The World After Bush

Record turnout ... by US standards

2008-11-04T23:55:00.000Z

This election has been a wonderful example of how democracies can renew themselves.

writes James Forsyth as The Spectator's CoffeeHouse prepares to blog through election night.

And he's certainly right about the many different ways in which the intensity of interest and participation has broken US records. Forsyth reports on turnout predictions:

The latest predictions I’m hearing for turnout is 64 percent. This would exceed the 63 percent turnout in the 1960 Kennedy v. Nixon race and be the highest since 1908; this in a year where already a record number of people have donated to the candidates and where more people watched the convention speeches than ever before.

This is impressive in US terms - and some states may get up as high as 90 per cent. But it isn't exactly in a different universe than the 61.4% which was seen as a pretty devastating indictment of voter apathy in the UK last time, well below the historic norm if a little up on 2001.

The US and international media are making a lot of the possibility of record turnout.

But we should hold off on the comparisons with South Africa 1994. That was unusual in that there was no official electoral register, but the 19.7 million votes cast accounted for around 90-91% of the estimated 21.7 million eligible voters.

Somebody with more academic expertise might explain why US turnout levels might not be directly comparable - but I would guess that the headline figure might also be artificially boosted by registration being more difficult in the US than several other democracies, although the Democrats seem to have made impressive inroads into that this year.

I would suggest that the level of intensity and the large number actively engaged in following the election closely is more impressive than the breadth of participation across the entire electorate.

And if they weren't interested this year ...

How to help Burma's democrats

2008-11-04T00:00:00.001Z

The global civil society campaign Avaaz and democracy campaigners in Burma believe they have found a pressure point on the Burmese Junta, which keeps the democratically elected leader Aung Sung Suu Kyi under house resist and so often seems to regard itself as immune to international criticism.

Avaaz have put out a call to action, asking supporters to put pressure on Lloyd's of London - as "the world's oldest, most respected insurer, which cares a great deal about its global reputation" - to stop insuring the Burmese Junta, to meet with campaigners for Burma to hear their concerns, and to disclose all Burma-related risks.

They recommend that we all write to Lloyd's chairman Lord Levene about the issue.

The Observer reported, on Sunday, cross-party political pressure on Lloyd's chairman Lord Levene, with Conservative John Bercow and Labour's Glenys Kinnock quoted. This should be an issue on which British political leaders and parties can unite: Gordon Brown has shown a strong interest in Burma, and the opposition parties have also been advocates of the democracy movement.

Several big insurers have pulled out - with Willis and Aon, and global reinsurer Swiss Re declaring earlier this year that they will cease their business relationships with Burma, as have Arab Insurance Group and others.

Obama and McCain would 'talk to Taliban'

2008-10-24T07:22:00.002+01:00

Time's Joe Klein has a significant interview with Barack Obama.

It includes a significant development in his thinking on Afghanistan.

Actually, Obama and Petraeus seem to be thinking along similar lines with regard to Afghanistan. I mentioned that Petraeus had recently given a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation in which he raised the possibility of negotiating with the Taliban. "You know, I think this is one useful lesson that is applicable from Iraq," Obama said without hesitation. "The Sunni awakening changed the dynamic in Iraq fundamentally," he said, referring to the Petraeus-led effort to turn the Sunni tribes away from the more radical elements of the insurgency. "Whether there are those same opportunities in Afghanistan I think should be explored," he said.

Wired's Noah Shactman, one of the most respected reporters on security issues, has, perhaps significantly, got a McCain campaign source to respond consensually.

"There are differences over timing, strategy, etc. But there is consensus that at some point there will need to be an effort to talk with some of these [Taliban] guys and peel off more moderate elements".

This might be surprising in the final phases of a campaign when there could have been a late partisan advantage to be made in politicising (perhaps misrepresenting) Obama's position on 'talking to the Taliban'. (Maybe Schactman has got a view informed more by McCain's foreign policy advisers rather than his political operatives).

