Wisdom from beyond the ages....

Now writing, albeit far too infrequently from New York City, my sojourn here has led me to study in somewhat more depth the History of this influential country, perhaps with a view to understanding more of the roots of the massive issues facing it and by extension the entire world. Whilst reasonably familiar with US history, at least up to the end of the Napoleonic wars and during the Civil War, the remainder of the period up to the end of World War I remained something of a murky one. I was inspired by a picture of president Obama working at a desk. The history of this desk, The Resolute desk, was that it was given to arguably one of the least well-known presidents (at least for British audiences) Rutherford B. Hayes , the 19th President of that country, by Queen Victoria during a period of gradual closening of relations between the two countries, carved from the hull of a ship, H.M.S Resolute which had been lost in the Arctic Circle and recovered by the USA.

Studying Hayes, a Republican from the 19th Century, I was struck by how sensible he seemed, and how this speech could provide a wake -up call both for Tea Party extremists who claim to represent the 'authentic' Spirit of the US, and Left wing extremists who think that any 'DWEM' 'Dead White European Male' (Hayes would be classifed as European on the grounds of being White) has nothing to tell us:


"In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many. It is not yet time to debate about the remedy. The previous question is as to the danger—the evil. Let the people be fully informed and convinced as to the evil. Let them earnestly seek the remedy and it will be found. Fully to know the evil is the first step towards reaching its eradication. Some are strong when they portray the rottenness of the present system. We are, to say the least, not yet ready for this remedy. We may reach and remove the difficulty by changes in the laws regulating corporations, descents of property, wills, trusts, taxation, and a host of other important interests, not omitting lands and other property'

Food for thought , certainly..

Democrats: getting ready for a major league "stitch-up"

I'm using the excuse that Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Wyoming Primary to file another report on the interminable struggle for the Democratic nomination. And it really is interminable, as the projections for the remaining 12 states now show that it is very unlikely that Obama will reach 2025 delegates based on elected delegates alone; which means that the 800 unelected 'super-delegates' - party officials - will be decisive.

Current projections show a split of around 60%-40% in super-delegates between Clinton and Obama but that's largely irrelevant when the Democratic convention comes around in August because they don't have to vote any particular way - they are guns for hire, perhaps literally. It is entirely possible that Clinton could somehow swing a majority of super-delegates around, even though she is very unlikely to have more of the elected delegate vote than Obama by then.

My worry isn't so much that this would be "unfair" - it's not immediately obvious that 100% election by caucus or primary (some of which involve independent voters who may be Republican sympathisers!) is the best way to choose a candidate, and an electoral college between party officials and voters (which is what they effectively have at the moment) might make more sense. It's more that, if there is such a deal and Clinton gets the nomination, a lot of Obama supporters are going to be so pissed off that they're not going to bother to turn out and vote in the presidential election in November. The same might happen in reverse with Clinton supporters if Obama wins the nomination, but I think that's less likely because he could at least claim he has the weight of "popular opinion on his side.

This struggle is dragging on and on - largely because Obama's support softened badly in Texas and Ohio when he ran into a wave of negative publicity about the corruption rap for his friend Tony Rezko, and he didn't handle it very well as far as the footage from the press conference I saw on Channel 4 news suggested. Of course the footage could have been edited to make it look like just about anything, but you can be damn sure that a successful Democratic candidate will have to be able to deal with the media onslaught and scandals both real and manufactured just to survive. Bill Clinton went from strength to strength largely because he was able to do that; Jimmy Carter got blown away after one term largely because he couldn't. The real danger is that Obama ends up suffering the same fate as Carter, rather than being able to combine the sense of resuscitating the corpse of political hope that both Carter and JFK embodied with the political balls of the Clintons. Both Bill and Hillary are real sluggers, as is Dubya Bush, and any successful president needs some of that. You can't biuild yourself up by cultivating a sense of hope in people and then fall apart when the going gets tough. That's the route to landslide defeat and condemning the Democrats to another generation of impotence (once again, look at Carter in 1980).

So, extra rations of bile and roughage for Obama over these next couple of months and he ought to be able to get through this. But if he looks too weedy or flaky then it's gonna be Hillary Clinton for the nomination. Should be interesting.

Somewhere, John McCain is rubbing his hands at the prospect of 5 more months of Democratic infighting. But as the poll ratings of both Democratic contenders against him in the election have risen since all this started, maybe the joke's on him...

Obama moves into the driving seat...

...or very close to it, anyway. Almost a week since Super Tuesday, and I should have got it together to post earlier, but there was just too much stuff going on. Anyway, waiting a few days allows me to incorporate the results from the Democratic primaries in Maine, Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington. Obama was some way ahead of Hillary Clinton in all four of these and unless Clinton can win by a substantial margin in Ohio and Texas in March, it looks very much like her campaign is gonna run into the ground.

That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that Obama is a shoo-in because a few hundred of the Convention delegates are local party appointees rather than being elected. Clinton is - currently - ahead in terms of the number of these 'super-delegates' who have come out in her favour. But it's impossible to know for sure how they will vote as they are representing no-one but themselves (and maybe the local party bigwigs). It's a weird overlay of cronyism on what is basically a democratic selection process, and it could mean that Clinton gets the nomination despite having less delegates than Obama. Which could tear the party apart at the Convention... the Obama camp must be hoping that Barack gets a clear enough lead by the summer that he won't need to rely on the super-delegates. That may well happen if the pro-Obama swing continues, but that's pure speculation at this stage. Next stops Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC. It's a constant gravy train...

US elections - the fields thin out...

Big news from both US presidential races yesterday as dropouts were announced.

