Thursday, August 30, 2012 

John McCain bids once again for quote of the decade.

"The demand for our leadership in the world has never been greater," the senator said. "People don't want less of America. They want more."

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8/30/2012 05:18:00 pm | |

Wednesday, November 05, 2008 

Barack knew.

For all that has already been written, is currently being written, and will be written, for all of it that will come to be seen as the over-enthusiastic euphoria-influenced dementia that it was, for all of the similarly deluded denunciations of how America has in effect just signed away its freedom, it's still too easy to play down just how honestly transformational Barack Obama's election is and will be. Not because of the scale of the victory: whilst winning a more convincing victory than either of Bush's, it was not the landslide that some claim it was, broadly in line with the more successful Democratic victories; not because Obama won the popular vote; not because Obama overcame the GOP smear machine despite the filth that was consistently thrown at him; not because of the turnout, however unprecedented it was; but because of the one thing that never should have mattered: the colour of his skin.

Despite all of the hope and the expectation, we weren't willing to believe that he really could win, or really had won until McCain conceded. If McCain had ran his campaign with the same magnaminity, respect, grace, heartfeltness and humility with which he delivered his concession speech, the result could surely have been different. McCain always was a fundamentally decent, honourable man, undone on this occasion by his volatility, both in his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, even if she did help to deliver the base, and then his behaviour over the crash, first claiming the economy was fundamentally sound, next cancelling his campaign to go back to Washington to attempt to fix things single-handed. He cannot be blamed for how the campaign was run; the smears were always going to happen, regardless of the candidate. In an ideal world, he would surely be offered some sort of job by Obama; thanks to those smears, that seems highly unlikely.

Before that speech, the paranoia was still overwhelming. We feared the polls had been wrong; we feared that the exit polls, like in 2004, were wrong; we feared the Bradley effect; we feared, that somehow, the Republicans would manage to steal a second election, if not a third. As it was, we need not have worried. Pennsylvania should have tipped us off, but it took Fox News, of all stations, to call Ohio for Obama, for it to finally begin to sink in. Florida followed, and before we knew it, the game, such as it was, was over. That was the point when I went to bed, and unlike the others, my tears waited until this morning. Not at McCain's dignity; not at Obama's beautifully worded, measured and delivered victory speech, with a crowd more befitting of Glastonbury than a political rally; but instead at the tears on the face of Jesse Jackson, the old warrior, the man who only a few months ago had wanted to cut the president-elect's nuts out, who had never believed that he would see an African-American win the presidency in his life-time, now overwhelmed by the emotion of seeing the reality before his eyes. For those of us who have been critical of the fatuity of the American dream when so many in that nation remain downtrodden without any real hope, this was the shattering of our cynicism happening in front of our noses. This doesn't just show the American child of whatever skin colour, gender or sexuality that anything is possible; it shows the world's children that anything is possible.

We should not give in to wilful exaggeration, or not confront the sad fact that from here the only way is inexorably down. Barack Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States of America at a time when few would want the job. His first task is to tame the recession which is coming, to rebuild an economy which like ours has for too long relied on the financial sector for its profits and growth. He faces two wars, one which appears to be winding down, with another which seems to coming up to boil. He faces a world which thanks to his predecessor has turned against America, no longer willing to listen to the chutzpah and bullying which has so often been the tone and content of diplomacy over the last 8 years. The amount of expectation on one man's shoulders would be enough to crush a lesser person's will. He will inevitably, especially to the European left, and maybe even the American anti-war left, be a disappointment, as the pragmatism which he will need to display will take precedence over populist measures. A swift withdrawal from Iraq, however welcome, cannot be countenanced whilst there is still the possibility that the former Sunni insurgents who now form the Awakening councils or what remains of them could go back to war, especially against a Shia administration that may yet abandon them. Likewise, in Afghanistan, where Obama seems to favour something resembling a "surge", we cannot expect him to come to the realisation that others have that Afghanistan cannot possibly exist as a democratic sovereign state in its current form. Deals with the Taliban, or what is described as it, will have to be considered. There is unlikely to be any significant difference between Obama's policy on Russia's re-emergence than that of the current administration.

