “Big Five” of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns). These banks were partly responsible for the rise of sub-prime mortgage lending in the first place, through the innovative creation of new ways to package up debt. Each individual sub-prime mortgage was a pretty risky undertaking: the chances of the borrower defaulting on their mortgage were known to be really high. But if you took those mortgages and combined them with a different, safer sort of debt – for example, a corporate bond – then they became a lot less risky. A huge industry was created where banks and law firms could help place risky debt into a package with safe debt, and then sell those repackaged debts to lenders. Because the repackaged debts were thought to be much safer than their riskiest components, the interest rates that lenders got on the debts was low, so that purveyors of risky debts like sub-prime mortgages could raise the finance needed to make their loans really cheaply. They could still charge huge interest rates on the mortgages, though, and the gap between the interest rate on the money they borrowed and the interest rate they charged when lending it out to sub-prime borrowers was supposed to be enough that they could cope with the costs of the odd foreclosure and still make a profit.

It didn’t turn out that way.
No, it didn’t. What happened instead was that foreclosure rates were higher than expected, and as a result the financial companies who had been lending to sub-prime borrowers suddenly found themselves unable to repay the money that they owed to their own lenders. Companies and funds which had lent money to these lenders then found themselves looking at big losses. The problem was, because all of the packages of debt were so complex, suddenly it became really difficult for companies to figure out quite how high their losses were going to be. The complex deals that the investment banks had been arranging suddenly became a huge liability: rather than reducing risk by merging risky debts with safe ones, they had just reduced visibility of quite what lenders’ liabilities actually were. All the big banks had been lending money in the shape of these packages, and suddenly, last autumn, they all realized that they had no way of telling how much of it they were going to get back.

So what did they do?
They stopped lending money. The value of their assets was decreasing (as those packages, thought to be safe, were suddenly shown not to be, meaning that their value went down) and they had to put money on one side in case they needed it later once they’d unraveled all of their complex debts and figured out what their losses were going to be. As a result, the banks stopped lending to each other. The problem was that a lot of banks’ business models relied on having easy and cheap access to credit: companies like Northern Rock in the UK and Bear Stearns in the US needed to be able to borrow money from other banks cheaply and quickly in order to be able to pay off rolling debts, and when that money supply dried up – despite central banks stepping in to provide cheap lending to financial institutions – their entire business model was messed up. The banks that they usually borrow from, knowing that this could happen, realized that the risk of them not being able to pay back new loans was going up, and became even less likely to lend to them; in short, they suffered from a massive crisis of confidence. Northern Rock ended up being taken over the British government, and Bear Stearns was gobbled up by JP Morgan Chase.

How did we get from there to the last few weeks?
This was nearly a year ago now, and basically what’s happened is that things haven’t really improved since then. Commodity prices have stayed high, and investors have stayed nervous. The result is that banks and other investors have been nervously watching each other, ready to get out of any dodgy investments if any large institutions looked likely to fail. The US government stepped in to save Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were big mortgage guarantee firms in the US who didn’t have enough reserves to cover the potential size of their losses; as those firms guaranteed much of the housing market, the entire US economy would have crashed dramatically had they failed. In the culture of nervousness, it was only a matter of time before another institution failed, and rumours started swirling about Lehman Brothers, the smallest of the remaining big investment banks. Those rumours were that Lehman didn’t have enough money reserves to meet its obligations, and was thus likely to collapse, and, of course, the very existence of those rumours meant that people wouldn’t lend money to them, further decreasing the size of their reserves and increasing the likelihood of their collapse. A couple of major knocks to Lehman’s performance – a Korean investment fund which they’d been hoping to get a big investment from walked away, and they then announced that they had made a massive loss in the last quarter – provided the spark that led to their dramatic collapse into bankruptcy as investors abandoned them.

The government stepped in to help save Bear Stearns, Northern Rock, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Why not Lehman Brothers?
The reason for this is something in economic theory called moral hazard, which governments had been worrying about since the beginning. On the one hand, if a big institution fails then a lot of people will lose money, and that could have disastrous effects on the economy as a whole. On the other hand, if you step in to save any big institutions who look likely to fail, then you take away the fear of failure, meaning that such institutions will be more like to take bigger risks later, safe in the knowledge that if they fail they’ll be rescued. The US government needed to send a message that they couldn’t always been counted on to ride to the rescue, which is why they allowed Lehman to fail.

But that didn’t work out so well either.
No, again, it didn’t. The government misjudged it: the shock of the Lehman collapse, which was quick and dramatic, sent everyone on Wall Street running for cover. Merrill Lynch shares started to collapse spectacularly, and, amid worries that Merrill might soon go the same way as Lehman, they arranged a fire-sale to Bank of America, who bought them for a fraction of what they had been worth just a few months previously. Eyes next turned to American International Group, or AIG, which is the world’s biggest insurer. AIG had been heavily exposed to both the sub-prime mess and to Lehman Brothers debt: lots of people had taken out insurance with them against the possibility that Lehman might go bankrupt (this is fairly standard procedure in financial markets, but obviously Lehmans’ lengthy difficulties had exacerbated the problem). They thus found themselves on the hook for vast insurance payouts, and at the same time their own investment banking division was facing a write-down in the value of their own assets which meant that AIG would have to raise tens of billions of dollars at very short notice in order to stay solvent. They couldn’t possibly do it. AIG was much bigger than Lehman Brothers, and the shock of their collapse would have been even bigger: Lots of companies owned debt or insurance policies from AIG; their collapse would have meant that many companies in the wider economy would have had to write down the value of those assets, and the result could have been a string of retrenchments in the wider economy, and even some spectacular bankruptcies in sectors other than finance. It was a nightmare, so the government stepped in with $85bn of rescue money and took an ownership stake in the firm in exchange. The world’s largest insurer effectively got nationalized.

What happens next?
This is hard to say. The remaining investment banks may not be able to survive: they have already changed their status so as to take deposits from individuals, i.e. to become regular banks, and they may get snapped up pretty quickly – Morgan Stanley in particular is looking vulnerable. Of bigger concern to the economy, though, is the bad debts that plenty of banks have now accrued from all of these messes: loans that they have made which will never get paid back, and which will drag down otherwise healthy banks if they don’t get help with them. In order to restore confidence in the financial sector, the US government is proposing to create a public agency to buy those bad debts from banks so that the banks can move on and private investors can get back to business without worrying about their banks failing. This is currently stuck in Congress, but will probably become law fairly shortly. Unfortunately, the housing bubble is still ongoing, commodity prices are still high, and plenty of big companies will be incurring losses from their exposure to Lehman Brothers. This mess isn’t anywhere near over yet, and even if banking can be stabilized, we seem to be set for a pretty nasty recession in the developed world.

On the plus side, anyone looking to buy a house in the next twelve months is going to get a pretty sweet deal.

One last word of warning: this is all incredibly complicated, so if you spot anything I’ve gotten wrong, please go ahead and point it out.

War in Europe- and worse to come

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:43:00 +0000

The outbreak of a war between two nation states is never cause for celebration, but the hostilities in the Caucasus recently are more dire and portentous than most. A flawed, but indisputably elected, government came close to being swept away in an invasion by a hulking, nationalist power whose leaders are accountable only to themselves and to a secretive elite founded in intelligence agencies and economic cabals. At a time when the world was supposed to be concentrating on the coming-out party of the next great superpower, China, statesmen instead find their eyes being drawn to the next great threat to world peace: a bullying and revisionist Russia, intent on restoring an unrepresentative client government into a country which had been desperately trying to claw its way out the Russian sphere of influence. The potential consequences ought to serve notice to a complacent West, which faces a security challenge greater it has been willing to recognize.

The current crisis has been simmering ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but its sudden escalation has taken many by surprise. Accusations of who started what have been flying backwards and forwards, but what seems to have happened is that the Georgians responded to the latest bout of low-intensity fighting around the enclave of South Ossetia by making a long-planned – and long-desired – move to reassert central government authority over the renegade province. With Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin out of the country at the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing, Georgia made a quick and sudden assault on the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, hoping to brush aside Russian peacekeepers and present a fait accompli to the outside world before Russia could react.

The move was a gamble, and the Georgians did not bet well. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev quickly took control of the situation (until Putin was able to get back, at least) and ordered reinforcements from Russian North Ossetia into the conflict zone before the Georgians could consolidate their hold over the South. (Russia had been engaging in its annual war games in North Ossetia, designed to intimidate Georgia, in the month before war broke out.) Georgia failed to close off the Roki tunnel, a 4km lifeline between the two Ossetias, and Russian heavy armour, armoured personnel carriers and supplies were able to pour through quickly, while Russian air power pummeled Georgian positions. The Georgians were forced into a fast retreat to the town of Gori, south of Tskhinvali and just 80km from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. Russian jets bombed Georgian bases throughout the country – including a military installation where American defense advisors are based and the international airport just before a European Union negotiating team led by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was due to land. Meanwhile, egged on by Russia, authorities in the other Georgian renegade province of Abkhazia declared a state of war with Georgia and had their existing Russian peacekeepers quickly bolstered by 4000 paratroopers and ships from Russia’s Black Sea fleet. By the time that the cease-fire was declared, Russian troops had taken over Gori and were occupying large parts of the country, with checkpoints just 30km from Tbilisi and the key strategic port of Poti under Russian control. Georgian bases and military hardware have been systematically destroyed, with Russian activities to weaken and emasculate Georgia continuing after the cease-fire broke out. The Russians now claim that the cease-fire gives them right to set up a buffer zone inside Georgia around South Ossetia – which the Georgians deny – and that South Ossetia and Abkhazia should be granted independence as they clearly have no interest in remaining within Georgia. Georgia insists upon its own territorial integrity. An impasse appears to have been reached, but it is a fragile one.

The background of the conflict goes back decades. When Georgia became independent upon the break-up of the USSR, numerous regions declared their own state of autonomy free from the writ of the national government. South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Ajaria fit into a broader pattern of local elites making power-grabs which was also visible in such places as Nagorno-Karabakh (which was the cause of a lingering armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan), Transdniestria in Moldova, and Chechnya, which the Russian army quashed brutally in another lingering conflict whose most recent phase began in 1999 at the behest of then-Prime Minister Putin.

Georgia was ruled through much of the 1990s by Eduard Shevardnadze, who was a liberalizing Foreign Minister of the USSR under Gorbachev in the 1980s. A rigged election in 2003 saw massive street protests (dubbed the ‘Rose Revolution’), the departure of Shevardnadze from power, and the election of Mikheil Saakashvili, an American-educated lawyer and something of a firebrand. Controversial reforms in subsequent years dented Saakashvili's reputation. Tbilisi saw massive protests at the end of 2007 in support of the opposition and against a government which was perceived to be cheating in parliamentary elections; after an outcry at the forcible suppression of these protests, Saakashvili backed down and won re-election as President in a poll which was deemed to be mostly free and fair. (The appalling quality of the opposition candidates made his ongoing popularity particularly plausible.) His reputation has also been dented abroad: Germany in particular views him with suspicion (partly because he has made a habit of being irritating to Russia) and blocked Georgia’s application to NATO earlier in the year.

One of the biggest issues facing Georgia was dealing with its frozen conflicts. Shortly after Saakashvili came to power, the authorities in Ajaria were peacefully swept aside and central government authority restored; Saakashvili longed to do the same in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The two pseudo-statelets have become infamous as dens of lawlessness and centres for smuggling, and ongoing low-level hostilities have kept Georgia permanently on edge. Most ethnic Georgians were kicked out of the two regions in 1991, and the fearful regional rulers turned to Russia for protection. The Russians, resentful over their loss of power, influence and territory, were happy to step in to prevent their new neighbour becoming too well-established. Russian troops were sent in as “peacekeepers” (under an international mandate, despite Georgian scepticism) to prevent the Georgians from attempting to militarily reassert control over their territory, and Russian passports were issued to Abkhazians and South Ossetians in a move designed to give Russia a lasting justification for its military presence. According to a senior State Department source quoted in last week’s Time magazine, the South Ossetian government is almost entirely under the control of the FSB, the Russian security service.

In this context, Georgia’s desire to boot the Russians out and reassert control seems less like wanton aggression and more like a desperate weariness with a debilitating status quo. Georgia’s inability to exert control over its own territory has been a constant distraction, a barrier to economic development and genuine block to a state of normalcy. Georgia has also been regularly harassed by the Russian air force (which shot down an unmanned Georgian drone a couple of months ago and made frequent incursions into Georgian airspace) and bullied economically and socially, with its citizens subject to travel bans and humiliating deportations, its gas supplies being cut off in the middle of winter, and its produce being blocked from being exported to Russia under the cynical old Russian trick of creating politically-motivated sanctions on the basis of trumped-up bureaucratic obstacles. Georgia has been provoked and bullied for years, and the temptation to do something about it and pluckily assert itself was clearly great and understandable – but still, ultimately, foolish. By tempting Georgia to shoot down Russian planes in Georgian airspace, by shooting down unmanned Georgian drones, and indeed by handing out Russian passports in South Ossetia in recent months so as to enable a vigorous “defence” of Russian “citizens”, Russia has clearly been trying to goad Georgia into providing a casus belli for armed intervention. Georgia’s actions played directly into the Russian trap, giving Russia a justification to open the full-scale hostilities that it has been longing to let loose: from Russia’s perspective, the upstart little fly which has been buzzing around annoyingly is now finally being swatted back into its rightful place and shown who’s boss.

But the Russian case is by far the weaker. Just as calling its soldiers “peacekeepers” (even though, as in Transdniestria, they largely lack international legitimacy and the consent of the host country) does not actually make them peacekeepers, accusing Georgia of “genocide” does not mean that genocide has actually taken place. Although it seems clear that Georgia’s ill-judged offensive did cause deaths of civilians in Tskhinvali, the shrill Russian claims of thousands of deaths were clearly a number plucked out of thin air, with Russia later admitting that 133 South Ossetian civilians had died - a number consistent with deaths as a by-product of a military campaign, but not a scale of destruction resembling genocide or ethnic cleansing. Russia’s own military response has hit civilian areas, with the Russian reputation on civilian casualties from Chechnya not being remotely enviable. (The Russian concern for the safety of its citizens wasn’t quite so strongly felt if they were Chechens, it seems.) The far-fetched accusations flying backwards and forwards present a distraction which the Russians happily use to carry on doing whatever they decide to.

