Us politics

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, told Fox News Sunday last weekend: ‘The fact is, it’s not a question of whether can Mitt Romney win. The statement is, Mitt Romney has to win for the sake of the very idea of America. Mitt Romney has to win for liberty and freedom. We have to put an end to this Barack Obama presidency before it puts an end to our way of life in America.’ There you have it, the conservative movement’s flammable combination of hysteria, hyperbole and cynicism in a single soundbite. Verily, American politics has become an ugly thing, dominated by boors and scoundrels animated by a

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.

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

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

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

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).   And yesterday, the Obama campaign put out an ad attacking Romney for not denouncing Trump’s claims that the President wasn’t born in the US, contrasting it with the

With just over three months to go to the Republican convention, what sort of vice presidential nominee is Mitt Romney looking for? Well, a Republican official ‘familiar with the campaign’s thinking’ tells Politico that what they want is an ‘incredibly boring white guy’. You see, the Romney campaign is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 2008 McCain campaign — including his choice of Sarah Palin as his candidate for the vice presidency. So they’re looking for a much safer — and more conventional — pick who won’t do any damage to Romney’s chances. This approach would rule out Florida Senator Marco Rubio (not boring or white enough), who

Gawker, the American news gossip site, is very pleased with itself. They’ve hired a Fox News ‘mole’, and he or she has already given them their first scoop: off-air footage of Mitt Romney chatting away amicably with Fox News presenter Sean Hannity before an interview. This is meant to be an insight into the sleazy world the American right, and inevitably the clip is going viral. But what Gawker and the mole might not realise is that they may have given the Romney campaign a surprise boost. I’ve seen many Romney interviews and speeches, far too many. But this is the only time I’ve seen him come across as a human being.