That Obama is here endorsing the emulation of an important part of the Petreaus strategy in Iraq may have a good deal to do with that. But perhaps, and despite all recent appearances to the contrary, 'Country First' is still an argument which holds some sway with the McCain campaign on issues that really matter.

PS: Even outside of the campaign context, the British experience shows why politicians can be wary of this debate in public.

Last December, British discussion of strategies to "split" the Taliban generated front-page Brown: It's time to talk to the Taliban headlines. A Parliamentary statement which generated We will not negotiate with Taliban, insists Brown headlines the following day.

The proposed strategy was always, rationally, somewhere in between. Or as Paul Woodward of War in Context put it: 'We will not talk to the Taliban who we won’t talk to, apart from those who we will talk to'. And that appears to be the policy which both US candidates are converging on too.

McCain's future: the market was rigged!

2008-10-19T23:20:00.001+01:00

Trading in political futures on the leading InTrade market gives Obama an 84% chance of the White House, against 16% of McCain.

Check out the graphs - and notice how late the Obama surge broke.

And now we know why. InTrade has revealed in a statement that a single institutional investor spent hundreds of thousands to make McCain look more competitive on the market than he was. This reduced the Obama probability of winning down by around 10 points over a month. (This is not simply counter-cyclical betting by somebody who thought the herd were getting it wrong: they were deliberately betting at much worse odds on InTrade than were readily available elsewhere).

CQ has all the details of how it was done. I heard about this on Paul Krugman's blog, but even the Nobel winner has to doff his hat at Nate Silver, who spotted something suspicious and worked out from the betting patterns a few weeks ago. (Sliver's www.fivethirtyeight.com blog takes political numbers to a new art form).

But there wasn't enough of a future in it. You can buck the market for a while. But you can't buck the election.

'I can live with defeat says McCain' probably isn't the best headline in the momentum stakes either.

Belgians for Dubya

2008-10-18T09:45:00.000+01:00

About to catch the Eurostar to speak to the Flemish Social Democrats' conference in Brussels tomorrow morning.

This could also be a chance to investigate a mysterious quirk in yesterday's international poll on the US election, carried by The Guardian, Le Monde, Le Soir and other newspapers.

The public in all eight countries preferred Barack Obama to John McCain, with the lead ranging from 17 to over 60 points, and majority support for the Democrat everywhere except Poland (43-26) and Mexico (46-13)

A second question asked Since the start of the Bush Presidency, how has your opinion of the US changed?

In seven out of eight countries, opinions of America had changed for the worse.

But not in Belgium. Voters there do back Obama over McCain by 62% to 8% - quite a similar result to those in Britain and France. Yet 52% of Belgians have improved their opinion of America since 2000, while for 39% it has deteriorated. That's a 13% positive Bush bounce in America's global appeal among Belgians, compared to deficits of 44% in Britain, 64% in Canada and 68% in France.

Why? I shall try to ask around and report back ...

A deserved Nobel

2008-10-12T12:15:00.001+01:00

Has the Nobel prize lost its glitter?, the Observer asked this week. Like the rest of its panel, I didn't think so.

There are good tributes to this year's peace prize winner Martti Ahtisaari from fellow Finn Reijo Ruokanen and from ex-Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans for the International Crisis Group. But celebrations in Aceh or at the Martti Ahtisaari Primary School in Namibia may best capture the reasons for the award.

If securing Namibia's peaceful independence is Ahtisaari's proudest achievement, the award of the prize this year was also intended to bring renewed attention to Kosovo. The International Crisis Group - which is among the most focused and valuable of any foreign policy think-tank - has recently published a report recommending how to support Kosovo's fragile transition.

McCain may take Macedonia

2008-10-10T07:55:00.001+01:00

And that's about as much good news as can be found for the Republican candidate right now.