Russia refuses to acknowledge Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and has made clear it expects them to become independent; such independent states would be a joke, and would inevitably end up annexed by Russia in the long run unless Russia decides to maintain them as a flashpoint, providing a ready-made excuse to provoke further hostility with Georgia whenever it sees fit. Frustratingly, there is little that Georgia, or the West, can do about this. There is, rightly, no desire to confront the Russian army; the risk of broadening the conflict would be far too great. But as it happens, the situation in Georgia has actually presented the world with a moment of clarity, and the Russian military victory is leading quickly towards a tremendous diplomatic rout. What the Russian government has failed to understand is that the surest way to unite your enemies against you is to swagger around like a bully. Like Germany in the years leading up to the First World War (when pointless small acts of German aggression managed to unite the other great powers into the Triple Entente, an anti-German alliance), Russia may yet achieve with its aggression what was politically impossible for a divided West to manage on its own.

This has been seen already. Germany, which put the brakes on the Georgian and Ukrainian applications to NATO earlier in the year, has reaffirmed that both should be admitted; Chancellor Merkel said that Georgia should become a member while visiting President Saakashvili in Tbilisi. Ukraine, which has a large Russian-speaking population and an incipient territorial dispute with Russia over ownership of the Crimea (which was part of Russia in Soviet times and only transferred to Ukraine for administrative reasons in the dying days of the USSR), ordered the Russian black sea fleet to restrict its movements after it was involved in sinking the Georgian navy. (Russia retained a giant Soviet-era naval base in the Crimea.) When Russian military commanders responded that they took orders only from the Russian President, Ukraine offered the West access to its early-warning radar systems. Meanwhile, Poland, which had been dithering about the details of an agreement with the United States to host interceptor missiles for the US Missile Defense shield, came to quick agreement with America and inked the deal this week. Russia decided today to “end” its military cooperation with NATO, a day after an emergency session of NATO froze Russian ties with Partnership for Peace, the main vehicle for Russian cooperation with NATO. The clear next steps are that Russia will be summarily evicted from the G8 (it would be a travesty for Dmitri Medvedev to be allowed to stand alongside the leaders of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan as an equal at next year’s summit in Sardinia), and for its aspirations of joining the World Trade Organization to be thoroughly quashed (Georgia itself has a veto on that one).

In the longer term, Russian actions demand a stronger response. It was clear from the Russian government’s treatment of Yukos (and the politicized behaviour of Gazprom) that the Russian economy is not genuinely free-market; it was clear from the shambolic Russian parliamentary elections earlier this year that Russia’s commitment to democracy is shaky at best. The most important thing that needs to happen is in Western Europe, which needs to wake up to the damaging nature of its relationship with its giant neighbour to the east. Russia supplies natural gas for most of Europe, with demand set to grow as a consequence of economic growth and the decline of North Sea production. At present, European countries purchase their gas individually, and Russia pursues a policy of divide and rule. Existing gas networks allow Russia to cut off countries in Eastern Europe either for supposed non-payment of bills or because of mysterious “technical problems” arising concurrently with political disputes. Ukraine and Estonia – as well as Georgia and the Russian vassal state of Belarus – have already had their gas supplies temporarily closed off following political disputes. The Nord Stream pipeline that Gazprom is building in the North Sea (direct to Germany) and the South Stream pipeline running through the Balkans through Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary to Austria will give Russia enough flexibility to be able to easily cut off supplies to the nations in between itself and Western Europe, which it still regards as its sphere of influence. Russia currently picks away individual countries from the European consensus – including Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria – on a divide and rule strategy that is working extremely well.

European nations need to combat this urgently. In the long run, a major shift away from natural gas and other fossil fuels can generate energy independence for European nations: wind, solar and nuclear power capacity needs to be ramped up urgently and on a much larger scale than has been seen up to now. This should be an absolute priority in any case for environmental reasons – which ultimately dwarf matters of geopolitics – but as the health of the planet does not seem to be a sufficient motivator, perhaps national security can finally give alternative power the kick-start that it needs.

In the shorter run, though, Europe needs to find an effective way to undermine Russian power over western energy markets. Luckily, there are certain steps that Europe can take in this direction. The problem is not one of insufficient leverage. Russia may be a monopoly supplier of European gas, but as it happens, European countries are Russia’s only customer, meaning that Europe is a monopsony buyer – and has significant bargaining leverage as a result. The problem is thus one of coordination: European countries need to commit to a mechanism whereby their purchasing needs are met by a central buyer, most likely through a mechanism of the European Union. This would increase solidarity between European countries and present a united face to Russia; it would also protect individual European countries from the vicissitudes of an unreliable and aggressive trading partner. The impact on Russia would be high. Although its population numbers 140 million, gas sales are the only reason that it is flush with cash; its GDP, even at purchasing power parity, is no larger than that of the United Kingdom. A Europe which recognizes its own power and presents a united front will be one which is more secure, and will keep Russia safely contained, with its troops out of the countries of Eastern Europe permanently.

All of this will come too late for Georgia, which is the tragedy at the heart of the current mess, and a genuine long-term response may not be quick enough for the coming challenges. The Baltic states may be beyond Russia’s reach militarily, but bullying and cyber warfare there can expect to be stepped up. Transdniestria will become a flashpoint if Russia wants it to, and can be used to keep Moldova (Europe’s poorest country) in line. The biggest challenge in the post-Georgia era will be in Ukraine, which will in all likelihood be torn apart if the current confrontational course persists. Ukraine is already subject to incipient Russian territorial claims over the Crimea; it is also a nation divided, with the Russian-speaking east much more sympathetic to Moscow than the Ukrainian-speaking west. With Ukrainian politicians already accusing each other of disloyalty and of serving the Russian agenda, as President Yuschenko did to Prime Minister Tymoshenko earlier this week. The strategic uncertainty surrounding the country is immense – and it could become a major flashpoint in the future.

The strategic map of Europe therefore looks more gloomy now than it has any time since the early 1980s. Hopefully the tragedy befalling Georgia at present will galvanise a sleepy West into a coordinated response that will finally address the immense strategic challenge presented by a Russia which is increasingly aggressive and nationalistic. For too long, western countries have ignored the signs that Russia was the major strategic challenge which exists today; now, perhaps, after the tragic invasion of Georgia, Russia will finally be treated as such.

"The Bear Has Come Out Of Hibernation"

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:26:00 +0000

It's extremely frustrating not to have enough time at present to do a full treatment of the situation in Georgia, which I have been following extremely closely and with a great deal of alarm. (After writing a lengthy piece on the subject, I decided to sleep on it and awoke to discover that the situation had changed, meaning that some hefty rework is required.)

In the meantime, I would strongly encourage anyone with an interest in some analysis on the subject to avoid the BBC and the daily newspapers, pretty much all of whose reporters were bussed in at the very last minute once it turned into a hot war, and who all seem to think that Georgia's assault on South Ossetia was the point at which the story began. (They clearly haven't been reading their own papers: anyone who had been paying attention to the regurgitated wire agency reports published in the same news outlets would know that this is nonsense.)

Instead, I recommend, predictably, an excellent piece of analysis in The Economist, which has been closely covering Georgia for ages and even predicted the war's imminence before it broke out; also, less predictably, a heroic and comprehensive piece of reporting in Time magazine, whose correspondents and links in the Caucasus and in Russia are well-developed and authoritative. I will check back in later in the week, perhaps after we see the outcome of today's emergency NATO meeting, which will contain clues as to how the dust is going to settle.

The Finishing Line

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:58:00 +0000

There is a palpable sense of relief and anticipation in the air in America this week – or so it appears from here, at any rate – as the campaign for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination winds to an end, 17 months after it began in earnest at the start of 2007. It has been a long, exhausting, and occasionally caustic campaign, where the lack of substantive disagreements over the issues has been masked by an intensity and stamina that is usually reserved for the general election. As Barack Obama claims his place in history as the first black – indeed, the first non-white – presidential candidate of a major American political party, and (on a rather more mundane level) as I end my five months of primary blogging, it is an appropriate time to do several things. It’s a time to pause and note the historic choices that both parties have ended up making in this most unusual of primary campaigns. It’s a time to reflect on the primary season as a whole, with all of its ups and downs. It’s a time to consider how the campaign that’s past will affect the campaign in future. And, naturally, it’s also a time to gaze into the crystal ball, and see if we can divine anything about the long campaign to come.

First, though, the story of the last few days. Hillary Clinton’s hopes before the weekend rested on two things: the Democratic Rules Committee’s ruling on the seating of delegates from Michigan and Florida, and enough primaries going her way this week to give her a convincing lead in the popular vote. It became apparent that she wouldn’t be able to rescue her situation after the Rules Committee met. Speculation had abounded that she would use her connections within the committee to swing things her way. This was not to be. It was obvious that any move that robbed Barack Obama of the nomination through a technicality would be disastrous for perceptions of the Party, and accordingly the committee came up with a fudge: delegates would be seated, but with only a half-vote each, and Obama would get some of the delegates from Michigan who had voted “Uncommitted” (his name had not been on the ballot in the state). Clinton’s net gain was thus very small – nowhere near enough to bridge the gap with her opponent. Her campaign reacted with a certain degree of outrage – the valid point was made that the committee didn’t have the authority to allocate “uncommitted” delegates to a nominee – but the sense of it all being over was beginning to settle. In the meantime, the vitriol spilled by Clinton supporters upon hearing of the verdict called up ugly memories of the violent 1968 convention and perhaps gave all Democrats pause, as an indication that the continuing split was going too far and might prove too divisive if it continued much further. Although the campaign had grounds to appeal and even threatened to continue all the way to the convention, privately it was beginning to accept that the race was nearly over.

Evidence for this was on show all week. Hillary Clinton, normally controlled and combative, began to relax – a sign that she was keeping on until the bitter end, but that she wasn’t focused single-mindedly on victory any more; she was making more informal comments and jokes. Campaign staff were asked to get all their expenses in by the end of the week. A young communications staffer was introduced to the traveling press pack en route to Puerto Rico; in recognition of her hard work based mostly in Washington DC, she was due a rewarding trip to the Caribbean. Bill Clinton hinted that the campaign wouldn’t continue beyond Tuesday. Rumours swirled about a concession, despite frantic denials. Clinton won in Puerto Rico, by a huge margin of 68% to 32%, but she only increased her vote count by 140,000 – not the 200,000 that had been hoped for. On Tuesday, the last states to vote went for it, finally turning the entire map of the US purple. Obama won in Montana by 57% to 41%, but Clinton’s 55% to 45% victory in South Dakota bucked the trend towards Obama in the mountain west. (John McCain won in South Dakota’s Republican primary by 70% to 17% for Ron Paul, and also won New Mexico’s Republican primary by 86% to 14%.) This last minute surprise win was not enough to save her though.

The Obama campaign had puzzled some pundits as the stream of superdelegate endorsements dried up in the week before the last primaries; it became obvious on primary day that this had been a deliberate choice, as they unveiled 28 superdelegate endorsements over the course of Tuesday. Coupled with Obama’s pledged delegate gains on the day, this was enough to finally push him over the 2,118 threshold to claim an absolute majority of Democratic delegates. Among the endorsements were former president Jimmy Carter and Representative James Clyburn, one of the first members of the national party leadership to make an endorsement. Clinton, conversely, began shedding superdelegates as the outcome became clear: Barack Obama had won enough votes, and enough states, to be the nominee. Clinton’s sole remaining argument was her popular vote victory – an argument which only worked if you included votes in Florida (which didn’t count), Michigan (where Obama’s name wasn’t on the ballot), and Puerto Rico (which doesn’t vote in the general election in November), and discounted caucus states which didn’t disclose their actual voting tallies. Given that Obama’s victory in any case was largely down to states which ran caucuses (which always have lower turnouts anyway), that argument ran hollow. It certainly wasn’t enough to bring Clinton the superdelegate stampede that she needed to proclaim victory.

And so it was, in a typically charismatic and eloquent speech on Tuesday night, that Barack Obama claimed the mantle of the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. It was a powerful moment. American parties have flirted with diversity in the past: electing a Catholic president in 1960, nominating a woman to be Vice President in 1984, choosing an orthodox Jew as the Vice Presidential candidate in 2000. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians have variously been Supreme Court Justices, Mayors, Governors, Senators and Congressmen. But never before has a major American political party done anything like it did this year, anointing an African-American as its Presidential candidate despite the bigoted rumours about his religion, his patriotism, and even (as became apparent in West Virginia and Kentucky) lingering racism in parts of the country. This is a moment when America deserves to pause for a moment and feel good about itself.

The beauty of the Obama victory is that he didn’t run as a self-consciously “black” candidate: he ran as a post-racial one, a politician of undoubted intellect and probity who was attuned to the problems of white Americans and black Americans alike. (Some of the dafter criticism of him even came from certain black leaders claiming that, because he wasn’t descended from slaves and was half-white, he wasn’t “black enough”.) It is very tempting to get carried away, and claim that the Obama victory represents a coming-together of Americans as one nation after centuries of division, as a mark of progress and reconciliation after eight years of a presidency predicated upon exploiting divisions to achieve narrow victories. More than that, Obama represents that rare politician who is possessed of a fearsome intelligence and actually uses it; a politician who will plump for the options that make sense rather than those most politically expedient; a politician who achieves victory by being smarter and more articulate than his opponents; a politician possessed of the gift of soaring rhetorical ability that has failed to fall on any politician since John F. Kennedy. One can look at his victory starry-eyed, and see a triumph of “the audacity of hope”, and – remarkably – one would not be entirely wrong to do so.

In reality of course, other factors are also at work. The new electoral system for Democratic primaries has served him as well as could possibly be hoped for, as the old system (still in use by Republicans) would have given Hillary Clinton victory months ago by virtue of her wins in all of the biggest states. Momentum might have gone in different ways if Florida and Michigan hadn’t been foolishly discounted by overzealous Democratic rules committees. A more representative system of voting – primaries, say, instead of caucuses – could have tilted hundreds of delegates into his opponent’s camp. And some of Obama’s positions – his calls for a quick withdrawal of troops from Iraq, his opposition to free trade – have reflected old-school, cynical political tactics of adopting popular measures without any real intention of implementing them. (Obama has pledged to consult with military leaders before drawing down troops from Iraq, and in the interests of avoiding chaos there he will not be able to withdraw them as quickly as he’s said he would like; meanwhile, his comments to the Canadians around NAFTA represented one of the most humiliating revelations of the entire campaign, from any candidate.)