For the Democrats, John Edwards has thrown in the towel after failing to make much impact in any of the primaries so far, running a distant third behind the media frenzy enveloping Clinton and Obama. Despite making substantial criticisms of Clinton's attacks on Obama during the early primaries, Edwards is not endorsing either Clinton or Obama - for now. This is probably strategic - keeping his options open to cut a running-mate deal with whoever wins the presidential nomination. It's a pity Edwards didn't make more headway as he was the most radical of the candidates and the only one who made action to reduce the shocking levels of poverty in America the centrepiece of his campaign. To a large extent he has been eclipsed by the emergence of Barack Obama as the alternative to the Clinton dynasty in this campaign - although Obama's policy platform isn't actually that radical.

Meanwhile, after what has turned out to be the most strategically wrongheaded campaign in recent history, one-time favourite Rudy Giuliani has pulled out of the Republican race. Giuliani's campaign was a disaster, full stop ("period"). He didn't bother to campaign in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan etc because he was concentrating on Florida because it had a lot more convention delegates. What he didn't take into account is that by failing to compete in those early primaries he looked like an also-ran time after time, and he missed out on any media coverage. The strategy might have worked if the early results had been a complete mess, with none of the other candidates gaining any net advantage, but the fact that John McCain was in the lead by Florida, and that McCain was also the candidate whose policy stance is closest to Giuliani's, effectively wrote him off. It's an extraordinary failure for the guy who was at one stage being touted as the great white hope for '08. Giuliani has endorsed McCain.

The boys are back with the Barack

(with apologies to Alan Partridge...)

Good result for Barack Obama in the South Carolina primary. 55% for Obama against 27% for Clinton is a huge victory margin and it looks like Obama benefited from a backlash against the increasingly negative campaigning of the Bill and Hilary double act. Those two are pulling dirty tricks out of the bag as fast as they can, in a way that suggest they may be running pretty scared... and it's gonna be interesting to see what they pull out next in the run up to 'Super Tuesday' in 9 days' time.

I was surprised to see John Edwards not doing better than 18% of the vote in what is almost his home turf, but I think he's been squeezed badly in the Clinton/Obama crossfire. Nonetheless, if he stays in the race up to and including Super Tuesday he could still emerge with enough delegates to hold the balance of power at the Democratic Convention, if it's a close enough race.

I've not yet seen detailed polling from any of the Super Tuesday states so at this point there's not much more to say on this topic at this point in time - I'll come back to it later in the week.

Clinton vs Obama: close calls, stupid voting systems and stupid voters

Results from the Nevada Democratic primary show a narrow win for Hillary Clinton.

Or at least, the headline results do. The actual delegate figures show Obama with 13 delegates from Nevada to Clinton's 12. This is due to the idiotic first-past-the-post system of delegate selection by precinct (and that isn't a dig at the States because we have the same stupid system for our elections - it's how New Labour ensures a working majority with only 35% of the vote.) Overall, Obama has 38 delegates to Clinton's 36, with Edwards on 18.

What this means is that one has to 'read the small print', i.e. look at how the primary and caucus results are translating to numbers of delegates at the Democratic Convention in the summer, before making any predictions on who's going to get the nomination. Based on current evidence the Democratic race looks too close to call and it's entirely possible that neither Obama nor Clinton will end up with the necessary 2,025 delegates by the time of the Convention - which could leave Edwards as the 'kingmaker'. An interesting thought.

Also interesting, if a little spooky, is BBC North America editor Justin Webb's claim in his blog today that some people haven't been voting for Barack Obama in the primaries because they think he's a Muslim. Well, I guess if the American education system is set up to produce drones - both working and middle class - who get their entire info from Fox News, then this is the kind of crap you end up with. And that's not to say the UK system is any better - anyone who remembers the 1987 general election and the widely touted claim that if Kinnock won, Soviet Tanks would be rolling down Whitehall within 48 hours, will know there's no room for complacency.

Barack Obama storms out of the blocks...

And so, as promised, on to the Democratic race, where, only 4 days into the campaign proper, Hillary Clinton is already starting to look like a lame duck. The general media consensus was that the amount of funds raised by the Clinton campaign and the support of Bill would be enough to propel her through the primaries with Barack Obama a creditable second, and John Edwards a long way back in the rear.

Instead, what seems to be happening - based on the results from Iowa and the latest polls in New Hampshire - is that Obama is surging into a big lead, with Edwards and Clinton fighting over second place. Obama got 38% of the vote in Iowa with Edwards and Clinton pretty much tied at 30%. One of the polls from New Hampshire puts Obama 10 points in front - and if the actual result goes that way, it would be an even bigger upset than Iowa.

The factor that seems to be propelling Obama to the front of the field seems to be a big surge in support among young activists and voters - see, for example, this BBC piece. It could be that, like George McGovern in 1972, Obama is going to cruise to the Democratic nomination on a wave of youth radicalism - but unlike McGovern, there is a strong possibility Obama has the charisma to go all the way to the White House.

This of course, doesn't mean in itself that he'll be any good. Democratic presidents of whom much was expected have been complete letdowns before - Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter (although his focus on energy policy now looks extremely ahead of his time) and, arguably, even JFK. However, Obama does have the advantage of not being George W Bush, Hilary Clinton, or Mike Huckabee, which, given the state of politics in the US, might be as good as any reason to vote for him.

To finish, a few words on John Edwards, who is unlikely to get the nomination - he doesn't have anything like the campaign funding that Clinton or Obama have, but his decision to mount a (relatively) left-wing campaign highlighting the appalling levels of poverty that exist in the US and a strategy to reduce them, is to be applauded. He may well decide to drop out if he has won few or no primaries by 'Super Tuesday' in February, but he'd surely be a good choice for running-mate if Obama does get the nomination. An Obama-Edwards ticket would be about as good as we can expect from the Democrats this year, and should be strong enough to beat anyone the Republicans can come up with.