McCain is still within 6 points in RealClearPolitics' poll of polls, but the InTrade futures market now gives Obama a 76.6% chance of victory with McCain back to 23.3%. The dramatic slump in his prospects over the last month is also captured by PoliticalBetting's graph of the UK betting markets.

Meanwhile in Macedonia, McCain's appeal is holding up a little better, according to The Economist's totally unscientific Global Electoral College based on reader's online votes.

This would be fun, but election night isn't going to be cliffhanger. Only Georgia has John McCain on its mind, where the Republican has 68% of the vote at time of writing, while he was hanging on to 53-47 leads in both Macedonia and Andorra. And that's it. In a much expanded worldwide electoral college, Obama's current lead is 8501 to 16

This web-based self-selecting methodology may well have a pro-Obama bias: The Economist gives him an overwhelming lead in the US too. But there are similar messages from conventional worldwide opinion polls. Obama had a clean sweep in a 22-nation BBC poll and Reader's Digest global Presidential poll.

Obama also edged ahead in Israel this summer, though another poll found McCain ahead in the Palestinian territories: both somewhat counterintuitive results.

Only Americans get to vote on November 4th. These global polls are never too good for the Republicans - and they can be more of a headache than a boon to the Democrats. But George Bush was more popular than John Kerry in 2004 in Poland, the Phillipines and Nigeria, and tied his opponent in India. All four countries have now swung behind the Democrat contender in 2008.

Its unfair to say that McCain is less popular than Bush. But Barack Obama's distinctive global appeal suggests that he could yet make the world fall back in love with America again.

Post-debate, it was no contest

2008-10-08T20:29:00.002+01:00

The debate was a no-score bore, though voters gave it to Obama.

Wonkette has a fascinating review and full C-Span video showing Obama excelling at retail politics, Clinton-style (after being snubbed when attempting to shake his Presidential opponent's hands)

And after 90 seconds, there was one side on the field.

As Michael Tomasky has been pointing out on his excellent Guardian blog, McCain isn't competing in the ground campaign either. And that could prove an even costly mistake come election day.

Boring, boring Barack Obama

2008-10-08T18:03:00.003+01:00

Boring Barack Obama. And Boring John McCain. And boring, useless Tom Brokaw, wittering on about the clock but doing nothing useful as a moderator, though in all fairness that much exalted Town Hall format could have been devised to take the life out of the political debate.

Were there any interesting nuggets at all? Let’s at least try.

* Is John McCain spending so much time with Sarah Palin that he’s turning into her?

Asked about the financial bailout, did he really say "I have a plan to fix this problem, and its to do with energy independence”

* Did six million Americans really email in their questions in the hope of getting them put to the candidates?

Another difficulty for the politics is broken brigade is that when we get unmediated politics (even on as flat a night as this one, then voters’ impressions of both candidates tend to rise. And that happens once large numbers of non-anoraks, about to undertake the solemn duty of electing a President, decide to pay just a little more attention for a couple of nights once every four years. Perhaps that’s because of the all too well hidden secret of national politics: it can be much more often about decent people thinking sincerely about how to solve difficult problems than anybody tends to let on.

* Does anybody really think that McCain’s “that one” comment cuts it as a historic debate “moment”?

This definitely won’t ever be there with Reagan and Dukakis on the tape of those famous debate moments in years to come; my guess would be that few people will remember it by this weekend.

Spin alley is very old news now that campaign press secretaries can simply ping over an email to reporters during the debate. But that also entails the risk of losing all perspective. I doubt this would have been much more than the briefest of footnotes to news reports twenty years ago.

Yes, McCain is getting snarkier. Like Ezra Klein, I didn’t spot any racist connotation – but McCain is pissed off that he is losing. And no, it won’t work while Obama maintains the contrasting Presidential demeanour which has served him especially well ever since the financial crisis broke, somehow seeming above the fray even as his bid to be President enters its critical final weeks.