But Obama has earned this victory. He has stuck to his guns on his soaring principles, with the notions of “Change we can believe in” – “Yes, We Can” – providing an immensely optimistic and idealistic antidote to the poisoned bickering more typical of the national political scene. He has stuck to his guns with this idealism, acting chivalrously toward his opponents long after they started going after him. More importantly, he has been learning on the job in a hugely impressive way. Surprises abounded after he announced his candidacy. It turned out that his stump speeches were made out of wood – quite a surprise given his post-2004 convention reputation of being a talented speaker. He fixed it, leading by the end of 2007 to the now-familiar inspiration that we associate with him. His health-care proposals were meager next to those of his opponents; he fixed it by quickly developing proposals of his own which built on the best aspects of John Edwards and Hillary Clinton’s. His foreign policy experience was dismal, and he dug the trap of naivety for himself with his pledge to meet with leaders of hostile countries without preconditions; his recent caveating and qualifications would make any diplomat proud. He thought he’d won after Iowa, but defeat in New Hampshire taught him to hold on and avoid triumphalism. He was hit hard by scandals such as the Reverend Wright affair and “bittergate”, but after initially shaky responses he learned how to deal with them. In other words, every time that he has stumbled, he’s picked himself back up again, improved and seasoned by the experience. Four years ago, he was still a state senator in Illinois, and it is correct to describe him as inexperienced, particularly in comparison to his opponent. But what he has proved, time and again, is that he has the potential to be a great President, not just for his symbolism but for his substance. Despite all of the campaign vitriol, he is a better candidate now than he was when he started his campaign, and he will be a better candidate still when November comes around.

The Democrats, of course, are only one side of the coin, and the Republicans have had a tumultuous season as well. John McCain was written off as a lost cause by last autumn, even by such normally astute observers as The Economist’s Lexington. But out of all of the front-runners – McCain, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson – none was an obvious choice. Huckabee was a religious nut, anathema to the business wing of the party and its foreign policy experts. Giuliani was the darling of one foreign policy wing – the neoconservative hawks – and acceptable to the business wing, but held in deep suspicion by social conservatives. Romney was the darling of the business wing, but ran as a social conservative who was unable to overcome suspicion by many in the conservative base on account of his Mormon religion. Thompson appealed to social conservatives longing for a new Reagan to unite the party, but faded without making much of an impression. And McCain was regarded as being insufficiently conservative and far too much of a maverick to be palatable, as well as being too old. The Republicans, in short, faced a very difficult year after two terms of Bush bequeathed them deep unpopularity.

After much excitement – the rollercoaster ride of the Romney campaign, the bizarre lunacy of Giuliani’s plan, the surprising indefatigability of Huckabee - the Republicans pulled themselves back from the brink by choosing John McCain, the only candidate who gave them a decent shot at victory in November. John McCain has a lot going for him: his long experience in politics, his war hero credentials, his undoubted strength of character and moral stature (after his stands against lobbyists and torture), his fiery independence from any ties to interest groups which could hold him hostage. His appeal to independents is mighty indeed, and his sure hand on foreign policy may be just what the country needs after so much incompetence.

But he faces challenges too, particularly since none of his drawbacks in primary season have shown much sign of going away. He is still old – potentially the oldest first term president ever. He may not be hostage to special interests like religion and the gun lobby, but closeness to such groups is a source of strength rather than weakness for Republicans, amongst their base at least. He doesn’t have any significant economic experience (in a time of recession), and he has never really run anything (in a time when the federal government is a mess). He is weak with his base and, despite being very spry for his age, he is not running a campaign that is truly national or a fundraising juggernaut yet. His ties to his party are necessarily weak as he keeps his distance from a party heading for a landslide legislative loss.

Barack Obama has troubles too, of course. The long campaign has entrenched and potentially alienated many supporters of Hillary Clinton, who may not be motivated to work for him in the autumn. Most of the states he has won in the primaries are going to vote Republican in the end, meaning that he will relying on states won by Clinton to be his base of core support. His victory partly rests on the disenfranchisement of voters in two large and important swing states. He is inexperienced in not just economic matters, but foreign policy ones too. But he is young, symbolic, well-funded, a quick learner and very well organized. John McCain may have a bigger appeal than most Republican candidates would in key Democratic states like New York and California – and be a major threat in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Florida – but Obama’s incredible fundraising will put normally Republican states such as Virginia and North Carolina in play as well. From where we sit now, then – particularly given current levels of popular animosity towards the Republican party – an Obama victory looks more plausible than a McCain one.

But much could happen between now and November. Obama will need to watch out for his weak spots on the economy and foreign policy, and ensure that he is perceived as trustworthy by middle class and working class Americans who might balk at electing so liberal a leader. McCain will need to fix his campaign organization and figure out how to mend his relations with his party without ruining his appeal. Vice Presidential picks will be of huge importance. Paranoids on both sides worry that McCain might die of old age, or that Obama might be assassinated. But thankfully, the more extreme outcomes aren’t the most plausible. And the rest of the race – judging by how it’s gone so far – will hopefully remain civil and, now that we move to a fight between the parties, issue-focused.

What is most uplifting about the way that these campaigns have turned out, in fact, is the wonderful result that both of the candidates being put forward would make excellent Presidents. President Obama would be symbolic, inspiring, and potentially transformative. President McCain would bring the steady hand of experience to the tiller of state, and would fix much of what is currently wrong with the government by dint of his fierce independence and upstanding moral character. In conclusion, then, this has been one of the best primary seasons ever: exciting without being nasty, inspiring without being cynical, and ending by presenting two excellent candidates for the job for the first time since 1992. America has been transfixed by the saga of the past five months of campaigning, and as a result of their outcome, America can now look forward happily to a brighter future.

Next Up: There are no more primaries, but the election blog will return to assess the candidates’ platforms once the Vice Presidential picks are made, and perhaps even to offer an endorsement when the election is upon us.

Republican voting in the Gem State

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:06:00 +0000

Idaho is well known for its potatoes. It is also known as the home of Lou Dobbs (famous for his bilious rants on television) and Larry Craig (famous for being the senator who propositioned a police officer for gay sex in an airport bathroom). In a bit of a stretch, the state is also notable for having given its name to a character in Frank Herbert’s Dune novels who eventually ends up being repeatedly cloned for several thousand years by a giant human sandworm.

But it was Idaho’s people who dutifully trudged out to vote yesterday in cloudy, 13 degree (centigrade) weather, and the reason that they were voting was that the state was holding its Republican primary. (State Democrats voted – for Obama – in their own primary on February 5th.) John McCain won every county, taking 70% of the votes to 24% for Ron Paul. It was a result that was fairly unimportant – and, indeed, largely unnoticed – but nevertheless the results show up some of the difficulties that face the candidates going forward.

The result was possibly most disturbing for John McCain, whose 70% victory was distinctly underwhelming given his status as presumptive nominee. In point of fact, his share of the vote was smaller than that which went to Obama, who beat Clinton in the state by 79% to 17%. Idaho is a fiercely conservative state, and the result very quietly served to highlight McCain’s ongoing difficulties attracting the sorts of conservative voters who really ought to be making up his base. Amusingly, the number of voters who went for Ron Paul, who has no chance of winning anything, was almost twice as large as the number of voters who went for Obama (29,741 to 16,880, according to CNN), who has a very good chance of winning the entire thing.

And this turnout figure is the scary thing for Barack Obama. Much of his lead in pledged delegates comes from his lopsided wins in Western states like Idaho, yet turnout in the Democratic primaries in such states is miniscule next to turnout for Republicans. In a competitive primary in Idaho, Obama won big with just 16,800 votes; in a practically non-competitive – even irrelevant - primary, John McCain still managed to garner 87,300 votes. This story is the same in much of the West – but because almost all other states in the region hold caucuses rather than primaries, the absolute vote tallies have been obscured. Idaho helps to make it apparent that Obama’s primary wins in such places will not translate into general election victories in the autumn. The upcoming primaries in Montana and South Dakota – which Obama will likely win – will make this clearer yet. Obama, in short, will be relying for his main base of general election support on states which voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

One shouldn’t read too much into this – John McCain will easily win the Western states come November, and the big, reliably Democratic states which went for Clinton will swing behind Obama in due course. But as the two campaigns rush into the post-primary campaigns with the self-confidence that comes from their primary victories, Idaho provides a stark reminder that it will not be smooth sailing for either candidate.

Next Up: Puerto Rico votes in its Democratic primary on June 1st, followed on June 3rd by Montana’s Democrats, New Mexico’s Republicans, and both parties in South Dakota. These are the last of the primaries, bringing the primary season, after five long months, to a close.

Hillary-bashing

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:19:00 +0000

Pity poor Hillary Clinton. She wins another state, lopsidedly, but still the headlines won't swing behind her. The reason? Everyone is impatient for this contest to move on to the next stage, especially Barack Obama, who picked up another line in his repertoire this week – that, despite Clinton’s first big clawing-back of his lead in delegates for a while (only by about 30, not enough to make a difference), he has now edged himself to the point where he has the majority of pledged delegates, his latest milestone in the grueling, neverending slog. This latest pronouncement – delivered in Iowa, in an unsuccessful attempt to look unifying and conclusive – provoked an inevitable comment from Bill Clinton calling it “dumb politics”, as the milestone only works if you discount Florida and Michigan. The two candidates appear to inhabit two different worlds.

I never thought I’d say that I wanted the primary race to be over, but this is getting silly now. Hillary Clinton’s win in Kentucky – 65% to 30% - doesn’t change the race’s dynamic, and this week’s are the last two states that really have any meaningful size. The Oregon result shows that Obama is now winning primaries in blue states by a big margin – 59% to 41% - while Clinton is not. Clinton can continue to argue that she better represents older, whiter, less educated voters; she can continue to argue that Florida and Michigan delegates need to be seated so as to avoid alienating those two states. But the mood has started to shift. In a context where the conversation should be about boosting Obama’s appeal to those voters – and how she can help her party out with that – her continuing campaign comes to appear more like obstructionism than anything else.

It is very difficult for Hillary Clinton to let go, it seems; it is also frustrating and unfair. Had the Democrats retained their rules from previous primary seasons, or used the same rules as Republicans, not only would some of her delegates from Florida and Michigan be seated, but the winner-takes-all system would have delivered her a resounding victory months ago. On a more fundamental level, if more states used the more democratic primary system instead of caucuses, she would have a big lead in delegates and might even have won by now. But the rules are the rules, and she wasn’t challenging them back when they were being made; however stupid the Democratic rulebook is (and it is very, very stupid), that’s the deal, and she will have to live with it. It must be tough to go from juggernaut to sideshow, but that’s just the way it goes.

Does she have some sort of plan for using the party rules committees to somehow swing victory her way? If so, it won’t work – imagine the outrage if that were to happen now that Obama is widely perceived to have won. Not even the Democratic party could be so stupid. Perhaps she is motivated by a Huckabee-like stubbornness, intent on at least finishing the race, or waiting for Obama to just cross that finishing line? If so, she is being damaging without possibility of being constructive, and ought to be told by her advisers to stop. Is she, as the press is speculating, bargaining for a position on the Obama ticket, a seat in his cabinet, or even just the adoption of some of her policy positions? She should do so behind the scenes; none of this will help the Democrats in November if she continues her attacks.

Barack Obama can be forgiven for trying to rise above the Democratic fray now, avoiding campaigning in West Virginia and Kentucky almost entirely, moving on to general election states to campaign, focusing on McCain and only mentioning Clinton in terms of faint praise that make it sound like she’s gone already. And the press seems to be right – finally – in letting him get away with it. But it will continue to ring false until his opponent gets out of the way and stops being a spoiler for her party and, indeed, her country. Hillary Clinton’s time in the sun has now gone, and even if she pulls some sort of comeback out the hat now – which, given her track record, still seems possible – she will do so in a context where she has damaged her own reputation and that of her party in an unnecessary way. She can no longer win the nomination for the presidency.

John McCain finally broke the 80% barrier on Tuesday’s primaries, taking in 85% in Oregon next to 15% for Paul. He is just the sort of unconventional candidate that a state like Oregon might go for; Obama is right to focus on him rather than Clinton there. He also won Kentucky, but with only 72% of the vote.

Pundits may be right to see Hillary Clinton’s campaign as coming to resemble the title of her memoir, Living History, in the sense that it really should be history yet stubbornly refuses to die. She may well have something up her sleeve. But this is now moving beyond healthy competition into the realm of the painful, and it is to be hoped that she will hurry up and reach the obvious conclusion as soon as possible.

Next Up: Republicans in Idaho will hold their primary on May 27th (next Tuesday).

Hawaii, McCain

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:43:00 +0000

Sunday saw the conclusion of the Republican state convention in Hawaii, a state which is about as blue as could be, and also happens to be Barack Obama’s childhood home. State Republicans have been doing moderately well in recent years, but the fact that the current Republican governor is the state’s first in 40 years gives you a clue to the local political tendencies. Because of this reason, Hawaii will likely be irrelevant to the Republicans this year, and the media have therefore ignored its primary delegates appropriately.

There is another big reason for the media to ignore the result, and that is that the result itself is obscenely complicated, with even Hawaii’s local newspapers struggling to make sense of it. Hawaiian Republicans vote for delegates rather than candidates; they chose their state convention delegates in a protracted series of caucuses in February, and those state delegates then chose the delegates to the national convention over the weekend. Those national delegates are under no obligation to vote for any given candidate. As it happens, Ron Paul had very good fundraising and an excellent presence in the state, but through clever management of the voting the state party leadership has probably secured mostly McCain supporters to head to Minneapolis-St Paul in September.

