Us politics

Thursday

Alex Massie

Condi Rice gave a great speech. She still won't be a contender. - Spectator Blogs

It’s no surprise that John McCain gave a shriveled, bitter, small speech at the Republican convention during which he inadvertently confirmed that the electorate – boobs, nitwits, rubes and all – were quite right to deny him the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. More war, all war, war everywhere was, alas, all McCain had to say. He is a man diminished in every way and it is a sad business to see him so. More surprising – and pleasingly so – was Condoleezza Rice’s return to form. She gave the best speech of the convention thus far. That this may be a low bar does not mean it’s not one

Tim Wigmore

McCain sounds his age, not like an elder statesman

John McCain cut rather a sad sight last night as he addressed the Republican National Convention on his 76th birthday. Four years ago, he would have envisaged spending the convention stepping up his campaign for a second presidential term. Now, he was reduced to a speech that attracted only polite interest from delegates, who were far more enthused by the offerings from Rand Paul and Paul Ryan. Few people are consigned to history more rapidly than nominees who lost a presidential election: none since Nixon, with his almost unique powers of resilience, have later campaigned seriously to reclaim the nomination. At times it felt as though the only applause McCain

Alex Massie

Paul Ryan and the Audacity of Seriousness - Spectator Blogs

If Paul Ryan looked and sounded like the tyro lawyer in a John Grisham movie delivering his first big courtroom speech then that’s because, in a way, he was just that kind of rookie performing upon the biggest stage of his life. Happily he had Matt Scully on his team so there was reason to think Ran’s speech would be well-crafted at least. And it was. Scully put lipstick on Sarah Palin four years ago, writing a speech that hoodwinked us all for a time. He had a hefty hand in Ryan’s too. Not that Ryan is another Palin, you understand. Even so striking the correct balance between substance and

Wednesday

Ryan Bourne

A Paul Ryan reader

Ever since Mitt Romney named Paul Ryan as his running mate, the UK media has raced to portray him as a fiscal Sarah Palin and suggest that he advocates extremist policies. If anyone wants to find out for themselves, and learn about his policies and ideas, where do they start? Here is an introduction to one of the most interesting and intellectually substantial figures in American politics. Background Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan said a lot about the direction of the Presidential election campaign. It disappointed conservatives who wanted Romney to select a VP candidate based on identity politics, or to keep the campaign a referendum on Obama. But it was a triumph for those of us

Tim Wigmore

How Artur Davis can really help Mitt Romney

‘The last time I spoke at a convention, it turned out I was in the wrong place.’ Artur Davis spoke last night at what he now believes is the right venue for him: the Republican National Convention. It did not take him long to reconcile himself to Republicans angry that they were welcoming a man who had provided the official second in favour of Barack Obama’s candidacy at the Democratic Convention four years ago. Davis has a most unusual personal story. Like most African Americans, he had been a Democrat all his life, and served in the House of Representatives for eight years until 2011. In 2010, he campaigned, unsuccessfully,

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Rape is rape and abortion is abortion. Except when they're not. - Spectator Blogs

Way back in my debating days at Trinity College, Dublin we knew you could guarantee large crowds and impressively  – that is, pleasingly – bad-tempered debates twice a year. These were the annual debates on Northern Ireland and abortion. And they really were annual fixtures during which, for years on end, the same arguments were deployed with the same passion and no-one’s views were ever changed by anything they heard. In those days it was usually pretty clear who the bad guys were too. In the case of abortion it was anyone speaking as a representative of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child or, more generally, anyone

Fraser Nelson

Six to watch at the Republican Convention

The Republican National Convention is properly underway today*, where Mitt Romney will try to introduce himself to an America that still doesn’t really know him. The race is close: Romney leads 47-46 in a Gallup poll. Both sides have been spewing out attack ads, which seem to be working: not for 20 years have both the president and challenger had such dire approval ratings. Not many Brits will stay up to 3.30am to watch all this, but we’ll be keeping you fully briefed here on Coffee House. Here are the six people that we have our eye on: Anne Romney (Speaking today): She’s auditioning for first lady, and hasn’t been