This may still be more of a referendum on the Democratic contender than his party would like it to be – but he’s more than passing that test, And its enough of a referendum on Bush-McCain and the economy for him to be an increasingly confident as front-runner.

So he is now running down the clock from here until November 4th, I guess that means we’ll be hearing much more of nothing much new from this new, boring Barack Obama.

As long as he gets to take the rhetorical fireworks out of the box again on January 20th 2009, then what is there to complain about?

Sarah Palin: unqualified, but still alive

2008-10-03T10:22:00.000+01:00

I couldn't quite stay up for the VP debate in St Louis (full transcript), but was grateful for our two year old daughter waking us up at 6am so I could watch the recording as live before hearing anything about it.

Campaigns always try to manage expectations downwards: none can ever have played quite such a blinder in the expectations game as Sarah Palin. And no politician since Al Gore has done quite so much for the internet as Palin.

Her CBS interviews have conclusively proved that she is not yet qualified to be President. But Palin's lack of knowledge is perhaps less scary than her confidence in spite of this. In her clarity, certainty and lack of all nuance, she very much resembles the current President George W Bush. And like Bush in 2000, she performed confidently and well, by combining her talking points with a folksy anti-politics appeal, in the controlled debate format in which it was relatively easy to duck specific questions.

Joe Biden's strategy was a smart and effective one. He never challenged Sarah Palin and was wary of contradicting her directly - though he was very clear in his rebuttal of the Cheney doctrine of the vice-presidency. But he hammered McCain again and again. Biden won the debate comfortably according to the immediate polls of viewers and undecided voters, with clear and focused advocacy of Obama's domestic and foreign policy platform. And the weakness of the McCain-Palin ticket in current conditions came across too: on domestic policy, the answer is always for government to do less and get out of the way.

But Republicans will be relieved too. Palin's performance - an honourable defeat - will end the question of whether she can remain on the ticket.

As she gets back to energising the base, Palin is unlikely to be exposed to much more media scrutiny during the rest of the campaign. The PalinSpeak interview generator will have to suffice.

If the faltering McCain campaign were to recover and win, then there would be an immediate priority for development assistance to our long-standing ally: Gordon Brown should ensure that Britain urgently sends the best heart surgeons we have to Washington to be on permanent stand-by for the next four years. Any 'special relationship' would demand no less.

'When was the last time America elected an angry President?'

2008-10-02T22:19:00.002+01:00

Karl Rove asked that of Howard Dean's surge last time around.

Joe Klein contrasts the Obama and McCain temperaments in an excellent Time column.

McCain, playing the underdog, is getting angrier as the race closes. But he risks confirming the growing impression that Obama is President-elect.

But Klein also warns against the idea that the race is over, and suggests some possible game-changers on the Time Swampland blog.

Above all, let's hope Osama bin Laden - following his somewhat machiavellian contribution in 2004 - can not seek to intervene in America's democratic choice,

Washington's blame game

2008-09-30T09:02:00.000+01:00

The House of Representatives vote to reject the $700 billion bailout, by 228 votes to 205, has sent shockwaves through the financial markets, hitting London this morning following the dramatic fall in the US in response yesterday.

Efforts are being made to rescue the rescue, but almost as much energy seems to be going into the blame game. House Republicans split two to one (65 to 133) against the bill, though 95 Democrats also opposed it, with 140 (60%) of Democrats in favour. That was about ideological aversion to government intervention - but it was also about electoral politics. Nate Silver's analysis shows that representatives in competitive races voted heavily against.

Still, Republicans want to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for making a partisan speech, though it is hard to credit the idea that this could have swung a dozen Republican votes.

Few have taken John McCain's dramatically erratic interventions in the bailout negotiations seriously - not least because he didn't manage to find time to read the original three page Bill, still less to express a clear view on it. But McCain had already claimed the credit for bringing the House Republicans on board, somewhat prematurely.

