Barack obama

Monday

James Forsyth

Barack Obama appears happy to help a leader in a spot of bother

From our UK edition

Barack Obama just threw a protective arm around David Cameron at their joint press conference, stressing that ‘you have to see if you can fix what's broken in an important relationship before you break it off '. The instant retweeting of this line by the Tory leadership’s communications channels  shows just how grateful they are for Obama’s verbal support for Cameron’s EU strategy. It is also worth noting, as they have gleefully tweeted, that Obama’s words also appear to be an endorsement of renegotiation as an approach. But does this actually matter? I suspect not. On this issue, Tory MPs are more worried about what their associations are saying and the concerns of their former voters than those of the President of the United States.

Isabel Hardman

Obama warns Britain that leaving the EU would be an isolationist step

From our UK edition

President Obama took care this afternoon when asked about an EU referendum to give as nuanced an answer as possible. He emphasised repeatedly that this was a matter for the British people. He also affirmed Cameron's 'basic point that you probably want to see if you can fix what's broken in a very important relationship'. Tory eurosceptics might be a little less impressed by this endorsement of Cameron's strategy, but what they will be really unhappy with is the impression Obama gave that he believes an exit from Europe would be a sign that Britain is becoming more isolationist.

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Game-changing

From our UK edition

In the days when we had bottles of milk delivered, some tits discovered how to peck through the foil tops and consume the cream beneath. Suddenly all the tits were at it. This illustrated what the alternative scientist Rupert Sheldrake called morphic resonance. Something similar has happened over the past days with the phrase game-changing. Trevor Kavanagh, in the Sun, commented: ‘The local elections delivered a ground-breaking, game-changing, seismic political moment.’ In the Independent, Donald Macintyre compared ‘Ukip’s position to that of the game-changing SDP’. Except, in the days of the Gang of Four, the obligatory epithet was not game-changing but breaking the mould. That metaphor was used erroneously almost from the outset.

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Rehabilitation of George W Bush: A Sisyphean Task

From our UK edition

Freddy Gray is quite correct: the drive to rehabilitate George W Bush is suspicious. It is also a dog that won't hunt. It is true that recent opinion polls have reported that Dubya is more popular than when he left office but this is surely chiefly a consequence of the public forgetfulness. Returning to the spotlight can only be bad news for Bush's reputation. It will remind people why they were so pleased to be rid of him in the first place. Because, in the end, an administration bookended by the worst terrorist attack in American history and the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression can't be spun as much of a success. It just can't. True, presidential reputations change over time.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Why oh why oh why can’t Barack Obama be more like Lyndon Johnson?

From our UK edition

So, is Barack Obama a wimp or just another lame-duck second-term President? Maureen Dowd, in her typically sophomoric fashion, appears to believe that the failure to pass gun control legislation shows that the President has not been paying enough attention to Aaron Sorkin movies. Tim Stanley, who at least knows something of how Washington works, suggests this failure reveals Obama as a lame-duck. Today's New York Times piles on with an article asking, essentially, why oh why BHO can't be more like LBJ. As is so often the case, a presidential setback must be attributed to an absence of Presidential willpower. The Cult of the Presidency is an eternal flame that can never, ever, be extinguished.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

The world should see that North Korea is no laughing matter

From our UK edition

I found myself snorting with derision last night while watching a news bulletin about the Korean situation. The sight of a Gummy Bear like Kim Jong Un vowing to obliterate the United States was too much after a long day. But then I checked myself: what if, this time, the madmen are serious? It is, of course, a leap to say that a regime of such longevity is mad. There is cunning in Kim Jong Un’s apparent lunacy, which has been heightened yet again by news that he has closed the border to South Korean workers in a jointly-run industrial zone. Such actions are not created ex nihilo.

Friday

Douglas Murray

Drones save lives

From our UK edition

‘Drones save lives’ is the title of my piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. President Obama is currently receiving criticism from left and right for his policy of targeted assassination by unmanned drones. I think among a range of bad options drones are the least bad option for dealing with the threat, and explain this further in the piece which is available here. Along the same lines readers might be interested in a debate I did last week on the same subject for Google and Intelligence Squared. The motion was ‘America’s drone campaign is both moral and effective’. I was lucky in having David Aaronovitch on my side. The other side included Clive Stafford-Smith.