Hawaii is the least of John McCain’s worries at the moment. With the Democratic nominating process drawing to a close, he has certainly established himself well as the party’s candidate, but rather than enabling him to tour around drumming up support while the Democrats self-destruct, their ongoing fight has actually had the effect of drawing attention away from him in a big way. He has been happily chugging along in the background, but hasn’t exactly been grabbing the headlines. Meanwhile, a number of trends seem to be making themselves apparent which do not bode well for him – namely, his continuing problem appealing to conservatives, the potential that an Obama candidacy has for pulling the rug out from under his feet, and his liabilities related to other Republicans.

John McCain has yet to win a Republican primary with more than 80% of the vote. This, quite frankly, is astonishing: his has been the only viable name on the ballot for quite some time, and yet still Huckabee and Paul – who have both admitted defeat – draw those primary votes. His sweeps of all the delegates obscure the fact that his best result yet has been in Mississippi, with 79%; although he has jumped to the 70s since his March 4th wins, nowhere has he drawn the vote tallies to reflect his delegate gains. The reason why is fairly clear: he simply does not resonate with conservatives, who have subjected him to a great deal of bile and are wary of his western, small-government ways. After spending an awful lot of time arguing against the way that President Bush has been conducting the war on terror, he didn’t have the best rep with southern conservatives to begin with; now, he is going to be facing a fight for turnout amongst a group that propelled the current president to office. There isn’t very much he can do about this given that his independent thinking is a big part of his appeal, but a continuing refusal to give the pack some red meat will continue to hurt. Developments this week aren’t helping. The California Supreme Court has ruled restrictions on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, and the moderate Californian governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has welcomed the ruling and pledged to support it. McCain is in the Schwarzenegger camp. He thinks that marriage is an affair between a man and a woman, but more importantly, he thinks that its definition is a matter for the states, which is why – another heresy – he voted against a federal constitutional amendment to ban the practice. This position is near-identical to those of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, right down to thinking that gay partners should have civil rights equal to those of heterosexual couples. This moderation endears him to moderates, but not to the conservatives who are supposed to be his base. McCain has been in Virginia this week addressing the NRA; having decided to do a walkabout in a sports (euphemism for “guns”) store, he actually avoided the gun aisles (he doesn’t own a weapon himself) and made for the fishing rods. Firing up the ravening hordes of gun owners, he isn’t.

All of these problems with his base are being compounded by challenges from both right and left. On the right, the former Republican congressman Bob Barr is going for the nomination of the Libertarian party, and may capture votes from die-hard conservatives. Barack Obama, meanwhile, is potentially transforming the region’s politics. The Democrats have shown a knack recently for taking heavily Republican congressional seats in by-elections in the South; in the meantime, the ongoing Democratic campaign has ensured that vast tracts of the South have been involved in Democratic primaries in an active way for the first time in years. Even in states where the Republican primary was competitive, turnouts for the Democrats have been higher, for example in conservative states like Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. And black voters are energized like never before. It remains doubtful about whether these will really be enough to put the South in play for the Democrats – after all, the key to winning remains the white voters who may have been tempted by conservative congressional candidates but will stay away from Obama – but what they will mean is that McCain will have to keep a steady eye on his own back yard. Now that he is opting into the federal campaign funding for the general election, he will have much less cash to throw around than his rival, and if he is forced to throw it into safe states in the South to keep up morale and turnout, then he will have less available for the swing states.

In the meantime, to have any chance at all of victory, he is having to preserve his outsider status by staying away from other Republicans, both in the White House and Congress. Congressional Republicans aren’t exactly popular, and the sitting president is one of the most unpopular in history, so this may, at first glance, seem wise; indeed, it would be accurate to say that McCain has no choice in the matter. But a general election is a coordinated effort by a single party at the levels of state legislatures and governorships, Congress and the Presidency, and the relationship between the Presidential nominee (as a standard bearer) and the rest of the party (as the troops) is an important one in ensuring that the message makes it through. Avoiding other Republicans is thus not a good way to win in the end. The problem is that associating with them will hurt him. In Israel this week for that country’s 60th anniversary celebrations, President Bush lambasted those who were in favour of negotiating with extremists calling for Israel’s destruction as appeasers, invoking a comparison to Hitler; the Obama campaign immediately struck back at the President, leveling the fairly grave accusation that the President had used a foreign policy trip to score political points domestically, which is a pretty serious breach of decorum. When McCain then chimed in agreeing with the President’s comments and leveling the relevant accusations at Obama, this was supposed to have the neat effect of taking a statesman-like statement and focusing it on a candidate; the move backfired immensely, with the Obama campaign practically ignoring McCain altogether and going directly for the President himself. The more that McCain is associated with Bush, the easier it will be for Obama to attack the president directly; this is a much easier line of attack than those against McCain himself. It is a remarkable thing for the candidate from the governing party to be afraid of appearing with a sitting president for fear not of being overshadowed, but of being tainted. McCain will be burned, and will keep his distance more in future.

(As for the truth amongst all the allegations flying backwards and forwards, the jury will remain out on whether Bush was actually targeting Obama; the comments are a fairly typical thing to say in Israel, and could apply as much to other nations as to politicians at home. The White House has alternated between snide remarks – along the lines that the world does not revolve around presidential candidates, much as they would like to think so, and the comments weren’t aimed at Obama – and bewilderment, with it emerging that White House speechwriters actually had Jimmy Carter – who has met with Hamas – rather than Obama in mind. As for the allegations being leveled at Obama, he hasn’t called for talks with Hamas or Hezbollah and wanted to talk to Iran primarily in the nuclear context, meaning that his position on Israel is actually pretty clear and showing the Republican tactics as something of a smear.)

What all of this adds up to is that John McCain has actually been getting a fairly easy ride so far. As soon as the Democrats make their decision and turn their attentions to him, he will find himself in a very difficult position indeed. It is indeed possible that the renewed publicity will buck him up, and that the course of the campaign could see a big swing in his favour. But due to his weaknesses with his base, his ties to his unpopular party, and his often prickly and individualistic policy positions, he may turn out to be a much weaker candidate than anyone now supposes.

Next Up: Both parties vote in Kentucky and Oregon - medium-small states - on Tuesday, May 20th.

Beginning of the Endgame

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:17:00 +0000

The mood has shifted in America, and in a big way, since the results last week. Clinton may not have done as badly as everyone seems to think, but it was still nowhere near the breakthrough that she desperately needed. It’s as if a giant trip-switch has flicked amongst Americans: having gone from bemused tolerance of her continued run before Pennsylvania to a kind of breathless excitement after her victory there, it has now abruptly decided that her chances of actually winning are gone forever, and that the remaining campaign is near-guaranteed to be futile.

And no wonder. Her campaign is now $20m in debt, despite her having loaned a total of $11m to it so far. The very act of competing is serving simply to deepen the financial hole that she operates in. Donors are backing away, unwilling to continue bailing a sinking ship. She is no longer irrevocably behind only in the pledged delegate count; she can no longer reasonably expect to be able to win the popular vote, with the prospect of Michigan and Florida being counted fading away completely. Worse, her long-shrinking lead in the pledged superdelegate count finally disappeared this week, with Obama now counting 284 superdelegates to Clinton’s 273. The momentum is with him: most of her superdelegates pledged for her long ago, before Obama became seriously competitive. He has been picking up increasing numbers of them ever since, including several who had previously come out for Clinton, and even one pledged delegate from Maryland who apparently decided that he couldn’t in good conscience vote for Clinton despite having been elected to do so. Even James Carville, one of the Clintons’ closest advisors, as much as admitted this week that it was only a matter of time now before she dropped out.

Amusingly, it is amidst this murky doom and gloom for her campaign that she marked another victory, winning a massive 67% of the vote to Obama’s 26% in West Virginia, sweeping every county. This was comparable to McCain’s 76% in the state’s Republican primary, which he also swept (although most of the state’s delegates will go to Mike Huckabee following the earlier Republican convention there on February 5th). She thus picked up 20 of the state’s 28 delegates. This gain of 12, however, will not make a dent.

The Clinton aim now has to be to win as many more states as possible to bolster her argument to the superdelegates. West Virginia, however, will not help with that, as the victory is not a pretty one. In the run-up she voiced for the first time one of her key selling points: that she does well among the white voters that the Democrats will need to woo in the autumn, and that superdelegates should thus vote for her. While it is dubious if this was actually racist to say – analysts have been saying it all along, after all, without much controversy – it wasn’t very wise for the candidate herself to say so. The ensuing focus on race in overwhelmingly white West Virginia led on to revealing opinion polls showing that fully one in five of voters thought race was an important factor in making their decision, and that 8 in 10 of those voters went for Clinton. “Elitist” Democrats elsewhere in the country are thus able to sneer (privately) that Clinton won West Virginia because it’s full of racist hicks – hardly a great endorsement. This is all a far cry from the distinction Clinton would prefer us to draw – that no Democrat has been able to carry the general election without taking West Virginia since 1916.

Obama, however, may still win West Virginia in the fall; and therein lies the problem. Now that he is so far ahead, he can afford to avoid states that would embarrass him now, and indeed he chose to spend Tuesday in Missouri. Rather than heading to the next primary states, as Clinton has, he proceeded from there to appearances in Florida and Michigan, a neat reversal of the Clinton campaign’s association with those states up to now. (He will head on to some primary states a little later.) With the Obama and McCain campaigns now focusing largely on each other, Clinton is being left forlornly behind while Obama appears increasingly as the presumptive nominee.

And so it is that Hillary Clinton begins, finally, to fade.

While the Democrats finally begin to enter their endgame, the Republicans are getting on with the campaign, but naturally McCain’s overwhelming wins yesterday in West Virginia and Nebraska didn’t make much of an impression as he has already won the race. Worse still was the result from a Congressional by-election in Mississippi in which the Republicans had tried to diminish the candidate by associating him with Obama; the strategy failed to work (or even backfired) as the Democrats proceeded to win the heavily conservative seat. As the second Democrat win in a conservative district in as many weeks, congressional Republicans can only hold their breath for a landslide defeat in November. No wonder, as it was revealed today, they’ve borrowed their slogan (“Change you can believe in”) from an antidepressant.

Next Up: Republicans in Hawaii will be voting on May 18th (Sunday).

Correction: I have the antidepressant slogan wrong above - the Republican slogan is "Change you deserve", which also used to be used by Wyeth for its Effexor drug. "Change you can believe in" is associated with the Obama campaign.

Hoosiers and Tar Heels; or Gas and the Reverend

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:56:00 +0000

After the huge build-up for Pennsylvania, the results from Indiana and North Carolina – the last major states to go – seem almost anticlimactic. To a certain extent, this is because they are. If Hillary Clinton had barnstormed her way to a North Carolina victory, Barack Obama’s days would suddenly have appeared to be seriously numbered. If Obama had squeezed a win out of Indiana, it would have shown that he hadn’t been hurt by all the recent scandalling and would have almost certainly knocked Clinton out of the race. As it is, the result was two tepid wins for the two major candidates that seemed to reflect growing disillusionment with the continuing race.

The two weeks between Pennsylvania and Indiana/North Carolina had been characterized by the Reverend Wright and by Gas Prices. Obama had left Pennsylvania clearly hoping that he would be able to put the previous month of gaffes and misstatements behind him, but as it happened, all that he managed to do was to ricochet off the elitist tag and onto the angry-black-man tag. Such out-of-the-frying-pan maneuvers, in fairness, weren’t really his fault, as he is mischaracterized in both categories. On the elitist point, his thoughts on rural voters may have been unwise, but they were certainly in tune with the liberal thinking that Obama has consistently displayed throughout his life. An awareness of his biography – and the noble way in which he has spent his life – ought to discredit the notion of him as an elitist. (The Stephen Colbert joke skewers it pretty effectively. To paraphrase - Colbert: “So, tell me about your elite upbringing on the South Side of Chicago. How many silver spoons did you have?” Michelle Obama: “We had three spoons. Then my father got a promotion at the plant, and we had four.”) As for the angry black man tag, the outbursts of his former pastor were simultaneously ridiculous, hurtful to him personally, and representative of a way of doing politics that Obama is leading a generational rebellion against.

Nevertheless, both are sticking. The Harvard-educated lawyer with the high-falutin talk has always had difficulty appealing to the working poor, and now many such people think of him as not understanding them at all. Meanwhile, despite all of his lofty rhetoric about change, the confrontational comments of Reverend Wright have cast minds directly back to the anger of older black politicians like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and even Louis Farrakhan. Their (righteous) passion may have been heartfelt, but it certainly put off non-blacks in a big way, and Wright’s diatribes may have awakened a fear of a certain angry black stereotype that Obama had worked extremely hard – and extremely successfully – to avoid. As he lurches from problem to problem, it’s no wonder that he’s reportedly been looking glum and irritated recently.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has been chirpy and commanding, enjoying what will probably turn out to have been a swansong in which she briefly swung back into contention. With the Pennsylvania win, she carried momentum and renewed confidence into Indiana and North Carolina. She has certainly taken the initiative. And what, one might ask, has she done with this opportunity? Deciding to play to the crowd and further improve her rapport with the blue-collar whites of the industrial north-east, she has jumped onto a silly idea – originally picked up by John McCain, no less – to give consumers a month-long summer holiday from paying gas taxes. Quite apart from sending completely the wrong message on the environment, making no economic sense and promising a nightmare of a windfall tax for the oil companies who would have to pick up the tab, this “McCain-Clinton” gas holiday, as Obama has taken to calling it, would save the average family only about $30. Such populist claptrap is rightly seen by many as pandering, and has focused much attention on Clintonian populism, further damaging her credentials to having serious policies. The long-standing argument that her greater experience would stand her in good stead is seeming more and more laughable.

On top of the damage that both candidates have been attracting, of course, the continuing fight directly between them – now stretching into its fifth month – is hurting each other as well. At some point, people will start to get tired. The limp victories that the two of them achieved yesterday are a part of this. Obama started out with a huge lead in North Carolina, which Clinton eroded down to 14 points – big, but not as big as the 28-point lead he achieved in South Carolina or his 25-point win in Virginia, next door. (He won 56% to 42% in North Carolina.) Clinton squeaked a 3-point, 51%-48% win in Indiana, which was supposed to be home territory for her judging by its demographic similarities to Ohio and Pennsylvania and her triumphal touring of the state over the past fortnight.

Overall, then, the results were probably about as inconclusive as you could get. In neither state were the wins strong enough to point to one candidate or the other romping to victory, and in neither were the results weak enough for either candidate to begin thinking about being knocked out. As for the delegate count, Obama picked up about 12 more than Clinton did, continuing his slow, meandering path towards an overall lead that just isn’t big enough to win.