And John McCain's latest response - its time to leave the politics out of it, as long as everybody realises that this is the fault of Barack Obama and the Democrats!

Our leaders are expected to leave partisanship at the door and come to the table to solve our problems. Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process. Now is not the time to fix the blame. It’s time to fix the problem.I would hope that all our leaders, all of them, can put aside short-term political goals and do what’s in the best interest of the American people.

Shameless. But at least it isn't working. The economic crisis has significantly damaged McCain's prospects of winning the White House.

Debate verdicts round-up: Few minds changed

2008-09-27T13:01:00.000+01:00

If there was no clear winner, most people seem to have ended the night thinking pretty much what they did when they began. A debate transcript is available from RealClearPolitics.

One of the most interesting pieces of analysis is from The Plank at The New Republic, arguing that the pundits don't understand why voters put Obama ahead.

The CNN poll [detail] suggests that Obama is opening up a gap on connectedness, while closing a gap on readiness ... Specifically, by a 62-32 margin, voters thought that Obama was “more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you”. This is a gap that has no doubt grown because of the financial crisis of recent days. But it also grew because Obama was actually speaking to middle class voters.

But here are the best of the pundits' verdicts anyway ...

Ezra Klein says that McCain's passion came from contempt for his opponent and a failing ideology.

McCain has every right to be angry: He would have been an excellent, maybe unbeatable, candidate in 2000 or 2004. Instead, he's facing down the excesses of his own ideology in 2008. And that's what McCain doesn't understand. He's not behind because he doesn't deserve this, or because he's not served his country honorably. He's behind because events have disproven his agenda. Because the success of the surge does not outweigh the blunder of Iraq. Because the appeal of tax cuts does not outweigh the costs of deregulation and wage stagnation. And even the best debate performance can't obscure that.

Joe Klein says McCain was tactical where Obama was strategic.

Obama emerged as a candidate who was at least as knowledgeable, judicious and unflappable as McCain on foreign policy ... and more knowledgeable, and better suited to deal with the economic crisis and domestic problems the country faces ... Neither man closed the sale, and I don't think many votes, or opinions, were changed.

Matthew Yglesias says McCain failed to gain the ground he needs.

All things considered, it’s about a draw. McCain got a couple of good punches in and so did Obama. Insofar as the idea is supposed to be that McCain has a domineering advantage on national security he certainly didn’t prove that point. And for the candidate who’s losing, a tie amounts to a loss.

Jim Geraghty of National Review thinks it was a surprisingly strong night for John McCain, after a bad week, perhaps proving his own point.

My guess is, everybody thinks their guy won tonight. From where I sit, McCain had a surprisingly strong night — it'll change the storyline from "uh, what was he thinking?" ... it's really hard to say McCain had a bad night, and I think Obama seemed a little shaky at times tonight - his performance didn't boldly and clearly say, "I know I'm new on the scene, but you can trust me; I am ready to succeed in the hardest job in the world."

Andrew Sullivan - an Obamacon - believes the Democrat was more focused.

It strikes me as a mistake for McCain to end the debate on his commitment to staying in Iraq indefinitely. Obama's emphasis on the broader global conflict and our broader responsibilities will reach more people. His vision seems broader, wiser, and more focused on ordinary people. A masterful performance tonight, I think. Obama's best ever debate performance. McCain was fine, but it's wrong for him to attack his opponent at the end. And then he gave a slightly rambling defense of his experience. I give Obama an A - and I give McCain a B.

Chris Cillzilla of the Washington Post thought McCain gave his most relaxed debate performance to date and is not convinced that Obama pinned the Bush record on McCain.

Obama had a simple goal in this debate: tie McCain to the policies of George W. Bush. Right from the start, Obama sought to link the economic policies responsible for the financial crisis to Bush and McCain; he noted at another time that although McCain as casting himself as a maverick, he had voted with the current president 90 percent of the time ... It's a smart strategy on paper. But, will the average voter become convinced that McCain and Bush are one in the same? Remember that the lasting image most voters have of McCain is as the guy who ran against Bush in 2000.