Thursday

Alex Massie

No, the Syrian civil war is not “Obama’s Rwanda”

From our UK edition

Today's Question To Which the Answer Is No is asked by Will Inboden over at Foreign Policy. To wit: Has Syria Become Obama's Rwanda? There are many reasons why it has not, not the least of them being that the question rests upon an utterly false premise. According to Inboden, however: In the crucible of policymaking, officials should ask themselves more often how they will look back on the decisions they made while in power. Former President Bill Clinton has repeatedly said that one of his biggest regrets was not intervening in Rwanda.

Monday

M.E. Synon

America’s ‘gun culture’: Does anyone actually know what an ‘assault weapon’ is?

From our UK edition

Before British coverage of the American debate on gun control goes any further, I have to hope the BBC and a lot of other Anglo-Saxons who really ought to be better informed try to find out what they are talking about. The chatter started up again last week after President Obama’s State of the Union address. I don’t mean the ignorance here of the origin of the right to keep and bear arms protected by the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, thought there is that, too. The amendment was not an invention of James Madison, the principle author of first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights. In the Second Amendment, Madison was simply affirming the right to bear arms which the people of the 13 States had inherited from English law.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

No, Barack Obama has not declared an end to the War on Terror – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

I see that Con Coughlin is at it again. Apparently, you see, Barack Obama has "taken leave of reality". How so? By declaring that al-Qaeda is but "a shadow of its former self". That seems a reasonable statement to me. Moreover, the sensible response to that declaration is surely I should bloody well hope so. Otherwise what have we - that is, chiefly, the US Armed Forces - been doing these past dozen years? According to Con, however, the President is, at best, hopelessly naive and, more probably, abdicating from his responsibilities. You see: Is he forgetting that it is only five months since Chris Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, died following an attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi by al-Qaeda militants?

Friday

Alex Massie

Mr Obama, Tear Down This Offal Wall – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

It is not often that I find myself agreeing with Sarah Palin. But the erstwhile Governor of Alaska and hockey-mom-in-chief had a point when she asked how all that hopey-changey stuff was working out for ya? Barack Hussein Obama, you have been a disappointment. Change we can believe in? More like Continuity that Shames America. I am sorry to say it, but this American president is no better than his predecessor. I suppose a fair-minded observer could argue that the failure to close Guantanamo Bay represents a graver breach of trust than Obama's parallel reluctance to lift the long-standing US embargo on haggis imports. Nevertheless, this latter matter grates.

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22: Get out of jail free and Cameron’s EU speech

From our UK edition

How broken is the British criminal justice system? In this week's View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson and Rory Geoghegan, research fellow at Policy Exchange, explain the rehabilitation game and the cover up masterminded by our political class to hide the truth about how we dole out justice. Why is the government so keen on using electronic tagging? And does it work? Why are they deliberately fudging statistics to hide the real picture of reoffending? We also examine what an actual bobby on the beat thinks about the current policy of more cuts and more tagging? We're also delighted to be joined by the New Statesman's political editor Rafael Behr, who went head to head with our own James Forsyth on yesterday's EU speech.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

If Barack Obama is an isolationist then isolationism no longer has any meaning – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

Con Coughlin suggests Barack Obama has "given up" fighting al-Qaeda which, frankly, is a curious assessment given the ongoing drone war (and other operations) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Roger Kimball, however, makes Coughlin look like a piker since, according to Kimball, Obama's inauguration speech yesterday contained shades of Neville Chamberlain. Yes, really. These may be extreme reactions but there is evidently a widespread sense that Obama is some form of "neo-isolationist" hellbent on retreating from a big, bad and dangerous world so he may instead concentrate upon our old chum "nation-building at home". If by this you mean Obama is unlikely, as matters presently stand, to send 250,000 American troops into battle then, yes, I suppose this charge has some merit.

Monday

Lloyd Evans

Sketch: Obama’s inauguration

From our UK edition

It was like Narnia at today’s inauguration. Half a million Obama fans gathered in Washington to shiver as their leader was sworn in for the second time. (Or the fourth, if you count the fluffed effort in 2009, which had to be repeated later, and the mandatory ceremony conducted yesterday in a nicely heated indoor room.) Up on the raised platform, the hoary faces of former presidents exchanged smiles and handshakes. A stooge from Congress toddled out and addressed the crowd in sombre, prayerful mood. Then he changed gear and introduced cult folk legend, James Taylor, hailing him as ‘a renowned musical artist.’ This was a polite way of acknowledging that Taylor has successfully evaded the overdose scourge that culled most of his hippy contemporaries.