The biggest problem Obama will face though is keeping together the incredibly fragile coalition that has brought him to power. America is still frighteningly polarised between the two parties, especially considering how little they often disagree over, even with Obama securing 52% of the vote to McCain's 46%. Overwhelmingly, the reason why he won that share of the vote is the economy, and those that voted for him will not be instant returns next time round. While some may have decided to be colour-blind this year, with voters directly in some cases saying to canvassers that they were "voting for the nigger", that will not last. While the Republican machine may be temporarily broken and bowed today, what Hillary Clinton long ago described as the "vast right-wing conspiracy" will shortly be doing everything in its power to make Obama a one-term president. The young that turned out yesterday, empowered by belief in this one man, will be the apathetic of the years to come. Whilst Obama is not Tony Blair, we should not dismiss the possibility that we don't yet know what we've let ourselves in for.

Tonight though such things are for another day. Today we should just enjoy the fact that after 8 years of seemingly endless war, abuses of power, contempt, arrogance, ignorance and imperial hubris, the underdog who almost became the establishment candidate has triumphed. Another world is possible. We need to hope, once again, that Barack Obama can begin to deliver on his and that exceptional promise.

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11/05/2008 09:04:00 pm | |

Tuesday, September 09, 2008 

Murdoch for McCain.

It's interesting to note that the New York Post, essentially the American version of the Sun, has today endorsed McCain for the presidency. It's something of a surprise, mainly because it's come so early, with the election still two months away, and also because of Murdoch's flirting with Obama. The Sun notably has lavished great praise on Obama, while little has been written of McCain. It took the vice-presidential choice of Sarah Palin to excite the tabloid to any extent.

As always with Murdoch, self-interest is paramount. He recently commented that he had preferred Obama to Hillary for the Democratic nomination because he would sell more newspapers. The emergence of Palin may now have affected that equation: it would be interesting to see whether newspaper sales shot up last week in line with the huge amount of chatter which the choice of Palin launched online. We also have to keep in mind that Murdoch backs winners; again, up until the picking of Palin, McCain's campaign looked dead in the water. Since then it's been re-energised, with the latest Gallup polls showing him getting a huge bounce from the RNC, and taking a large lead. A one off perhaps, but something that may well have affected Murdoch's thinking.

More likely though is that Murdoch made his decision based on two things that the NYP also lists as the most important factors: national security and taxes. We all know about Murdoch's views on the Iraq war, and the "success" (mostly down to the Awakening movements, with the other insurgent groupings turning on AQI/ISI) of the surge, which McCain backed to the hilt, and we also know that Obama has promised to cut the taxes of the poor and middle classes, while McCain has turned away from his former denouncing of the Bush tax cuts for the rich to now support them.

As one of the commenters on Greenslade's piece notes, the early announcing of who the NYP is backing is probably down to the uncertainty of who is going to win. If in two months' time Obama triumphs, it'll most likely pretend that this never happened. If McCain wins, then it'll probably be the NYP that wot won it. Whatever happens, Murdoch is as ever, likely to prosper.

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9/09/2008 09:58:00 pm | |

Monday, September 01, 2008 

All virgins are liars honey.

I haven't blogged much about the incessant background chorus which is the US presidential election mainly because I'm probably one of the few political creatures that isn't fascinated by the whole thing. The Democratic convention last week didn't help matters: it takes something to make our political parties' soirées at the seaside look meaningful and not like an exercise in navel gazing which both the politicos and the journalists spend getting lashed, but last week's convention and its screechingly mawkish sentimentality, which featured Obama's daughters on the stage talking to Daddy whilst he was elsewhere, the Hillary and Bill show where the least likable couple in political history failed culpably to get over their sour grapes at losing, and then Obama making a thunderously overrated speech, like all the rest, surrounded by a Roman-Greco backdrop which the Republicans themselves couldn't have constructed if they'd wanted him to look like a pseud, succeeded admirably.