Michael Tomasky of The Guardian wants more time to decide before accepting the instant reaction.

Let's watch what happens over the next two or three days. The McCain campaign, as I've written a hundred times, is geared toward winning news cycles. They will see the above numbers and go into overdrive to counter-spin. I don't think Obama's win, if that's what it was, was so decisive that the McCain team can't reverse spin it. It's McCain who's behind, and it's McCain who needs to change minds here.

First Presidential debate: McCain snark hands Obama slight edge

2008-09-27T12:06:00.001+01:00

There was no great dramatic moment, certainly no knockout blow, in a close fought and reasonably substantive opening Presidential candidate's debate.

John McCain began shakily on the economic crisis, where Obama was better. However, the Democrat made a tactical error in allowing the discussion to remain so focused on a traditional 'cut government spending' debate about earmarks for so long. McCain's detailed view of what should happen on the financial bailout remains rather opaque, yet was largely untested.

On foreign policy, I felt that Obama had the better of the exchanges on Afghanistan, and probably Iraq too. McCain's strongest debating passage was on Georgia and Russia, where he projected his experience most effectively. However, his claim that he saw only the letters 'KGB' behind Vladimir Putin's eyes sat slightly oddly with, in more or less the next sentence, his assertion that he had no interest whatsoever in any new cold war. On negotiations with Iran, what Henry Kissinger has said is somewhere in between what both candidates claimed: he has been for direct talks, without preconditions, but preferably at Secretary of State level.

The most important question of the night was whether uncommitted voters who have not followed the race closely would think Obama as qualified to be President. McCain's strategy was to consistently say "what Senator Obama doesn't understand". This came across as snarky. When he finally decided to say outright in his closing remarks that Barack Obama was not qualified to be President, he muffed the line, with Obama barely even needing to retort.

By contrast, Obama was consistently gracious. The McCain camp have issued an instant campaign video drawing on the times he acknowledged points of common ground. But this was a foreign policy debate and that is a major part of Obama's claim to bipartisanship, which is supposed to be part of McCain's "reform" credential too.

So Obama passed the 'ready to lead' test comfortably, being Presidential, knowledgeable, fairly robust in his views and carrying off his somewhat Kennedyesque persona in a substantive way. Voters worried about the experience gap will probably have felt that Obama held his own on his opponent's specialist subject. And Obama was considerably better at connecting foreign policy issues back to their domestic impact, which is an important part of the framing of the final month.

The economy is back at centre stage, McCain has had an erratic week, and the Palin pick looks somewhat less smart as time goes on.

So a drawn debate would have been to Obama's advantage. And he may just have done a little better than that. The "snark" factor may well explain why each of the instant polls of debate viewers had Barack Obama ahead on the night, though not dramatically so.

If John McCain was seeking to get a major boost from the debates, this may have been his best opportunity. And if his response as the underdog is to become more aggressive in the next two encounters, it may well do him more harm than good.

Overall, last night's debate didn't change the Presidential race very much.

So this remains the Democrats race to lose on November 4th.

Cross-posted: nextleft.org

Great debate moments

2008-09-26T21:06:00.001+01:00

It's game on. John McCain is going to turn up for the first Presidential debate.

Time has put together a good package of 10 of the most memorable debate moments.

The Obama campaign has put out an expectations memo which doesn't just talk up McCain's experience, but circulates reviews of their own useless candidate - "“Lifeless, Aloof, And Windy.

This is almost beyond satire - but Amy Sullivan of Time recommends a classic 2004 Daily Show clip which tries to keep up with reality.

Next Left

2008-09-07T19:44:00.001+01:00

The Fabians have a new blog called Next Left, to which I will be contributing regularly.