Jonathan Jones

Obama’s left-wing inaugural address

From our UK edition

Obama's second inaugural address was probably one of the most left-wing speeches he has made since the Democratic primaries in 2008. It hit all the liberal notes, from women's equality to climate change and gun control to welfare. But thanks to the President's trademark combination of poetry and weight, it didn't come off divisive or aggressive. That's because Obama pegged the political positions to principles that cut across partisan divide: chief amongst them, the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Fraser Nelson

In 2013, Obama sees peace. Cameron sees war.

From our UK edition

Barack Obama has just delivered an upbeat inauguration address, proclaiming that a “a decade of war is ending”. Just a few moments earlier David Cameron gave MPs a blood-sweat-toil-and-tears speech, preparing us all for a “generational" struggle against African jihadis. So what's up? Freddy Gray spells it out in a brilliant and timely analysis: Britain and America’s global interest are diverging. Obama is now, in effect, a Pacific president rather than an Atlantic president (as almost all of his others have been). Hawaii-born, Indonesia-schooled, he has always grown up seeing the world in a slightly different way. And he just doesn't see these African tribes as so big a deal, certainly not an existential threat that Cameron appears to speak about.

Alex Massie

Barack Obama’s inauguration speech makes the case for Bigger Government – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

I never quite know what to think about the whole Presidential inauguration thing. One the one hand there is always something stirring about being reminded of the sheer scale of the American experiment and something ennobling, even in tawdry times, about any refresher course in its greater hopes or expectations. On the other, well, there's the sheer scale of the pomp and flummery that makes one nostalgic for the theme park simplicity of monarchy. The Cult of the Presidency needs no encouragement of the type it enjoyed today. And so to Barack Obama's speech. The best thing about it was that it was short. Alas, much of the rest of it appeared to have been produced by a standard Presidential Waffle & Platitude machine.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Hillary Clinton 2016? If she wants it, then yes. – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

Yes, yes, yes, speculating about the 2016 Presidential election before Barack Obama has even begun his second term is a silly business. But so what? Silly things can be fun things. So Jonathan Bernstein attempts to answer a good question: if Hillary runs, would she knock most of her erstwhile rivals out of the race before the contest even reaches Iowa? His answer is sensible: maybe. But I think I'd be a little more certain than that and rate it probably. In 2000, after all, Bill Bradley was the only candidate to challenge Al Gore's inheritance and Bradley's campaign never looked like prevailing. Now Hillary isn't quite as obviously "next in line" as Gore was but, for a large part of the Democratic base, the difference between 2000 and 2016 is, in this respect, close to insignificant.

Alex Massie

Barack Obama’s Gun Control Measures: Harmless but Ineffective – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

Barack Obama's response to the horror of Sandy Hook was entirely predictable, largely unobjectionable and most unlikely to make much of a difference to very much at all. Politics as usual, then. If the President had the air of a man dusting off a long-closed folder marked "Standard Democratic proposals for gun control" then, well, that's because that's pretty much what he was doing. Perhaps there was a sheepish air to his performance too, the look of a man who would have liked to do this long ago but lacked the opportunity - or desire - to risk venturing into this field. Nevertheless, none of the gun-measures Obama announced yesterday would have prevented Adam Lanza's shooting spree in Newtown, Connecticut. We should be wary of supposing they will prevent future mass killings too.

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22: Obama, the Pacific president

From our UK edition

On this week's View from 22 podcast, the Spectator's assistant editor Freddy Gray discusses his cover feature on Barack Obama, who he argues is becoming the pacific-centric president. Although America has given us the impression they are angry with a potential EU withdrawal, Freddy concludes that Uncle Sam is just not that into us. When did this new attitude start emerging? And would it be any different under a Mitt Romney administration? James Forsyth also provides an update on David Cameron's rapidly-approaching EU speech and asks whether the whole thing is a year too late. Will all the Tory party troubles be forgotten and will the speech be it be alright on the night?