All this was meant to have set-up McCain for what would have been a fight-back; instead what we've seen has been natural disaster and, well, human disaster. You can't plan for events like Gustav disrupting your enthronement, but McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate must in the pantheon of political choices go down as one of the worst of all time, without hyperbole, although who knows, come November I may be eating my words. This was a shockingly cynical but also shallow choice, at a stroke rendering the Republican attack on Obama as inexperienced dead in the water. If this was a further sop for the PUMAs, then it was one based on a flawed idea of what the average Hillary supporting Democrat was after: Palin doesn't just oppose abortion, but also opposes it for rape and incest victims. She has thanks to her reputation as an evangelical, NRA-supporting, global warming sceptic appealed to the Republican Christian conservative base, but on every other ground she comes up short.

To be completely juvenile and dwell on irrelevancy for a paragraph, that includes on naming her children. I mean seriously, Bristol, Track, Trig, Willow and Piper? We expect celebrities to call their children stupid, pretentious things, whether it be Peaches, Pixie, Apple, Shiloh, Romeo, Brooklyn and all the other assorted nightmares, but politicians generally have slightly more sense. Except for David Cameron, of course, but then he fits the profile alluded to. Bristol is apparently named after Bristol Bay in Alaska, which I am reliably informed by someone who used to live 12 miles from where Palin was formerly mayor is a huge salmon processing place which always smells like death, but Wikipedia informs us that it was named by James Cook in honour of the Admiral Earl of Bristol, so it takes its name from our own delightful city. Anton Vowl alludes to where next if Palin was to have any more children she could take influence from - Swindon, Bradford, Middlesbrough, to which I can only add that I don't think anyone has yet thought of calling their offspring Scunthorpe, Cockermouth (which is actually a rather lovely little town) or Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.

The issue that has emerged has however not been Palin herself having any more children, but that of her daughter, the aforementioned Bristol who it has been revealed is 5 months pregnant. Whether this was released because certain left-wing blogs in the US were scurrilously and completely erroneously alleging that Bristol had in fact given birth to Palin's last child, Trig, who was born with Down's Syndrome, is unclear, but it has nonetheless rather energised comment as only something resembling a scandal involving a politician can.

This shouldn't as some have already argued be either something to score points over or to even mention for fear that it will be seen, quite plausibly, as the lowest form of politics. The facts however do speak for themselves: Palin is an opponent of "explicit" sex education and has supported abstinence only education in its place. After all, if a politician's own daughter's experience appears to suggest that abstinence only education doesn't work, isn't that something that ought to be highlighted? Plausibly, but it will still be seen as it ought to be of bringing family into something that most will highly sympathise with; after all, we all make mistakes and this is one that Palin's daughter most likely bitterly regrets. There might be more in it if Palin additionally opposed contraception, but she doesn't. Probably the best case I've seen for it to be any sort of issue is made by innerbrat.

More pertinently I think that the real issue here, away from the fact that Palin doesn't seem to have been properly vetted by McCain's people, further suggesting that she was on-the-cuff choice designed to also pull some of the attention away from Obama's speech, is that it's been swiftly announced that Bristol will also be marrying the father of the child. Considering that she's already 5 months pregnant and there doesn't seem to have been any sign at all that there was to be a marriage prior to Palin's swift ascension to being McCain's number two, this seems to be even more cynical than our own Tessa Jowell's swift separation from her husband after the mortgage debacle. Quite aside from whether this is her daughter's own wishes and whether getting married at 17 is even anything resembling a good idea, it also rather exposes Palin's opposition to same-sex marriage, which she detests to such an extent that she supported a constitutional amendment which would have denied state health benefits to same-sex couples. The familiar argument against it is that it debases marriage and the sanctity of the institution; what more actually offends the institution than shotgun weddings in this day and age, either to appease a Christian conservative base or to spare a vice-presidential candidate's potential blushes?