Its at www.nextleft.org/

Polarising America

2008-09-07T19:43:00.000+01:00

Over at Liberal Conspiracy, Sunny Hundal thinks Obama needs to fight the culture wars, in response to the Palin nomination.

I disagree.

The Democrats should avoid being baited from the election they want to run.

And, Obama can't be Obama if he reneges on the message of his 2004 Convention speech and his campaign.

Fabian Review column: The Obama factor

2008-07-25T22:46:00.004+01:00

Our prime minister is a fan of reality television, seeing in the X-Factor a metaphor for unlocking talent. So how he must have thrilled to the Democracy Idol show which has gripped America this primary season; catapulting a new star, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, to the brink of a historic presidency.

The contest has demonstrated America's remarkable capacity for democratic renewal. Whoever wins, John McCain's vanquishing of the Republican right means that the next US president will know that global warming is real, and that using torture is both wrong and counter-productive. But Obama offers transformative potential. Even if he must ultimately disappoint some of the diverse hopes projected onto him, his inaugural address could begin to repair America's battered global reputation much more rapidly than has ever seemed possible during these disastrous Bush years.

Britain is not America. As we celebrate sixty years of universal healthcare, that remains a cause unfulfilled for progressive America. But winds of political change do frequently cross the Atlantic. After the Thatcher-Reagan era, the New Democrats deeply influenced New Labour and a generation of European social democrats. Many policy lessons for governing in the global age remain relevant. As politics, this once-modernising formula is badly dated. Hillary Clinton's Democratic primary defeat brings the long 1990s to a symbolic close.

Clinton was, in part, unlucky. She won over 17 million primary votes. If her 'inevitability strategy' fatally underestimated Obama, she was hardly alone in that. She ended a much stronger campaigner than she began, when championing lower-income Americans left out by a boom which never trickled down. (But note too how badly the populist gambit of an August gas tax holiday flopped).

Obama's success is not simply down to personal charisma, or the symbolic possibility of the first black president. Two important lessons are not about his race or his personality:

Firstly, words matter. New Labour's response to Mario Cuomo's dilemma - that 'we campaign in poetry but govern in prose' - was too often to manage expectations downwards and make sure we campaigned in prose too. 'Forward, not back' and please take care not to wake up the voters. Hope-mongers face their own challenges. A President Obama would need to educate his movement for the longer haul of delivering change through politics.

But the Clinton campaign's argument that this was to offer 'false hope' was deeply conservative. Labour must rediscover its sense of mission. Only by standing proudly for our cause of a fairer Britain, and what government must do to make it possible, could Labour make a fight of the next election.

Second, inspiration needs organisation. Obama's bottom-up movement out-organised a formidable political machine. The lessons go much deeper than fundraising. This was a revolution in political mobilisation. Obama has brought a new cohort of younger activists and voters into politics because he was prepared to let go and trust supporters with the power and tools to organise on his behalf.

As David Lammy argued in his recent Fabian lecture, this is light years away from the way we do politics here. The spectre of past divisions makes the instinct to control paramount. So our institutions do much to sap political energy and boil off hope. As the Fabian Society's Facing Out pamphlet advocated, much lower barriers to entry and an openness to internal pluralism are essential for the Labour party to be part of a broader campaigning progressive movement.

This would be to turn the culture of our party politics inside out. This may be too much to ask. If so, the US election, like the much missed West Wing, would offer nothing more than a shot of political escapism, an idle reverie amidst the deepening Westminster gloom. Yet we know that Labour has a mission and a soul. Might we even now rediscover the audacity to hope?

* This commentary appears in the new Fabian Review, and is also published in The Scotsman and by Progress online.

A nuclear free world?

2008-07-24T21:30:00.005+01:00

Perhaps the most striking passage in Barack Obama's Berlin speech was the prominence he gave to his call for the goal of a world without nuclear weapons

This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love. With that wall gone, we need not stand idly by and watch the further spread of the deadly atom. It is time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from another era. This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.