Wednesday

George Chamier

George Washington: Gentleman warrior

It is easy to forget that the dignified eighteenth-century gentleman whose image appears on the one-dollar bill, the first President and father of his nation, owed his position entirely to his prowess as a soldier. Stephen Brumwell’s book charts the two phases of his military career, firstly fighting for King George II, then fighting against King George III. George Washington was born into a landowning family in Virginia and was expected to become a gentleman planter like his forebears. But the appeal of adventure on the frontier drew him to enlist – with no formal military training ‒ as a militia officer. Five years of tough campaigning followed, defending the

Monday

Freddy Gray

Risky Ryan will give Romney's campaign the pep it needs

Paul Ryan is a solid if not sensational choice for the Vice Presidency – a reverse Sarah Palin, if you will. I know, I know, he is meant to be a gamble, but all Veep nominations are gambles. Ryan may not be deemed a ‘safe pick’ in the Tim Pawlenty mould, but a safe pick would actually have been risky for Romney, whose campaign is in dire need of conservative pep. Ryan is, as everybody keeps pointing out, a fiscal hawk. And he’s not just grandstanding against deficits. He means it. He was interested in reforming – and bringing down the cost of – American healthcare before the row over

Saturday

Deroy Murdock

Paul Ryan, the right choice

Congressman Paul Ryan (R – Wisconsin) has not courted much of a profile outside America, so I doubt many CoffeeHousers will be familiar with him. But rest assured: he is an excellent choice for vice-president. Here’s why. The 42-year-old is not a neophyte, having served in the House of Representatives for 13 years. He has cross-party appeal: he represents a Democratic district that he nonetheless has won comfortably on seven occasions. Ryan knows how to listen to and speak to Democrats. This is a priceless skill for a Republican running for the second highest office in the land. Two traits define him: his striking command of public policy (especially on

David Blackburn

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s big idea

Mitt Romney has broken the habit of a lifetime and taken a risk. But it’s an intelligent risk. That at least is the view of some commentators on hearing confirmation that Romney has appointed Paul Ryan as his running mate. Niall Ferguson tweeted earlier: ‘Romney gets it right with Ryan. Now this election gets serious. It’s a straight fight between radical fiscal reform and Europeanization.’ David Frum makes a similar point (albeit with a clear note of scepticism) in a blog post for the Daily Beast: ‘This election—which Romney once intended to make a referendum on Obama’s record—will now become a referendum on Paul Ryan’s bold budget ideas.’ Frum provides

Jonathan Jones

Mitt Romney picks Paul Ryan

Mitt Romney will announce his choice of running mate at one o’clock this afternoon, but members of the campaign have already confirmed his identity: Congressman Paul Ryan. I reported yesterday that the Republican right has been pressuring Romney to pick Ryan, and it looks like he’s bowed to that pressure. Despite having served as chairman of the House Budget Committee for the past year and a half – and his high profile role in budget negotiations – Ryan is still relatively unknown. A new CNN poll shows that only 27 per cent of Americans have a favourable view of the Congressman and 19 per cent an unfavourable one, which means

Friday

Jonathan Jones

Romney's not-so-boring white guy

The next big event of the US presidential election will be Mitt Romney’s announcement of his Vice Presidential nominee. For the past few weeks, the two clear favourites have been Ohio Senator — and Budget Office director under George W Bush — Rob Portman and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. Both certainly fit the description of ‘incredibly boring white guy’ that one Republican official said the Romney campaign was looking for. But in the last couple of days, Romney has come under increasing pressure from the Right to pick Paul Ryan: a white guy, yes, but not so boring. When the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Briefing: Obama v Romney, three months out

