Us politics

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 retake control and reinstall Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.

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.

Hillary Clinton is holding talks in Israel today after a turbulent weekend in Egypt, ending a diplomatically fraught trip with little obvious benefit. Officially, Clinton was there to open the American consulate in Alexandria after it closed in 1993 due to budget cutbacks, but the subtext was to manage the conflicting aspects of America’s strategic interests in the country. Clinton met with Mohammed Mursi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who is now Egypt’s new President, assuring him of the ‘full authority’ of his office. This was a subtle endorsement at a time when Mursi finds himself locked in tug-of-war with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces for power. The latter has so far prevented him from forming a civilian government or convening parliament.

Via Kevin Drum, this is really rather remarkable: 'The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative. They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name. Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review.

Tim Stanley says Mitt Romney's speech to the NAACP's annual convention was his campaign's first ‘moment of magic’. Up to a point. It's true, as Stanley observes, that Republicans once had a better record on civil rights than Democrats (it was once the Party of Lincoln after all). True too that Mitt's father George, governor of Michigan, was one of those northern Republicans who agitated for decency before it was popular or politically-expedient to do so. Romney has a story to tell here and it's not a bad tale either. The speech had two chief aims. First, Romney wins pundit-points for being ‘brave’ enough to speak to a largely-hostile audience. Secondly, when it comes to votes Romney wasn't really looking for black votes.

Barack Obama’s latest email appeal for campaign funds – entitled 'we could lose if this continues' - doesn’t seem altogether sincere. The president’s re-election team wants more money, of course – who doesn’t? – and they must be concerned by the fact that Romney and his plutocratic committees are beating them in the fund-raising stakes. As Obama says, 'we can win a race in which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more'. Yet anyone with half a brain can see what Obama and his strategists are trying to say (again): Romney is a super-rich agent of the super-rich. He represents big business, not ordinary Americans. He is, as one White House adviser put it, trying to 'purchase the White House'. But, hang on.

Grover Norquist, a leading voice of American conservatism, is cross about the date of the Republican Party convention. He tweets: 'Which idiot put the GOP convention the same time as 'Burning Man' in Nevada? Is there time to change this?' Burning Man, in case you didn't know, is a festival in Nevada where 'freethinkers' flock in their tens of thousands to spend a few days being individual. Money is not allowed, natch. It attracts thousands of British trendies -- ex-public school types, on the whole, trying too hard to carve an artsy identity for themselves. They come back considerably more smug than they left, if the ones I know are anything to go by.  How appalled they would be to know that the deeply unfashionable American Right is as fond of Burning Man as they are.

The US Supreme Court's decision to uphold 'Obamacare' and the so-called 'individual mandate' will have brought a little relief to President Obama. If his administration's hardest-fought legislative victory had been struck down by the high court, the president's admirers would have started to wonder whether he had achieved anything at all. But Obama and the Democrats will know that their healthcare battle is far from won. Republicans have pledged to carry on trying to repeal 'Obamacare' in its entirety. And there are bound to be all sorts of complicated and tedious state-by-state legal challenges over various technicalities before the most of the law is brought into force in 2014.  And anyway, the ruling might have dire implications for Obama's re-election campaign.

When Obama brilliantly skewered Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last year, you might’ve thought the billionaire would slink off the political field. But, to the great glee of Team Obama, ‘The Donald’ is still keen to keep playing. Ever since Trump’s endorsement of Mitt Romney back in February, the Democrats have been attacking Romney by association (‘They both like firing people’, they said, tying Romney’s ‘I like being able to fire people’ gaffe to Trump’s famous Apprentice catchphrase).