Now, it might possibly be that her daughter fully intended to marry the father, and that theirs is a loving and committed relationship. Maybe I'm just being too cynical over potential cynicism, or then again, maybe I'm being realistic about the sort of relationships which most 17-year-olds have. In any case, Obama's campaign has quite rightly said that it won't be so much as mentioning it again. That doesn't matter though: already both left and right are squabbling online as only they can. The real question is exactly what those who previously hailed Palin as their sort of person based on her beliefs really think when they're not required to mind their language. As Michael Tomasky points out, Karl Rove thought that the revelation about Bush's DUI cost him three or four points with evangelical voters. We all know that such rigidity of dogma can only result in inevitable hypocrisy, but those self-same conservative warriors might not think too highly of her mother's skills as a parent, and that might just be enough to put the nail in the coffin of McCain's gamble.

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9/01/2008 11:59:00 pm | |

Thursday, June 05, 2008 

Barack knows.

When even the Sun, doubtless directly influenced by Murdoch's recent comments on the Democratic presidential candidate, praises to high heaven the first African-American to contest the White House, it's hard not to acknowledge that something has fundamentally changed, both in American society and also in American politics for Barack Obama to have finally won his party's nomination.

While it's easy to overstate his credentials, it's clear that Obama is certainly the most liberal presidential candidate for a generation, coming directly after what will certainly go down as one of, if not the most right-wing president of at least the last century. The hope that this signals the beginning of the end of the culture wars which have split America completely down the middle is probably still for now a pipe dream; it may well nature to take its course for that to be finally brought to a close.

It does however signify a generational shift. This wasn't just a rejection of the last 8 years; it was a rejection of the last 20. For those with a visceral dislike for Hillary Clinton, the slow collapse of her campaign, with her standing for nothing but her own personal vanity, believing from the beginning that she had a divine right to not just become the Democratic candidate, but also to become president, the last few months were little short of joyous. For someone who had spent their entire political career being the only woman in the nation with balls, even if she only wore them from her ears, her resorting to shallow femininity and even less feasibly, vulnerability before finally simple delusional intransigence, was completely shameless. Even with her plans for healthcare, and her defence of the right to choose, her comments on how she would "obliterate" Iran if it launched an attack on Israel using weapons which it doesn't have showed how the difference between her and John McCain were she to have won the candidacy would have been so slight as to warrant the spoiling of a ballot.

A little charisma can, as we've discovered to our cost, be a dangerous thing. The last thing that should be done is to give in to the hero worship towards Obama that some on the left both here and in America have displayed. As inspiring and hopeful as his campaign has been up until now, enough to make you wistful to wonder where our equivalent may come from, he's not the full package and doubtless we will be disappointed time and again from now until November as he tacks towards the right to head off some of McCain and the Republicans jibes. Already he's having to somewhat understandably row back on his pledge to talk to Iran and Cuba without pre-conditions, as welcome as that would be, purely because going too far all at once from the position which has been in the ascendance since the Iranian revolution causes irrational worry about just what else he might do. For all his rousing if ultimately vacuous rhetoric, he has to prove that he genuinely does have the power to both change the country and to unite it, and set out exactly how he intends to do so.

The first thing he could do to move towards that is to not give into the facile and desperate demands of some within the Democrats to appoint Hillary as his running mate. Despite her undoubted appeal to older voters and the white working classes yet to be convinced of Obama, she also still stands for the battles of the late 90s. She may have been right in denouncing the vast right-wing conspiracy which nearly brought her husband down, even if he was a liar caught with his pants around his ankles, but America desperately needs to move on, however painful in the short-term it might be for him and hurtful for Hillary herself. The dream would have been for the other main Democratic candidate, John Edwards, to join him, someone with undoubted appeal to the working class, but he's made clear that he doesn't want to be the prospective VP again after 2004. Most of his other options are ones that we in this country have barely and if at all have heard of, but he needs someone who can reach that parts that he either has trouble with or that have rejected him so far, but either James Webb or Ted Strickland of those already in frame appear on the surface to offer the most.