The remaining states are too small to really matter: West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Montana and South Dakota (plus Puerto Rico) will not swing it one way or the other. What seems likely now, then, is that the climactic moment will come in early June. Superdelegates will then come under intense pressure to declare themselves, and if enough declare for either candidate (or, more realistically, for Obama) then it will be a brave, forlorn loser who will carry on the fight (possibly in the form of Hillary Clinton campaigning for the Florida and Michigan delegations to be seated). Probably the next big checkpoint, then, is not the next state primary win, but rather the moment when Obama’s superdelegate count overtakes Clinton’s – possibly within the next week.

The outcome still seems to be pretty certain. In the meantime, however, the Democrats are flogging themselves to death. John McCain, naturally, also won both states.

Next Up: West Virginia’s Democrats and Nebraska’s Republicans will go to the polls on May 13th – next Tuesday.

Voting, closer to home

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:19:00 +0000

My ballot card arrived in the post today, which means that it’s finally time to start thinking seriously about London’s elections (on May 1st) for Mayor and Assembly. This prospect is more onerous than it should be: London’s new government will probably have more effect on my day-to-day life than, say, the next US President, so I ought to be taking a high interest in it. Nevertheless, I have been going out of my way to avoid the tedious non-debate that has characterized the race so far.

As a New Yorker essay pointed out recently, calling London’s top dog “mayor” is a bit generous: “transport commissioner” would be slightly more accurate. Most of the Mayor of London’s powers revolve around transport and housing, with a bit of influence over the police thrown in, plus he gets the moral authority of having a soapbox to make pronouncements from. As a result, most of the campaign promises are going to be fairly similar. Cheaper public transport. Better public transport. More affordable housing. More green housing. More greenery in general. Less crime.

Given how unobjectionable most of this stuff is, it’s off-putting to discover how unlikeable many of the mayoral candidates actually are. The attitudes of most Londoners are probably accurately summed up in the words of my housemate’s boyfriend: “there are only two real candidates, and one of them’s been in power for too long.” Despite this, it’s one’s civic duty to vote, so it’s time to dive in and take a look at who’s who and what’s what, and, perhaps, to take a stand on the inevitable brand war of “Ken” vs “Boris”.

The leaflet that comes with the ballot helpfully includes an A4 (landscape) manifesto-cum-advert for each candidate. The booklet is fat: there are ten candidates for mayor.

Some of these are clear no-hopers. One befuddled looking lady standing for the “Left List” (the name of the far left party seems to change with each election – wasn’t it the Socialist Alliance last time?) offers, as her third most important priority, bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Quite how she intends to do this from the Town Hall is not explained. (Perhaps she intends to send the redundant bendy buses over to pick them up?) Attention is also drawn to her pledge that “Londoners should not have to subsidize the Olympic games,” presumably implying that the rest of the country should, and thus harking back to the proud Stalinist dictum that anything painful is clearly someone else’s responsibility.

The Christian Choice, in the meantime, presents a candidate with a good portrait but a scary-looking family photo, whose pedigree is worthy but whose top priority is to “promote marriage” as the solution to most of London’s problems. Once that’s taken care of, he intends to move on to stopping West Ham’s proposed mega mosque. Somewhat forlornly, the list of priorities ends with stopping the “(alleged) corruption” at City Hall: We may not know if it’s real, but we sure don’t like it anyway!

The next page offers a slick picture of an English Democrat, who, one suspects, sports a beer belly further down from his quiffed, bleached hair. The party's platform is concerned, exclusively, with being pissed off about English subsidies for Scotland. “We all remember a country we called home,” he begins, presumably referring to the England of 1706 which we all so fondly recall. Whether Londoners should really consider the relationship with Scotland as their top priority is a puzzle; the claim meant to reinforce it – subsidies to Scotland amount to “over £2,500 of YOUR money, per person, per year” – is saved from being untrue only because of its misleading grammar, and the fact that the candidate’s name is O’Connor leads one to suspect that the entire thing is actually a sly joke of some sort.

The usual suspects are represented, too. UKIP offers an MEP, but in the absence of any control over “mass immigration” or the “European Constitution”, he is reduced to arguing for – you guessed it – better transport and less crime.

The BNP pops up offering a thuggish candidate, who seems to be slightly uncomfortable sitting in a suit and tie with his hair looking wavy. A list of “People Like You Voting BNP” include a thuggish-looking “HOUSEWIFE”, a thuggish-looking “BUILDER”, and a thuggish-looking “STUDENT” who is actually Irish and therefore presumably wants to go home very badly. Like the Scottish fellow before, they try to play the idyllic-past card. “Remember London the way it used to be? Clean, friendly and safe.” (Lost me there.) Rather optimistically, the candidate promises that “as mayor I will make sure that people like you – the real Londoners – are put first.” Presumably he isn’t referring to the one-third of Londoners born overseas. Not that intelligence is something that this fellow is too concerned about, given that his agenda includes such BNP-unfriendly measures as “Zero tolerance on crime and yobs” and “Better education for all our people”.

The Greens, in the meantime, present an attractive young woman named Sian Berry, who has all sorts of cheery ideas for better insulation in houses, solar electricity on houses, a city-wide speed limit, and – you guessed it – cheaper transport, better transport, and less crime. The only vaguely controversial things on offer include cancelling the Thames Gateway Roadbuilding and, er, “opposing all airport expansion in London” – a task which should be very easy indeed given that the only airport actually in London is City, which isn’t exactly surrounded by rolling meadows.

And then there’s Brian Paddick, the Liberal Democrat candidate, who is trying very hard indeed to be the third candidate in the race, but struggles on account of no-one really knowing anything about him other than that he’s “the gay policeman”. A quick perusal of his policies explains why he's having trouble standing out: his three main priorities are: “action to cut crime,” “action to improve transport,” and, you guessed it, “action on housing and environment.” A quick perusal of his website reveals a bit more imagination – he pledges to plant thousands of trees to make London “the greenest capital in Europe”, boost recycling, scrap the Public-Private Partnership which runs the Tube (a likely tale, given that Ken Livingstone was heartily opposed to it in the first place and still couldn’t stop it happening), introduce bike hire schemes, and, intriguingly, put in place a tram and a light rail system. Unfortunately, he seems to think that taxi drivers form one of London’s most important constituencies: his “Black Cab Manifesto” to ban pedicabs and give taxi drivers a seat at the table in Transport for London gets rather more attention than his tram scheme.

Which brings us on to the two dueling muppets in front of the pack. The Economist memorably described the 2004 US Presidential election as being a choice between the incompetent and the incoherent; last week it painted another amusing picture of the buffoon versus the megalomaniac. Boris Johnson is the challenger: an old Etonian who was president of the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Conservative Association and a member of the Bullingdon Club (three qualifications of less than dubious appeal, as most Oxonians will tell you), Johnson is well known for being amusing in a ramshackle sort of way and for reducing the editorial offices of the Spectator to a venue for vast quantities of hanky-panky while he was its editor. An MP, his most recent distinction was being fired from the Tory front bench by Michael Howard after saying one offensive thing too many. Nevertheless, he is amusing in a ramshackle way, and there’s no denying that his buffoonery has an ability to inspire a certain degree of affection. His policies, while more distinctive than most, are still less than inspiring. The top priorities are, naturally, reducing crime (extra police, less bureaucracy, more community projects for the young, and, intriguingly, New York-style crime maps to improve the intelligence of policing), improving transport (mainly a play to nostalgia with the intention to remove the disliked “Bendy Buses” and replace them with a new Routemaster – that beloved old warhorse – with full disabled access, clean fuel, and conductors; but also a nifty idea for “live, interactive bus tracking” at bus stops, an air conditioned tube, the revocation of the £25 congestion charge fee for “Chelsea tractors” (SUVs, for any Americans out there), free travel for injured veterans, and lobbying for an Oxford Street tram and against a third runway at Heathrow), more greenery (zero tolerance for graffiti and littering, and various other minor platitudes), more affordable housing, and, possibly the only candidate to mention this, a pledge to fight for the international competitiveness of the City and for London’s small businesses.

The mop-haired oaf’s competitor is the incumbent of 8 years standing, Ken Livingston. Ken has a long history with London – he headed up the Greater London Council "until, not unrelatedly, Margaret Thatcher abolished it” (as the Economist puts it). He has done some decent things as mayor: the congestion charge for the city centre is working well, buses have been improved, business has thrived, and he has won £16bn from the government to build Crossrail, on top of the £9bn (and counting) he got by encouraging Tony Blair’s grand enthusiasm for the Olympics (or “three weeks of sport”, as he dismissively referred to it recently), which is to be pumped into some of the most run-down parts of East London. London has thrived under Livingstone. But he, too, has his quirks. Not for nothing is he called Red Ken: his obnoxious far-left grandstanding has seen him associating with extremist Islamic preachers like Yusuf al-Qaradawi and authoritarian Latin American leaders like Hugo Chavez. He has a tendency, having made a mistake, not to apologise for it goofily like Johnson, but rather to angrily defend himself; as a result, incidents such as the one where he irascibly compared a reporter to a concentration camp guard (the reporter was Jewish) have been blown out of all proportion. His personal affairs are no less tawdry than Johnson’s, and the unmistakable whiff of corrupt relationships and behaviours has been wafting out of City Hall for the past year. Eight years, many will think, is long enough. Livingstone initially agreed (he said he would step down after one term), but, like Mr Chavez, has decided that limiting his tenure is a bad idea. His manifesto includes pledges for better transport (by keeping on doing what he’s already doing), more affordable housing, less crime, and, indeed, more greenery. What is striking about Livingstone’s campaign is the dearth of new ideas. Johnson and Paddick both have numerous small but specific ideas which differentiate them; Livingstone is essentially running on his record.

So where does all this leave us? Livingstone has a surprisingly strong record, given how much he is disliked. Johnson has a surprisingly well-developed set of ideas, given how much he is ridiculed. And Paddick has surprising depth, given that everyone is convinced that he is simply running as the gay policeman.

In reality, of course, only Livingstone and Johnson are actually in contention. But the beauty of the choice that Londoners face stems from the nature of the electoral system itself. (Labour devolution may have left London’s mayor a bit of a weakling, but if there’s one thing Labour got right, it was the new electoral systems.) The abbreviated version of the Transferable Vote that will be on the mayoral ballot means that Londoners vote for their first choice and their second choice candidates. The first choice votes are all counted to begin with; if no-one gets more than 50% of those, then the top two candidates in the first round go onto a run-off, and the first choice ballots for everyone else are redistributed to their second choice candidates. In practice, what that means is that, if you have a preference for one of the eight unlikely candidates over the two front-runners, you can have it both ways: you can vote for your favourite candidate as your first choice, and the “least-worst” of the two front-runners as your second. That way, you make your point, but when your first choice candidate gets knocked out, you can still vote against either Ken or Boris.

Which leads us to the real question. Ken or Boris? It is difficult to decide. The one is a bit of a psycho. The other is a bit of a moron.

It’s a tough choice. But at the end of the day, it does all boil down to one simple fact. There are only two real candidates – and one of them’s been in power for too long. Given the complete lack of differing policies between the leading candidates, that is reason enough to hope for a Tory in City Hall for the next four years. But does that mean that Boris will be my first choice? Probably not.

To fight another day

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:18:00 +0000

Pennsylvania didn’t really expect to be a major state in the current nominating process, but as a key swing state it can’t fail to appreciate the extended national attention to its problems that the last six weeks have afforded. The Obama and Clinton campaigns have been furiously courting its voters and its politicians, and its politicians – governor, senators, mayors – have been making endorsements and getting national airtime heroically. The world now knows far more about the commonwealth’s rustbelt and high tech corridors, and its urban, suburban, exurban and rural voters, than the state has been used to for a long time.

Things have, naturally, been quieter during the big gap between Mississippi on March 11th and Pennsylvania on April 22nd than they were previously. While it wouldn’t be fair to say that the issues took centre stage beforehand, much of the media attention shifted during the Pennsylvania campaign (in its boredom with continuing arguments about health care, Iraq, the economy, etc) to a series of amusing diversions. Obama got in trouble for the controversial sermons of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who was pictured on television shouting “God damn America!” Obama managed to eloquently extricate himself by making a speech on race which has been hailed as one of the greatest political speeches in modern American history, but which nevertheless failed to dissociate himself from his former pastor, ensuring that grumblings on the subject will continue for the duration of the campaign. Clinton also got in trouble early on for trying to emphasise her foreign policy credentials by recalling a troubled landing in Bosnia during the 1990s, where she had to be whisked from the airplane because of the threat of sniper fire; unfortunately, contemporary news reports soon surfaced showing her grandly shaking hands on the tarmac with a welcoming committee, and even giving a hug to a little girl who had drawn a picture for her. Supporters were amused; opponents felt that it just showed how manipulative she was. Obama, in turn, had a moment of his own (“bittergate”) when he made some remarks in a closed-door fundraiser at San Francisco: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” (Obama’s own preference for inflammatory religion and “antitrade sentiment” notwithstanding.) Obama supporters were torn between lining up behind their man (the argument doesn’t sound so implausible to more cosmopolitan Americans) and feeding a backlash against the blogger who reported the remarks (comments made at fundraisers are commonly regarded as private). His opponents, meanwhile, were quick to pay tribute to the small-town culture of hunting and churchgoing that Obama was perceived to have demeaned. Again, this didn’t turn on anything substantive. Attention shifted back to Clinton a few days later when her campaign strategist, Mark Penn, was forced to resign when it emerged that he had attended a meeting with the Colombian government to help them plan a lobbying effort for the Free Trade bill currently going through Congress; Mrs Clinton opposes the bill. (He may have lost his client along with his campaign job: the Colombians weren’t particularly impressed with his denials about supporting their position.) Despite this, the tone was kept civil, with candidates making appearances with Hannah Montana at the Country Music Television Awards ceremony and on the Colbert Report, while both Democratic candidates sponsored a non-binding Senate resolution emphasising John McCain’s status as a natural-born citizen and thus his eligibility to be President.

