Us politics

Mitt Romney’s status as the overwhelming favourite to be the Republican nominee for president is confirmed by a new poll out of South Carolina. It has Romney on 37 per cent, 18 points ahead of his nearest rival Rick Santorum. South Carolina is the next primary contest after New Hampshire, which takes place on Tuesday and which Romney is expected to win comfortably.   The significance of these new numbers is that South Carolina, the first primary in the south, has long been considered inhospitable territory for Romney. (In the 2008 primary there, he finished a disappointing fourth with 15 percent of the vote). If Romney is to be denied the nomination, his opponents will have to inflict a defeat on him there and that currently looks unlikely.

The year has begun with Iran and the United States circling each other in the Straits of Hormuz; like two boxers before a bout, seeing who will strike first and working out where a blow could land. The immediate cause has been Iranian manoeuvres in the Arabian Gulf, and a visit to the area by the American aircraft carrier USS John C Stennis. Iran's army chief has said that his country will take action if a US aircraft carrier returns to the Gulf. Oil prices have shot up as a result. This could be the worst time to goad a Democratic president facing pressure from those Republicans currently trying ‘out hard’ each other in Iowa. Barack Obama has, throughout his tenure, tended to ignore bullyboy behaviour.

An Israeli strike on Iran has to be the most over-predicted event of recent years. It was meant to happen last year. And the year before that. But now there are reasons why 2012 could, indeed, be the year when Israel will find it propitious to take overt military action against Iran's nuclear programme. (Everyone assumes that a range of covert activities, from assassinations to cyber attacks, are already ongoing). The Iranian government is moving closer to having the requisite capabilities, and can reasonably be expected to take the final steps towards nuclearisation.

The year is ending not with a successful US withdrawal from Iraq — as President Barack Obama claims — but with what amounts to a coup d'etat by the country's Shiite prime minister (and former ally of the US) Nouri al-Maliki. Less than 24 hours after the last US soldier left Iraq, the country's Sunni vice-president Tareq al-Hashemi was wanted on charges that he led death squads, in a case most observers think could reignite the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07. Violence in Iraq has subsided since 2006-07, when Sunni insurgents and Shiite militiamen killed thousands of civilians each month — but, without U.S. troops to act as a buffer, many Iraqis now fear a return to those days.

Steven F. Hayward’s audit of the state of American conservatism, which David Brooks judges to be one of the best magazine articles of the year, argues that the Reaganite ‘starve the beast strategy’ has failed to halt the growth of government. Hayward writes: ‘Thirty years after the arrival of the Reagan Revolution, government is bigger than ever. The Reagan years appear to have been little more than a mild speed bump in the progress of ever-larger government. The regulatory state advances relentlessly on every front. The soaring national debt threatens economic oblivion sooner or later. In short, the Reagan era, for all that was accomplished, was not an analogue to the New Deal era.

He may be trailing Newt Gingrich in the national polls, but there's one metric by which Mitt Romney is dominating the 2012 Republican field: endorsements. He's already bagged the two biggest ones announced so far: Chris Christie and Tim Pawlenty. He also has the backing of several key Republicans in New Hampshire, including current Senator Kelly Ayotte and two former Governors. And yesterday he added another big name from another early state to his list: South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Haley's support for Romney is not wholly unexpected: she backed him in 2008 and he endorsed her early in her campaign for Governor last year.

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player This was, by some margin, the most talked about moment of Saturday night's Republican debate. Accused by Rick Perry of changing a passage in his book advocating an individual health care mandate, Mitt Romney stretched out his hand to the Texas Governor and said 'I'll tell you what, ten thousand bucks? Ten thousand dollar bet?' For Romney's opponents, the bizarre challenge provided the perfect clip with which to attack him. It combines Romney's biggest negatives into one neat sound bite: his record on healthcare, his flip-flopping, and the idea that he's an out-of-touch Wall Street millionaire. And, just as when Perry got a rise out of him over immigration in October, it calls his temperament into question.