Secondly, he has to be prepared to take the Republicans on at their own game, something which both Al Gore and John Kerry failed to do. The Republicans will fight the only way they know how, as dirtily as they can without completely turning the electorate off, and Obama has to be ready to rebutt fiercely and repeatedly every claim and smear which they make. They're going to indulge if not backup those that have been claiming he's a Muslim, that he has the most "liberal" voting record in the Senate, and that he isn't "American" enough. They're going to use Jeremiah Wright against him, even if there might actually be more understanding if they actually listened to portions of what he said and how some have become embittered and almost ashamed to be American. They'll put his comments on guns, religion and small towns on billboards and adverts even if truer words had never been spoken.

The choice, whether from here or in America seems stark. Does the country want a continuation of the last 20 years, or does it want to attempt to start afresh? Does it want to continue an unwinnable war which should never have been fought or does it want to keep spending unaffordable billions on it for the next 100 years? Does it want a 71-year-old man who is by anyone's standards remarkable, honourable and indefatigable, but who offers just more of the same, or the 46-year-old whom, if doesn't quite want to rip it up and start again, wants fundamental change that the other candidate simply isn't interested in? If I was being pessimistic, and it's often difficult not to be, I'd fear they'd still plump for McCain. The hope, and the hope in this case is so important, has to be that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.

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6/05/2008 10:33:00 pm | |

Thursday, January 03, 2008 

And so it begins.

If there's a counter-argument to fixed-term parliaments, as proposed across the political spectrum after Gordon Brown's outbreak of Grand Old Duke of York syndrome, it has to be how a second-term president in the United States oscillates between the two pillars of being free to do whatever he wants or becoming a lame duck. While George Bush's decline in power, if not support has been grossly exaggerated, the re-election of the sitting president now looks to be creating a four-year presidential candidate campaign cycle. That wouldn't be so bad if either the Democrat or Republican campaigns had shown signs of flickering into life, but neither have. The initial excitement around Barack Obama has subsided, while the only Republican to generate genuine fervoured support has been Ron Paul. To quote Dave Barry:

It was a year that strode boldly into the stall of human events and took a wide stance astride the porcelain bowl of history. It was a year in which roughly 17,000 leading presidential contenders, plus, of course, Dennis Kucinich, held roughly 63,000 debates, during which they spewed out roughly 153 trillion words; and yet the only truly memorable phrase emitted in any political context was, "Don't tase me, bro!"

It's hard to disagree with that. The Iowan caucus, taking place tonight, means at least a temporary halt to the debates and also the end of the phony war for some of the candidates who fail to get into the top three places.

The Republican race is the one that is still most certainly undecided. While there are only three realistic Democratic candidates, the Republican base in Iowa, 60% of which is estimated to be of the evangelical Christian variety, has a veritable pizza menu of choice, as long as you like an entirely male field, all of whom profess to believe in God and deny evolution, are opposed to a woman's right to choose and feel similarly about gay marriage, although some are favourable towards our civil union type model. You expect that from the likes of Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher who has described abortion as a "holocaust", supports insanely right-wing craziness like the oxymoronic FairTax and denied Medicaid to a 15-year-old with learning difficulties raped by her stepfather; Mitt Romney, a Mormon who in an attempt to woo the Christian right made clear he had a problem with those who don't believe in God; the laughing stock that is Fred Thompson and the opportunist policy shifter Rudy Guilani.