In short, this was a primary campaign with a life of its own, with its own dynamics and a stand-alone result that wasn’t contingent on momentum (that key magical factor in primary campaigns). And the result? Hillary Clinton won a decisive victory, eroding the likelihood of her withdrawing from the race before she is compelled to. It is even possible that her victory (taking 55% to 45% for Obama) might position her to take the nomination, although her chances remain heavily contingent on her performance in the last big state, Indiana.

Clinton’s victory came from a number of diverse sources. 69% of Democratic primary voters were aged 45 or over, despite the sharp increase in registered Democrats amongst the young before the primary; older voters favoured her heavily. Another group which swung in her direction was the state’s women, who made up 59% of those who voted. Intriguingly, voters who made up their minds at the last minute decided in her favour as well, reversing the usual trend of this group going for Obama.

These results were the outcome of a number of factors, foremost amongst which is the economy: since the last primary, a majority of Americans have become convinced that the country is now mired in recession (a judgement shared by The Economist, if not yet by official statistics). Economic pain has long been concentrated in rustbelt towns where Clinton’s policy detail plays well and Obama’s vague message of hope and change is less than convincing; Obama’s “bittergate” comments on conservative culture in such places were condemned as being patronizing and condescending as well as ignorant, and certainly didn’t help him in such areas. Clinton was also helped by good organization on the ground: as in Ohio, she had the endorsement of key Pennsylvania Democrats including the governor and the mayors of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and their ground organizations worked hard for her. She also ramped up her toughness on foreign affairs, with an ad implying that Obama wasn’t ready to take on important global challenges, continuing on the day of the primary with a rare answer to a hypothetical question (what would you do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons? “If I’m the president, we will attack Iran... we would be able to totally obliterate them.” Scary word, ‘obliterate’? Well, “it is a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to understand that, because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic”) which should serve to bolster her hawkish credentials on foreign policy. Less affluent and less educated voters strongly voted for her as well, helping her to take the majority of counties in the state, including the big cities of Pittsburgh and Scranton (her father’s hometown), confining Obama mostly to the affluent belt around Philadelphia. In this challenging context, Obama’s argument that he did well to close the gap in Pennsylvania sounds highly plausible, even if he did outspend his opponent by a large margin.

Clinton emerges from Pennsylvania stronger than she did before, and Obama emerges from it weaker. While her campaign gaffes simply served to make her look foolish, his were genuinely alienating, and opened up charges of elitism (which the Republicans were able to exploit heavily in 2004 against John Kerry) and a lack of patriotism. Her argument that she has what it takes to win in the big states is burnished; her grasp of policy detail and ability to appeal to hard-up Americans look much more appealing now that the economy has taken a turn for the worse. She still has a long way to go to make that argument compelling, however. Her victory reduces Obama’s lead in the popular vote by only about 200,000, and his lead in the pledged delegate count by a small number (he still has an overall delegate lead of 150). Superdelegates will still take a lot of persuading if they are to abandon the winner of both the popular vote and the most pledged delegates.

But everyone knew that to begin with, which means that the Pennsylvania victory needs to be put in the context of the quality of the argument that Clinton can make to those superdelegates. Her record of winning pretty much all of the biggest states which will be in contention in November is hugely impressive. Her foreign policy knowledge (and toughness) will be able to take on John McCain in his own area of expertise. Her command of policy detail on the economy and healthcare is becoming more important to voters as the economy continues to sour. In short, she is becoming increasingly attractive. Obama’s image is no longer as untarnished as it once was, and the electorate’s changing priorities are reducing the importance of his transcendent appeal next to the command of policy shown by Clinton; McCain is trusted significantly more than Obama on key issues of foreign policy and national security (deservedly) and on the economy (not so deservedly). Obama’s leads in the delegate count and popular vote, moreover, are largely based on outcomes in states in the West and South which will almost certainly go Republican in the general election; Clinton has won all of the big states that the Democrats need to win in November. Obama’s point, made recently, that this is irrelevant as big states like California and New York will certainly go Democratic anyway is correct but moot: it is states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana that the Democrats need to win. Only Illinois, out of all the big states in contention, has so far plumped convincingly for Obama, and that is his home state. A telling statistic comes from asking voters for both Democrats who they would go for in the absence of their preferred candidate: while both sets of voters would still vote for the other Democrat by a majority, many more Clinton voters would rate McCain as their second choice than would Obama supporters. This shows a crucial fact: middle of the road voters who are worried about their prospects prefer Clinton’s grasp of the detail, but have more confidence in McCain’s ability to empathise with them and help them out than they do with Obama’s. Clinton, in other words, is attracting more of the independent-minded voters (outside of the young) than Obama is. What all of this adds up to is a sense that Clinton’s long-standing (and oft-dismissed) arguments about general election viability may in fact be correct. Democrats are haunted by a nagging worry that, like liberal crowd-pleasers before him such as Adlai Stevenson and Walter Mondale, Obama might end up losing by a landslide.

Nevertheless, comparisons that the Obama campaign likes (John F. Kennedy) are still much more common, and it would really take something to persuade those superdelegates to force the selection of a candidate who did not win the popular vote or the most delegates. Superdelegates have been breaking much more for Obama than for Clinton recently. Her continued fight is thus an exercise in desperate optimism: she is hoping that she will continue to win big states (which she is doing), that the political climate will change in her favour (which it is doing), and that Obama will shoot himself in the foot in a way which will benefit her (which he is also doing). Things are, in short, going as well for her as could be hoped, but it still doesn’t look likely to be enough. But this nomination is still impossible to call. Clinton is $10m in debt and spending $1.10 for every dollar that she receives. Her efforts to persuade Florida and Michigan to re-run their primaries have failed. The next primaries are North Carolina (which will likely go to Obama) and Indiana (which is a key battleground): if she doesn’t win Indiana, then the pressure for her to drop out will intensify significantly. But it seems ever more likely that this will run all the way to the last primaries on June 3rd, at which point all the pledged delegates will be counted and it will officially be up to the superdelegates. A landslide rush of these superdelegates is still possible in either direction, especially if the key party grandees Howard Dean (Democratic National Committee chairman), Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the House of Representatives), Al Gore (former presidential candidate and Nobel Laureate) and John Edwards (who dropped out of the nominating race before Super Tuesday) make endorsements one way or the other. Unfortunately for Clinton, all of those grandees seem more likely to endorse Obama; either way, pressure from the party leadership is now on for superdelegates to make clear their choices quickly once the last nominating contests are over, so we may find ourselves with a Democratic presumptive nominee in advance of the August convention anyway. That nominee will still, in all likelihood, be Mr Obama: but with Clinton’s Pennsylvania win, things have become that little bit less predictable.

On the Republican side, meanwhile, John McCain won Pennsylvania by a handy 73%, with Ron Paul picking up 16%. He sat out most of the Pennsylvania campaigning, using the time to traverse the country and enjoy watching the Democratic candidates shower each other with insults that he can happily appropriate come autumn. Life, for the Republicans, is good.

Next Up: The states of Indiana and North Carolina will vote in their primaries on May 6th (the Tuesday after next).

Facebook Quotes 3

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:54:00 +0000

A third batch, captured for posterity and deleted from my profile. Enjoy.

"My favourite movie is 'Deep Throat'... I've watched that motherfucker six times."
- US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

"Green walked over the lectern, looked the analyst in the eye and said, 'What you're asking is, "what do we do if it gets tough?" I'll tell you what we do.'
The audience fell silent.
They could tell from Green's tone of voice and demeanor that they weren't hearing a rehearsed answer.
The usually self-contained executive growled, 'We grab the bayonet and we snap it off the end of the rifle and we put it in our teeth and we get down in the mud and the grime in the jungle and we kick and scratch and we stop at nothing. That's what we do when it gets tough. And we won't lose!'
A stunned silence followed."
- 'Values. Driven. Leadership. The History of Accenture'. (Bill Green is now Accenture CEO. He knows what it takes to be a tiger.)

Slightly more typical work quotes:
"Then PT - that's P for Penelope, and T for tea"
- Marie, to a senior manager
"I'm going to get a sodding coffee"
- Mike
"Can you sign my Sharepoint?"
- Marie again

"It was always going to be weird, being the girlfriend of Gordon."
- Hanna
"What I meant to say was, it was always going to be weird being the girlfriend of the group's alpha male."
- Hanna, slightly later

"I would rather have it said, 'He lived usefully', than, 'He died rich'."
- Benjamin Franklin

"You should come with a supply of cheese to match your vintage whine."
- Miles Edgeworth, in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All

"I think it will be entertaining and I'd love to learn a bit more about grammar."
- Prospective housemate in DC on living with a Brit

"Imagine how terrible it would be, never to see anything beautiful, never to eat anything savoury, never to say anything clever."
- Winston Churchill on life in Liverpool

"Dank, cloudy and small."
- The Economist on Britain

"It is not that [it] is badly written... [i]t is, however, very much written."
- Danny Leigh in the TLS

" 'I pray to God that I will never know about economics,' President Ahmadinejad once said when questioned about apparent contradictions in his economic policy. The Lord appears to have answered his prayer."
- The Economist

"An end to WELFARE BENEFITISM for the parasitic vermin feeding off the state. From now on the message must go out. No work, no money! No money, no food! DEATH! Vote Labour."
- G Brown, Supreme Leader (via Private Eye)

"I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words."
- Woody Allen

Time to start looking beyond the primaries

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:57:00 +0000

There comes a point in the campaign where smaller victories here and there really cease to matter. We generally pay attention to small states because of their function as bellwethers, with the candidates testing the waters and the results giving us a clue as to what might happen next in bigger places. Now that there are only eight Democratic states yet to vote, however (Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Montana and South Dakota), the outcome of the process is pretty much known, and eyes are naturally shifting towards the horizon, alighting first on the remaining big (or at any rate, big-ish) states – Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina – and then on the Democratic convention in distant August.

On the other hand, the fact that Guam and Puerto Rico are now starting to pop up on the list of upcoming states shows how close the race is getting. Every symbolic extra victory may play a cumulative role in convincing the superdelegates of one candidate’s heightened viability over the other. It is in this context that Obama’s 60% to 37% win over Clinton in Mississippi on Tuesday should be seen: as being more important in the sense of the one extra notch on his tally of states won than in the sense of the five notches by which he has extended his lead in the delegate count.

The Democratic campaign is rapidly coalescing into a war with three fronts. The first front is the push to win the remaining states. This effort remains the headline part of the campaign, and if Clinton wins Pennsylvania it will continue until June 3rd, when the last states vote. It’s now practically an impossibility for either candidate to win the absolute majority of delegates needed for an outright convention victory, and also near-impossible for Clinton to overtake Obama in the delegate count, so the key input that these remaining states provide into the nominating process will be in adding to the absolute number of states won by each candidate.

The second front is the revisiting of an old error – the Democratic National Committee’s refusal to recognize Michigan and Florida’s delegates as legitimate. Because these two states held earlier primaries than party rules allowed, the results were not recognized and their delegates will not be seated at the convention. No candidates campaigned in either state out of respect for the rules, but in Florida both candidates were actually on the ballot and their campaigns did do a fair amount of low-key campaigning, meaning that Clinton’s Florida victory is more legitimate than her Michigan one, where Obama (and Edwards) weren’t even on the ballot. It was expected that the other primaries would produce an overall winner, but now that they haven't the delegates from those two large states could be crucial, and could even overturn Obama’s lead in the delegate count. The Clinton campaign is therefore extremely keen to reinstate the delegates from both states, while the Obama campaign – much more quietly, not wanting to appear in opposition to a democratic result – is more in favour of sticking to the rules. The compromise way out which is now being explored is to re-run the primaries in both states, but the bill for primaries is picked up by the states themselves, and neither Florida nor Michigan is keen to stump up the cash for a re-run purely because of an internecine party dispute. In the absence of an agreement between the two candidates and the party leadership as to how best to re-run the election using private funds, this could eventually go to the courts – and the Obama campaign has no incentive to agree to such a compromise. Being a decent sort of chap, Obama may go along with it anyway and just take the hit, gambling that the results would be a lot closer now than they were the first time around in the absence of campaigning. He might emerge from fresh primaries in the two states still in the lead.

The third front, and by far the most important, is the battle to win over superdelegates. These party elders, who form a bit less than a quarter of the voting delegates at the convention, were given a say at the convention so as to allow the party leadership to steer the nomination in a responsible direction in the absence of a clear popular mandate one way or the other – precisely the sort of situation that we now have. The problem is that this sort of behind-the-scenes maneuvering (the metaphorical smoke-filled room, out of which a candidate would mysteriously emerge in times past) goes against the grain in modern democratic times. The way out, then, is for the superdelegates to follow some sort of principled method in choosing which candidate to flock to. Unfortunately, no such principle exists. If they want to follow the popular will, they could vote for the candidate who won the most pledged delegates, thus respecting the outcome of the pledged delegate system; or they could vote for the candidate who won the most votes nationwide, respecting the popular will; or they could vote for the candidate that their own constituency voted for, respecting the will of their own electors. Alternatively, they could weigh up the pros and cons and think for themselves, and pick the candidate who has the best chance of winning in the autumn.

Obama wants them to back the candidate who won the most regular delegates. Clinton wants them to vote for the candidate they think best equipped to win. Neither position is self-evidently superior to the other, and superdelegates can change their minds at any time about who to support. There is still a chance that the party leadership could broker some sort of agreement amongst superdelegates for who to support – possibly within the next couple of months, thus forcing the loser to drop out of the race early – but in the absence of that unlikely event, what we will probably see is continuing horse-trading between the campaigns and the superdelegates all the way up to the convention in August. Inevitably, the outcome will be suffused with the stench of that smoke-filled room regardless of how things now resolve themselves.

There is one chance for the Democrats to avoid that outcome – and one chance only. Barack Obama has done well enough to remain in the campaign regardless of what happens. But if Hillary Clinton loses in a big way in Pennsylvania, followed by Indiana and North Carolina, that may be enough to prompt her to withdraw from the race – more so if her efforts to reinstate Florida and Michigan delegates go nowhere. This probably won’t happen – Pennsylvania is a natural state for Clinton to win, and its governor is firmly backing her – but you can never quite tell what will happen. Practically everything now hinges on Pennsylvanian voters.