It’s coming up fast: there are now just three months to go to Election Day in the United States. And right now, Barack Obama’s looking a good bet — although certainly not a safe one — for re-election. The forecasting model designed by the New York Times’s Nate Silver — which accounts for both polls and economic data — currently puts Obama’s chances of victory at 72.4 per cent, his strongest position so far. Interestingly, though, Obama’s lead in the polls is not all that big. Silver’s model, which includes national and state-level polls and takes into account the house effects of each pollster as well as the difference between polls

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

The Tea Party claims another scalp

They may have failed to install one of their candidates as the Republican’s presidential nominee, but the Tea Party is having better luck in other elections. Last night, Ted Cruz — backed by Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul — beat Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst 57-43 in the Republican primary for Texas’s senate election in November. Despite being outspent nearly three-to-one, Cruz — who has never run for office before — achieved a remarkable turnaround. In the first round of the primary just nine weeks ago, Dewhurst beat him 45-34 (as neither got more than 50 per cent it went down to last night’s run-off). In the second round,

Monday

Shiraz Maher

Romney's foreign tour isn't derailing his campaign

Mitt Romney arrives in Poland today on the third and final leg of a foreign tour that has already taken him to London and Israel. While he may not have the obvious charm of Obama, predictions of his campaign being derailed by this foreign tour misunderstand Romney’s strategy. Foreign pundits are perennially guilty of ascribing too much importance to the foreign trips of prospective presidential candidates from the United States. When Obama visited Europe, the Middle East, and Afghanistan in the run up to the 2008 election – to mostly fawning press coverage – he only enjoyed a short-lived boost in the polls over his Republican candidate. His lead grew

Saturday

Jonathan Jones

Briefing: The fight for the House of Representatives

A couple of weeks ago, I took a look at the tight battle for control of the United States Senate. This week: the House of Representatives. The fight for the lower chamber of Congress is much harder to assess. There are, after all, 435 individual contests — each with its own unique candidates, characteristics and electorate — compared to the 33 Senate races. At the moment, Republicans have a strong majority, holding 242 seats (if you include the Michigan one recently vacated by Thad McCotter) to the Democrats’ 193 (including two vacancies). After a terrible set of results in the 2010 midterms, the Democrats have a mountain to climb to

Friday

Jonathan Jones

A tale of two economies

While our economy was contracting by 0.7 per cent, America’s was growing by 0.4 per cent, according to the first estimate just released by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. But, as the graph below shows, those 2012 Q2 figures just represent a continuation of the divergent economic paths the two countries have been on since 2010. In America: steady if unspectacular growth. In the UK: stagnation followed by a second recession. P.S. The Americans report GDP figures as ‘annualised growth rates’ — that is, the percentage GDP would grow by if it grew for a whole year at the same rate as it did in the quarter — which

Freddy Gray

Romney isn't just a clumsy diplomat: his foreign policy is bonkers

What have we learnt about Willard Mitt Romney since he arrived in Britain? Not a lot. He’s a plonker, that’s for sure, but most of us knew that. The UK leg of his world tour will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, for the gaffes. And as Isabel suggested yesterday, Mitt’s diplomatic clumsiness is a real weak point in his candidacy. It’s not just silly slips, his foreign policy ideas seem positively bonkers. Last year, Romney and his neocon advisers published a white paper called An American Century. It talked of Turkey as if it were part of the axis of evil, rather than a member of Nato.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

The Romneyshambles road show

David Cameron broke with Downing Street tradition today by meeting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But Romney might now be wishing that, like François Hollande, he’d been snubbed by the Prime Minister until the elections were over. He started his day with forgetting Ed Miliband’s name, calling him ‘Mr Leader’ instead when the two met. That wasn’t too bad: it’s not as if British people, or indeed the media, can remember what the Labour leader is called half the time, anyway. But once in Downing Street, he decided to get out a spade and dig a rather large hole for himself in the back garden (which he accidentally described as