You don't however from the suppoused libertarian Ron Paul, whose noisy supporters have been clogging up message boards and irritating everyone else now for months. His only real quality is his opposition to "war on terror" as it's currently being fought, as one of the only Republicans to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. He then takes his non-interventionist policy to ludicrous extremes: advocating US withdrawal from the UN, for example. His supporters' talk of how he's the only candidate espousing freedom; what Paul actually supports is fundamentalist, selfish individualism, which is something completely different. An actual libertarian would defend to the death a woman's right to choose and gay marriage, both of which are examples of the state interfering with a person's personal freedom where they're not harming anyone else. Instead, Paul supports the exact opposite: allowing the concealed carrying of guns for self-defense. He doesn't despite such over the top devotion have a chance, likely to come fifth or lower in today's caucus, but it'll be interesting to see if he runs as either an independent or the Libertarian candidate, where he'd have the potential to do a Ralph Nader and split the Republican vote.

John McCain is the only other Republican candidate that anyone on the left would even consider supporting if it came to it, in spite of his number of reactionary positions such as the above. He's the only one other than Paul to oppose to torture in all its guises, even if he blots his copy book with his hawkish views on both Iraq and Iran. His recent co-sponsoring of the bill on illegal immigration, probably the most heated issue enveloping the Republican campaign, shows his refusal to conform either to the ideological Republican base or to the prejudices of the right, and his significant ability to reach out to the Democratic leaning voter. If the worst came to the worst, McCain couldn't possibly be any worse than Bush.

The Democrat campaign, as disappointing as it has been, has at least attempted to deal with the primary concerns of ordinary Americans: health care and the Iraq war. All of the top three, Clinton, Obama and John Edwards support some kind of universal system, the first time that mainstream politicians have come to recognise that the insurance system with Medicaid for the desperately poor is a scar on the nation's conscience. Naturally, none is suggesting an American NHS: "socialised" medicine is almost as dirty as a concept as socialism itself, but it's the first sign that the United States is looking towards Europe or Canada rather than continuing to stare at its navel.

Iraq is and has been far more tricky. Hillary Clinton, as Michael Moore has wrote, has not just supported the Iraq war from the very beginning, she's done everything that's been asked of her when it's come to funding or otherwise. Her continuing belligerence towards Iran, despite the NIE report and her polarising manner ought to rule her out as the presidential candidate altogether. Does anyone really want the most powerful position in the world to begin to resemble a dynasty instead? Please spare us from a 20 year long reign of Bushes and Clintons.

That leaves us with Barack Obama and John Edwards. As inspirational as Obama originally was, and as charismatic as he continues to be, it's difficult to know either whether he has enough experience, or, sadly, whether America is ready for a black man to be president. He has to his credit always opposed the Iraq war, although he was only elected to Congress in 2004 and so didn't vote on the matter, which would have been the ultimate question of his position. He would be the break in convention and perhaps with the past that America desperately needs, even if it doesn't recognise it at the moment. Whether he would be up to that job is also uncertain.

John Edwards, leaving aside his $400 haircuts, has dared to tread in places where those before him would have quailed. He's not only not accepted corporate money towards his campaign, he's also made clear that he is willing to take on poverty and support the emasculated US unions, fighting those same corporate interests if it demands it. Again, the main question is whether he means it: his past record suggests he does, but as the third candidate in the Democratic nomination he's had to look for a different, defining message. The case against is that as a lawyer he's acted for those same hedge funds currently gobbling up so many companies in private equity deals. On Iraq, he's the only candidate to say that within a year of taking office that the troops would be withdrawn; a highly ambitious target.

Whether Democrats should unite around Obama or Edwards will becoming clearer after tonight. The opinion polls suggest that all three are neck-and-neck; victory for Obama or Edwards will be an immense boost. The dream-ticket might be the eventual winner with runner-up as the vice-presidential candidate. Never before have the 2.9 million population of a tiny American state had so much potential influence over something that will undoubtedly change the way the next five years pan out the world over.

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1/03/2008 08:22:00 pm | |

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