John McCain has now been endorsed by all meaningful Republican elders, and the party apparatus has swung behind him. He sat out his symbolic 79% victory in Mississippi as he is currently on a fundraising drive to boost his available money for the general election in November. He will shortly be picking a Vice Presidential candidate to share the ticket. And the Democrats’ continued pummeling of each other is starting to furnish him with some excellent attack lines for the general election. For anyone who wants to see a Democratic party ready to take on the Republicans in a year when their chances of retaking the White House are about as good as they ever will be, it is time to forget the merits of the two candidates, and hope fervently that Pennsylvania voters will plump for Barack Obama in great numbers in six weeks’ time. The alternative – which remains a likely outcome even if Clinton loses in Pennsylvania – is for the Democratic party to spend the next six months tearing itself apart.

Next Up: The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania votes in primaries for both parties on April 22nd – the biggest gap in the primary calendar yet. Both candidates will be saturating the state with events and advertising until then.

Wyoming, part II

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:37:00 +0000

Needless to say, nobody ever thought that Wyoming would end up in the spotlight during this campaign, especially after its Republican caucuses (which came at a fairly crucial time) faded into the background. The Democrats, however, are currently down to the wire, with every delegate counting. The state thus saw not just media attention - some of it fairly considerable - but even visits from the candidates, with all three Clintons personally campaigining in the state. For a state where most Democrats are afraid to reveal their political affiliation (or so the coastal-based mass media would have us believe), and where they are outnumbered in places by 10 to 1, this is a remarkable development. Turnout, accordingly, was huge - Laramie County, for example, saw ten times as many people show up for their caucus as they did in 2004. In Niobrara County, turnout was slightly under 20% - meaning that 20 people showed up out of a total population of 101 registered Democrats.

Obama won by 61% to 38%, but the contest should be worrying for the Democrats in several ways. He won, again, in large part because of the caucus system which historically favours him, but also because he had a big presence in the state for much longer than his opponent, with five local offices next to two for her. He also set up shop there two weeks earlier, and had the media markets covered. But the victory is slightly hollow: however much skill or foresight he may have demonstrated, and however strong it shows he is in the West, there is no way that a Democrat, not even one as appealing as Mr Obama, is going to win Wyoming come November. Bizarrely, that means that the media attention is now, if anything, disproportionate to the state's low importance - a nice swing of the pendulum.

In any case, if anyone was wondering which way this blows the momentum of the various campaigns, the outcome means that Obama pulls a whole three delegates further ahead of Clinton. The draw continues.

On the Republican side, Ron Paul made a widely-anticipated announcement on YouTube this week. Although he did make the surprise revelation that there was no way he could win the nomination "conventionally" anymore, his campaign won't be winding down entirely. So we can't quite put the little "out" button next to his picture. Sigh.

Next Up: The next state to vote is Mississippi, on March 11th (Tuesday). Both parties will be voting.

And they thought it was all over!

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:01:00 +0000

So, here's what happened. Obama won - by some counts - 11 states in a row, and polls showed him nipping at Clinton's heels in Texas and Ohio - so everyone decided that he would pull a victory out of the hat and wrap up the nomination on Tuesday. Tempting as it would be to crow after my two months of hedging and warning against reading too much into his recent victories, in recent days even I was drawn into predicting victory for him. Bill Clinton actually said several weeks ago that his wife needed to win in Texas and Ohio to stay in the race. The Obama campaign leapt on this gleefully, saying: "Three weeks ago, when they led polls in Texas and Ohio by 20 points, the Clinton campaign set their own test for today’s primaries." They did indeed.

And lo! Hillary smote him.

Here are the results: Clinton won Ohio by 54% to 44% for Obama, she won Rhode Island by 58% to 40%, and she won Texas by 51% to 48%. Only in liberal Vermont - home to last election's inspiring maverick, Howard Dean - did Obama win, 59% to 39%. The Texas caucus results are still being tallied, but Obama appears to have won those too, by 56% to 44%, showing a Washington state-like gap between primary and caucus results. (Texas's primaries allocate two-thirds of the delegates, the caucuses one-third.) So, after all those wins, Obama failed for the second time to glide from being the front-runner into landing a knockout blow. (The first time was in New Hampshire after his Iowa win.)

How did she do it? She enjoys her existing strengths amongst her usual core constituents. She also had her back to the wall, meaning that she went all out. Her campaign shifted tone markedly, accusing Obama of being unprepared and unqualified to lead America in a crisis and calling attention to Obama's lack of activity in his Senate subcomittee chairmanship (somewhat unfairly: he only got the post recently, and has been rather busy with other things). She also blasted the media for not covering Obama rigorously enough, an attack which could easily have backfired ("biting the hand that feeds" comes to mind), but which actually prompted some media soul-searching followed by greater scrutiny on her opponent. This attention quickly brought to light that Obama's chief economic advisor was sneakily telilng the Canadians that they shouldn't worry about his loony rhetoric on NAFTA, as he was only saying it to win the election and actually still believed the more sensible trade policies he had espoused earlier. Together with the looming corruption trial of a former major contributor, the sheen surrounding Obama has been slightly diminished. Voters who decided at the last minute plumped for Clinton by a big margin.

Did Hillary win big enough for it to be a comeback? This is where a reality check comes in handy. She will likely make a net gain of only about 15 delegates from her wins. In order to claw back a lead from Obama, she needed big double-digit wins in both Texas and Ohio, and she didn't get them. Obama still leads in the delegate count and has about twice as many individual victories as her. So the results don't change the electoral arithmetic, and rumours are starting to swirl that it is now mathematically impossible for her overtake him in the delegate count without relying on superdelegates. Unless, that is, the Democratic National Committee can be persuaded to seat the delegates from Florida and Michigan, big states where she won heavily (and without competition, in Michigan's case).

Unfortunately, it is also becoming clear that Obama won't get an absolute majority of delegates from the primaries either. So what yesterday's results mean is: no change in the electoral calculus, but Clinton stays in the race. As Bill said, she would have had to drop out if she'd lost either Ohio or Texas, but having won both she has proven her ability to overcome Obamamentum and keep on winning the big states. She can now stay in at least until April 22nd, when she needs to win Pennsylvania. So the only real outcome of yesterday's votes is that the race will continue for another month and a half. Obama will probably win both Wyoming and Mississippi - the next states to go - but that won't be enough to restore his momentum before Pennsylvania. The candidates are, it seems, once again at a draw.

In other news, the Republicans saw John McCain win all four states: Ohio by 61% to 31%, Rhode Island by 65% to 22%, Texas by 51% to 38%, and Vermont by 72% to 14%. The upshot: he now has 1,289 delegates in his camp, which is a goodly chunk more than the 1,191 he needed for an absolute majority. His nomination is now assured. Mike Huckabee, accordingly, has dropped out and urged the party to get behind him; President Bush has endorsed him. The Republican race is over (Ron Paul's increasingly eccentric campaign aside), and the party establishment is coalescing firmly behind him; for the Republicans, the general election campaign starts now. From being the party with the most confusing field of candidates, they now have a major strategic advantage.

Next Up: Everybody's favourite state, Wyoming! Wyomingites in the cowboy state vote in their Democratic primary on March 8th (Saturday).

Balkanisation

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:26:00 +0000

Last weekend, the world added a new country to its list of independent states, as Kosovo finally decided that it had exhausted the political process to the satisfaction of its western backers and declared independence from Serbia unilaterally. It thus follows Montenegro to become the most recent new country added to the world's total. So now we are 193. (I think.)

Unfortunately for the Kosovars, their declaration is not without controversy, and a delicate dance has now begun around the core measure of international respectability: recognition. This is a funny thing. A country establishes diplomatic relations with a new state only after recognising its existence, or its government, as legitimate. The reality of who actually rules a given country doesn't necessarily have any bearing on whether those rulers are "recognised", with the key criterion being the perceived legitimacy of their path to power. Usually there isn't any trouble: Montenegro, for example, left the old federation of Serbia & Montenegro after a peaceful referendum, and with mutual consent: a political process was followed that reflected the people's will. Recognition followed fairly mechanically.

In other circumstances, recognition has not been so mechanical. When the Soviet Union annexed the interwar (and now restored) Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the United States adamantly refused to recognise Soviet sovereignty for quite some time. Israel is not recognised by a large number of Arab countries, 60 years after its foundation. Sometimes this can have important consequences: it was the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek which ruled China in 1945 at the time when the United Nations was founded, and America's refusal to recognise the legitimacy of the government of Communist China - coupled with its Security Council veto - meant that it was Taiwan who sat in the UN as a veto-wielding Security Council power until America's rapprochement with mainland China in 1972. At other times the consequences can be trivial: witness the ongoing battle for recognition between China and Taiwan (since both governments claim to be the legitimate government of a united China, including Taiwan, you can only recognise one or the other), which plays out mostly in Caribbean island states on the basis of which of the two parties steps in to build a new cricket stadium. Or, to return to the Balkans, witness Greece's umbrage when Yugoslavia's southernmost republic declared itself independent under the name "Macedonia" - already the name of a Greek province, and synonymous with the history of the most famous Macedonian, Alexander the Great, who the Greeks claim as part of their own classical heritage. Greece refused to recognise the new state under its preferred name, and it currently sits in international organizations as the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", or FYROM.

Kosovo will be one of the countries for which the process will not be so mechanical. The United States and 22 of the 27 EU countries decided to recognise it immediately - roughly corresponding to the NATO coalition that intervened in 1999 to force an end to Serb ethnic cleansing, despite a lack of validation by the UN Security Council. But other nations will not do so. The reason for this is based on the particular history of this former Serbian province, and on the fear of the precedent that it may come to set.

The history of the Balkans is steeped in confusing changes to sovereignty and to borders, and it was the collapse of two great South-Eastern European empires a century ago that prompted the initial flurry of state establishment. As the Ottoman Empire slowly collapsed in the second half of the 19th century, its European possessions gained their freedom, resulting in independence for Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, and subsequently in the Balkan Wars in the 15 years prior to the Great War. It was in the Balkans that the First World War started, in fact, with radical Serbian nationalists who objected to Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina assassinating the Austrian heir in Sarajevo. Then, as now, Russia backed the Serbs as they faced off against larger European powers. That particular confrontation didn't go well for the Serbs in the end, but by the end of WWI Austria-Hungary had also collapsed, giving independence to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria's western Balkan possessions, which grouped together with Serbia to form Yugoslavia - Land of the South Slavs - under a monarchy until WWII, and then as a communist dictatorship afterwards under the prickly Tito, who kept his distance from the USSR. Yugoslavia began to break up in the 1990s when Slobodan Milosevic came to power and firmed up his base with fiery calls to Serbian nationalism. In rapid succession, Slovenia, Macedonia, and - more painfully - Croatia and then Bosnia-Herzegovina broke away from Yugoslavia, reducing it to the rump federal state of Serbia & Montenegro, which dissolved after Montenegro voted for independence in 2006.

Kosovo fits into the story of Yugoslav disintegration rather differently: unlike the other nations which broke away, Kosovo has always been a province of Serbia, rather than a separate Republic in a federal relationship. So whereas the other countries simply tore up their federal agreement with Serbia to declare independence, Kosovo's declaration has the effect of actually dismembering the Serbian state.

For the Kosovars, this is little more than an unfortunate product of history. They also had autonomy under Yugoslavia, but as a province rather than a distinct part of the federation. They are ethnically Albanian rather than Serbian (borders couldn't keep pace with the cosmopolitan ethnic mixing of the Ottomans, as we see today in Cyprus, Lebanon, Iraq and Israel/Palestine as well), and Muslims rather than Orthodox Christians. As a result, they see themselves as a distinct nationality from the Serbs, as deserving of their own state as any of the other breakaway parts of Yugoslavia. The Serbs, however, see things differently: Kosovo itself - the land, that is, rather than its people - is the site of important events in Serbian history, and they would much prefer a return to the autonomy that Kosovo had under Tito than to allow their nation to be wrenched asunder.

If the country suffering the conflict hadn't been Serbia, the outside world might not have paid too much notice - it would just have been one of those unpleasant little conflicts which eventually stagger to some sort of political reconciliation. In the nasty atmosphere of Milosevic's Yugoslavia, however, Kosovo Albanians suffered severe discrimination, prompting the formation of various militant (or terrorist) groups such as the Kosovo Liberation Army; the activities of such militias eventually brought the Serbian army in. Rather than just rooting out the KLA, however - perhaps in the way that Turkey mostly rid itself of the Kurdish PKK in the 1990s - Serbian forces engaged, in 1999, in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, resulting in widespread murder, rape, destruction of property and mass expulsions. Large waves of Kosovar refugees arriving in Macedonia and Albania persuaded the West - which felt as if it had sat on the fence for far too long during similar brutality in Bosnia in 1994-96 - to intervene forcefully. Russia promised to veto any Security Council resolution authorising intervention, so the NATO alliance unilaterally attacked Serbia with an eye to whittling down its military capacity and stopping the ethnic cleansing. After a two-month air campaign, Milosevic backed down and withdrew Serbian forces, and international troops under a UN mandate - including the Russians this time, who memorably flew in to secure Pristina airport ahead of the advancing British - occupied the province and set up a UN administration. Kosovo has essentially been a UN protectorate ever since.

What has happened now is that the political process of moving towards independence has been exhausted. Serbia is unable to offer anything more than "extreme autonomy" - it will not acquiesce in its own partition. Kosovo, however, now run by a democratically elected government with significant UN assistance, will not accept anything less than independence. Talks have dragged on for years, and there is no prospect of their ever succeeding, so Kosovo's western backers came to agree this month that a move towards independence was the only way forward. In the absence of UN recognition of the newly-independent Kosovan government - Russia's veto will prevent Kosovo being admitted to the UN, along with any fresh resolutions on the matter - the UN administration will hand over to a European Union one. Kosovo's status, then, will not so much be that of an independent state as that of a European Union protectorate, with an element of self-rule being tempered by a powerful viceroy in the shape of a Dutch diplomat. This is a similar arrangement to that which has imposed a degree of stability on Bosnia since the conflict there.

