Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books and the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.

Saturday

Christopher Caldwell

An American conservative who loves the Constitution

A Republican debate in Florida in late November marked this electoral season’s debut of Adolf Hitler, that reliable presence in American presidential campaigns. The Arizona senator John McCain, struggling to draw even with the garrulous ex-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the Mormon technocrat (and former Massachusetts governor) Mitt Romney, decided to burnish his pro-war credentials. The problem was, there was almost nobody to burnish them against. Seven of the eight candidates on stage had vied for months to outdo one another in their lock-stock-and-barrel support for George W. Bush’s Iraq policy. That left Ron Paul, the 72-year-old, ten-term congressman from Texas, to bear the brunt of McCain’s wrath.

Saturday

Christopher Caldwell

The message of this wipeout is that Americans believe they’ve lost the war

Washington On Monday afternoon, President Bush addressed a crowd of several thousand Republican supporters in Pensacola, Florida. The appearance was meant to shore up the sputtering campaign of Charlie Crist, the Republican candidate to succeed Mr Bush’s brother Jeb as governor of Florida. Crist was one of the rare Republican candidates willing to appear with the President in public. Until this week, that is. Crist (who won his race in the end) stood Bush up. He suddenly remembered that his campaign was ‘doing very well in Pensacola’ and that there were a lot of votes to be canvassed for in Palm Beach, several hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico. President Bush, appearing solo, gave his standard speech.

Wednesday

Christopher Caldwell

Why I love the French

Taking issue with the Americans’ Francophobia Washington DC On the night of the Arsenal-Barcelona match, I was on the train between Manchester and London when something happened that would be inexplicable to my American compatriots. Two English couples, aged about 60, sat across the aisle. They were what Americans would call middle-class, and they were tidily dressed: sweaters and ties for the men, sweaters and necklaces for the women. They were discussing the first Barcelona goal when one of the men loudly broke wind. This is not the part that is outside the American experience. It was rather that the guy followed up with a triumphant burst of laughter. His companions joined him. ‘Ha-ha-ha!’ ‘Oh, you’re terrible!’ and ‘Oh, stop!

Thursday

Christopher Caldwell

This is how Bush will be impeached

Washington In early April a silver-haired lady held up a placard at an Iraq war protest that has since been replicated on bumper stickers across America and blogs all over cyberspace. ‘Will Someone Please Give George W. Bush a B*** Job,’ the sign read, ‘So We Can Impeach Him?’ For partisan Democrats — at least those still smarting over the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about his office sex life — the sign’s appeal lay in its combination of low humour and righteous embitterment. But the embitterment predominates over the humour. Should Democrats win back the House of Representatives next fall, as appears more and more likely, the humour will fall away, and Bush will be impeached — whether he gets what Clinton got or not.

Saturday

Christopher Caldwell

Bush: Palestinians good, but not great

Washington In the 48 hours before George W. Bush took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday, the presenter for ABC news was blown up in his flatbed truck by a roadside device near Baghdad, Martin Luther King Jr’s widow died, former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay went on trial for accounting chicanery allegedly committed by his company back when it was President Bush’s largest single campaign contributor, Alan Greenspan spent his last day at the Fed, Judge Samuel Alito spent his first day on the Supreme Court and the radical Islamists of Hamas started their first week as the democratically elected rulers of Palestine. Whatever poll you check, about 60 per cent of Americans say their country is on the ‘wrong track’.

Saturday

Christopher Caldwell

The fruits of victory

Washington DC George W. Bush announced during his State of the Union message that America and its allies will disarm Iraq with or without the UN. If America, as appears increasingly likely, gets war, it will be thanks in large part to Tony Blair and Britain. But what will Tony Blair and Britain get thanks to America? A typical American would answer (a) that's the wrong question, and (b) quite a lot. If Tony Blair is America's poodle, then his yap is being heard. Britain stands higher in US estimation than at any time since 1945. Recent opinion polls yield results that could make an American question whether Britain was a foreign country at all.