The problem with recognition is the fear of precedent. Having ethnically or culturally distinct bits of your country delcare independence unilaterally is a worry for many nations. Cyprus worries about Northern Cyprus, which is already under a separate, Turkish-backed administration. Russia points menacingly to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway regions in Georgia which it has been propping up and may now encourage to declare independence, and it may well start mentioning Transdniestria in Moldova - and even Russian-majority areas in the Baltics - in the near future. China hates the idea of recognition providing momentum to Taiwanese movement towards independence, or encouragement to the Tibetans or to its restive Muslims in Xinjiang. Spain is worried of the impact on its Basque and Catalan provinces, and dislikes the idea of seeming to support a principle that might validate British sovereignty over Gibraltar. Pretty much every country in the world can see some way in which its interests might be damaged by global recognition of the emergence of Kosovo.

This worry over precedent is, however, entirely overblown. The nations protesting the loudest are being somewhat hypocritical. Spain, which worries about encouraging Basques, is oblivious to the encouragement it would receive in its own claims to Ceuta and Melilla, enclaves on the North African coast whose status is disputed by Morocco. Russia, which threatens to use the precedent to destabilise its neighbours, displays a wilful obliviousness to the fact that the precedent will also largely invalidate the legitimacy of its brutal repression of separatism in Chechnya, Dagestan and North Ossetia. It may encourage the Transdniestrians, but it would also encourage the Tatars. And Greek Cypriots have no leg to stand on if Turkish Cypriots take heart, after their 2004 rejection of the only reasonable compromise deal for their partitioned country ever to be mooted (which the Turkish Cypriots had agreed to). (Amusingly, Cypriots booted out the architect of that deal's rejection, President Tassos Papadopoulos, in the first round of last week's presidential election - even as Cyprus took its stand against Kosovan independence for reasons of precedent.)

In any case, even a cursory survey of recent Kosovan history reveals that the precedent being set is not one of callous disregard for territorial integrity: rather, it is a precedent involving repression, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, multinational intervention, international occupation, and protracted final status talks which prove irresolvable. This is not a precedent which will be widely applicable. For that reason, most countries in the world will recognise Kosovo, even as a few key ones fail to (and as the UN adds the territory to the small but important list of peoples who are not represented by any government at the organisation, joining Taiwan, Palestine, and Western Sahara).

Most of the damage, in fact, will be confined to the Western Balkans, and will not take place in Kosovo - now safely tucked under the arm of Europe, and thus guaranteed security, aid, decent governance, and a fast track to EU membership in 15-20 years time - but in Serbia. Europe's priority now that Kosovan independence has been granted must be to mollify Serbia as quickly as possible and ease the path towards Serbian membership of the EU. Serbs voted in a second-round presidential election this month in which they had two choices: the right, and the extreme right. The extreme right party - whose nominal leader is on trial in The Hague for war crimes - could have met Kosovan independence with force if elected, would have aligned Serbia closely to Russia in foreign affairs, and would have been an unmitigated catastrophe. The rightist candidate, Boris Tadic, is also implacably opposed to Kosovan independence - but is widely known to be willing in the event to swallow his pride and focus on the more important tasks of boosting the economy and getting Serbia ready for Europe. Even knowing this, Serbs voted for him in greater numbers and he won. A wellspring of moderation exists in Serbia and must be encouraged. Serbia faces incredible challenges, including a dysfunctional economy, a virulent nationalist streak in its politics, and the continuation of a nexus of paramilitary violence and organised crime which conspired to assassinate Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2004.

Demanding that Serbia tackles these problems without any sort of compensation - or reward - for not blowing its gasket over Kosovo will only serve to alienate it. Serbian intransigence in the past has been unpleasant for its European interlocutors, and its continuing failure to send certain villains to the ICTY in The Hague to be tried for war crimes is shameful, but now is the moment when geopolitics must take precedence over moral scruples. The objective of navigating Kosovo to independence has been achieved: if the West wants to cement good governance in Serbia, firmly establish the rule of law in the long-term, help to root out corruption, and encourage economic reform, then it must make clear that a road exists to the membership of NATO and the EU which will reward Serbs for their efforts. This sort of encouragement is the most powerful catalyst that the West has for driving change and encouraging reform in those European countries in the balance between Europe and Russia, and the sorts of changes that will be encouraged will lead to bigger gains for justice and freedom than insisting on the apprehension of individuals. Offering an agreement that would lead Serbia to accelerated progress towards EU entry talks, as the EU tried to do two weeks ago, is the right approach. Vetoing such an agreement because of continued lack of cooperation with the ICTY, as the Dutch did, is not. However Serbia ultimately manages its response to Kosovan independence, the important relationship now and for the future is the binary one between Serbia and the European Union, and the EU must ensure that it manages that relationship in a responsible way. Otherwise, cementing good governance in Serbia, and even, one day, Serbian recognition of Kosovo, will continue to be a pipe dream for the foreseeable future.

Obama Gathers Pace

noreply@blogger.com (Nat Kent) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:34:00 +0000

Everybody knew that Obama was going to do well in the sequence of primaries between February 5th and March 4th, but a press corps eager to lionize a winner has nevertheless decided that it can smell victory gathering around him, and has swung behind him accordingly. The Economist – always a paper that firmly places itself ahead of the curve – has already moved past “can he succeed” and onto “can he deliver”, an indication that the balance of probabilities has now moved in his direction sufficient for him to be confident of success, but not yet sufficiently obvious for everyone to agree on it yet. Time magazine, which has leant towards Clinton in its editorial stance, has even gone so far as to make a dreaded comparison between her and George W. Bush, in the sense that she valued loyalty over competence when forming her campaign staff prior to last week’s shake-up. The comparisons between Bush and Obama – both “outside the Washington establishment” candidates, both calling for bipartisan reconciliation, and both highly inexperienced in foreign affairs – have yet to be made.

Comparing either candidate to Bush may be a fatuous exercise, but what has become unambiguously clear is that the Clinton campaign has stumbled. Her money troubles and her weak performance in the post-Super Tuesday states are united by a single root cause: she was playing towards a February 5th endgame, and genuinely expected everything to be over by Super Tuesday. She has thus been caught completely off guard by the continuance of the race into states which don’t normally matter for the primaries, and as a result she didn’t have the finances or the state organizations in place to deal with them. Obama, in contrast, had made financial plans with sufficient contingency to continue beyond February 5th and had people working in campaign offices on the ground; as a result, he has been able to outspend and out-organize Clinton in the states which followed Super Tuesday while she scrambles to get back on her feet in time for the next big states.

Was this a stroke of organizational genius on the Obama campaign’s part, as so many are now claiming? Not as much as you might think. Both candidates formed their plans around achieving the results that they needed: Clinton needed a knock-out on Super Tuesday, whereas Obama needed to not be knocked out. The Obama strategy thus involved preparedness for the February states, whereas the Clinton strategy did not. It just so happened that Obama got the result he needed on Super Tuesday and Clinton didn’t; the campaign is now playing out the result. The extent to which Super Tuesday was thus a victory for Obama was partly obscured at the time by the fact that the two candidates seemed to have drawn each other, but it is now apparent that February 5th was really an Obama victory after all.

This isn’t to say that Obama hasn’t run his campaign well. Getting to the stage where Super Tuesday gave him the result that he needed took enormous organizational acumen, particularly given that Clinton had long since hired the best organizers in the early states. He won more states than had been expected on Super Tuesday, and he has since played a strong hand extremely well. His glide towards inevitability has been expertly managed, and continues to contrast greatly with the clumsy attacks on him from the Clinton campaign, which have ranged from getting Bill Clinton to put him down to attempting to ridicule him based on his kindergarten schoolwork, and has extended into the highly distasteful realm of dirty tricks, as with the shameful attempt to paint him into a racial corner in South Carolina, and now the rumours going around that Clinton will attempt to convince delegates assigned to Obama on the basis of his primary victories to back her instead.

The results in Wisconsin, Hawaii and Washington after yesterday’s primaries help to back all of this up, fitting the pattern of recent weeks, but don’t change the prognosis that the Clinton campaign is now hanging on the thread of a March 4th victory. Hawaii, a caucus state where Obama spent some of his childhood, plumped for him by a crushing 76% to 24%; in Wisconsin, the margin of victory was 58% to 41%. Obama will probably pull another 20-30 delegates ahead of Clinton as a result of the day’s voting. Wisconsin was the most important state which went yesterday, and the press have played it up as being a litmus test for Clinton's support base: mainly white, full of blue-collar unionized workers and anxious about the economy. (Topping off an increasingly uninformative string of election reports, the BBC, daftly, was even reporting that half of voters there were women. Indeed.)

This is a convenient angle if the story is a significant Clinton defeat, and indeed, the numbers do play to that: Obama did well amongst unionized workers, and drew Clinton amongst women. On the face of it, her only safe constituency is now the elderly. In reality, however, the results aren’t really a surprise. Obama has been doing well in Winsconsin polls ever since emerging as a serious challenger, and he has done extremely well in a number of nearby states elsewhere in the mid-west, including in neighbouring Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota. In both Illinois (his home state) and Minnesota (a caucus state), he actually won by much larger margins, long before any momentum was hitting the headlines. The region is swinging in his direction, so, as with all the other states he’s won since Super Tuesday, the Wisconsin result doesn’t tell us all that much about Clinton’s prospects.

Nevertheless, with all the predictions of Obama victories in February coming true, it is rapidly becoming clear that Clinton will need to win by double-digit margins in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania if she is to remain viable. It’s tough to see this really happening. Momentum is as real as people think it is, and it is attaching itself to Obama in large quantities. Clinton, it is increasingly apparent, has to win big on March 4th if she’s going to pull off an extension of her campaign all the way to the Democratic nomination; outright victory is coming to look more and more beyond her grasp.

The Press

The combination of Obama’s string of wins, stumbles by the Clinton campaign, and Clinton’s increasingly unpleasant gaffes have had a curious effect on the liberal press. The senior writers at institutional magazines like Time, the New Yorker and the Atlantic are as much a part of the liberal establishment as Hillary Clinton is, and mostly remember the 90s under Bill Clinton fondly. As a consequence, they have been torn between Obama’s appeal to their hearts and their guts, and their firm conviction that, on paper, Clinton is by far the better candidate. The general result has been breathless coverage of the Obama phenomenon coupled with a weary sense that Clinton was the more experienced candidate who would be able to get things done better.

What’s happening now, as Obama gains momentum, is that some writers seem to be feeling increasingly liberated from their rational convictions in favour of just following their hearts. If voters have made the hard choice to pick Obama over Clinton, then journalists can finally put their scruples aside and begin to get excited. Regardless of whether you think he was the best candidate or not, once the choice has been made it’s fairly easy to move on.

The Republicans

Not quite an afterthought, but John McCain won in Wisconsin as well, winning 55% to Huckabee’s 37%. This result, although strong, is nowhere near as strong as you would imagine it should be for the presumptive front runner. Huckabee isn’t going to get the nomination, so his continuing presence, with not insignificant levels of support, is a constant reminder that John McCain has yet to win over vast swathes of conservatives. McCain now has 918 delegates, putting him within 300 of the finishing post at 1,191: strong results in Texas and Ohio could finally bring him some closure.

The more important developments this week for him were endorsements. Mitt Romney reversed his earlier pained lack of an endorsement with strong words in McCain’s favour; given that Romney’s voters were the conservatives currently being wooed by Huckabee, that could help him continue to smack away Huckabee’s challenge. More importantly, he asked his 285 delegates to vote for McCain: some are constrained by state rules not to do so, but this is still a big bump that puts McCain within a whisker of wrapping the nomination up. The other big endorsement was that of Bush the Elder (or, as he’s known in the parlance, 41), who decided to go ahead with issuing public backing despite Huckabee still being in the race (but declined to call on Huckabee to pull out), and offered strong words of rebuke to anyone claiming that McCain isn’t conservative enough. This is just the latest sign that the Republican establishment – including the hugely effective Bush the Younger (that is to say, 43) fundraising apparatus – is swinging behind McCain’s candidacy. If only the party’s voters would hurry up and do the same.

Washington’s Primary

Anyone trying to figure out what’s going on in the primaries on a state-by-state basis will be more than justified in asking, “what the devil is going on in Washington state?” For a state which doesn’t normally have any bearing on the outcome of the nomination battles, they sure have designed a humdinger of a primary system.

Essentially, the state always used to be a caucus state, but decided a few years back that the caucus system was holding people back from participating – a reasonable conclusion. Rather than abandoning caucuses in favour of primaries, however, they decided to add a primary in addition to their caucuses. As a result, the state now organizes both primaries and caucuses, and holds them on different days.

The recipe for confusion gets thicker when taking into consideration that it is up to the parties to decide how to allocate their delegates. The Republican party shrugged its shoulders and decided to allocate half its delegates via the caucuses and the other half by the primaries; the Democrats, however, reasoned that it was good for state party engagement to have people attending caucuses, and refused to change its rules to allow delegates to be chosen by the primary. The result is something of a mess. Democrats charge Republicans with conniving in a massive waste of taxpayer resources, and indeed, with around 20 Republican delegates available and the primaries costing about $10m to run, the price tag of over $500,000 per delegate does seem a little steep. Republicans, on the other hand, accuse Democrats (with some justification) of persisting in supporting a caucus system that is profoundly undemocratic and unrepresentative. (To which the Democrats can charge that they, at least, split their state’s delegates on the basis of the proportion of the vote they received, whereas the Republicans apportion delegates on a winner takes all basis.)

The upshot of all of this? The Democratic primary yesterday didn’t count for anything and was essentially a straw poll, so no-one is paying attention to its result. And McCain won the Republican primary, and its delegates, by 49% to 22% for Huckabee. Just to add to the surreal nature of the proceedings, Mitt Romney managed to take 20% despite withdrawing ages ago. To put this in perspective, the state only allocated 78 Democratic delegates and 37 Republican ones.

There is one important point to bear in mind, however. The dual structure offers us a rare chance to see how different electoral systems produce different results from the same electorate: an obvious point, but one which is often overlooked. McCain won both the primary and the caucuses, but his margin in the caucuses was just 2 points, as opposed to 27 points in the primary. A clearer indication couldn’t be found to demonstrate the distorting effect of the caucus system – but then, in so dysfunctional an electoral system as the American one, this is but one of many problems with little prospect of resolution.

Next Up: A bit of a break, with some frantic campaigning. Both parties will vote on March 4th - a week next Tuesday - in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, and Vermont.