This will sound radical to American and to European ears, perhaps especially in Britain.

I can not imagine a British Labour party leader giving the issue a similar level of prominence in a major campaign speech.

That is largely because of British domestic politics - and the way in which unilateralism divided the party in the 1950s, then became a symbol of Labour's unelectability in the 1980s. The Trident renewal debate has often seemed to be as much about electoral politics as national security.

Obama first made this commitment last Autumn in his New Beginning speech. Its inclusion in this flagship European address reinforces the signal that an Obama administration intends to seriously engage with the growing bipartisan support in the United States to replace the theory of deterrence with a strategy to reduce and elimate nuclear weapons.

Henry Kissinger is the standout counterintutive name for a European audience, but he, George Schultz, Sam Nunn and William Perry were able to boast an astonishingly impressive list of the great and good of American diplomacy who have rallied around the goal.

We have also been encouraged by additional indications of general support for this project from other former U.S. officials with extensive experience as secretaries of state and defense and national security advisors. These include: Madeleine Albright, Richard V. Allen, James A. Baker III, Samuel R. Berger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, Warren Christopher, William Cohen, Lawrence Eagleburger, Melvin Laird, Anthony Lake, Robert McFarlane, Robert McNamara and Colin Powell.

More recently, the John McCain campaign have also signalled an interest in this agenda, referring to Ronald Reagan's dream of a nuclear free world. While McCain's approach is less specific than Obama's it has led John Kerry to highlight the opportunity this creates for a bipartsian initative.

In Europe, the debate has largely been confined to diplomatic circles, though David Owen's 'pro-nukes' policy was one of the defining issues of his political career, and so his involvement in a joint cross-party initiative with Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind and George Robertson was an attempt to emulate the US elite foreign policy initative.

The British government does share the goal. Former Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett gave a significant speech including this commitment in one of her final speeches as Foreign Secretary. The speech was given to the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference in Washington DC, and took place in the week of the Blair-Brown transition, and so was little noticed except by specialist audiences.

Perhaps the Obama commitment may now lead to a greater public debate on this side of the Atlantic too.

Obama in Berlin

2008-07-24T18:54:00.005+01:00

It may not have been at the Brandenburg Gate. But the genuine Obamamania among Berliners means that the keynote moment of the Obama European tour will have generated the right Kennedyesque images back home.

Perhaps, in such an atmosphere, the speech itself was always likely to be something of an anti-climax.

Diplomatic and campaigning conventions (and political prudence) meant that the critique of the Bush Presidency was rather a muted one, though commitments to oppose and end the war in Iraq (in the right way) won some of the largest cheers. So the candidate was never going to do what the Berlin crowd wanted, and lead them in a chorus of 'yes, we can' (though they did their best without him).

But if it was largely a speech of platitudes, they were always the right platitudes.

Being against torture, in favour of working with allies, aware of global interdependence, concerned about global warming, and committed to a fair peace for Israelis and Palestinians should hardly be earth shattering statements.

But, after the Bush era, they are statements which are needed, and which are even capable of generating great enthusiasm.

That may be more important than Obama's rock star status in explaining why a speech aimed at Americans can play so well with a European audience.

The challenge to Europeans, over Afghanistan in particular, might have been stronger than it was, not least to help allay fears that Obama's popularity abroad was a sign of weakness in international affairs. But the US mood has changed since 2004, and there are less takers for isolation as a badge of pride.

One of the ironies of Bush's polarising Presidency is that it has made it relatively easy for Obama to give a speech which has narrowed the Atlantic.

In search of inspiration: could Britain build a progressive movement?

2008-07-22T21:51:00.007+01:00

As Obamamania comes to Europe, the main focus is on what the Democrat nominee will say about US foreign policy and the future of the transatlantic relationship, and how it will affect the election race in the US.

But there is another debate bubbling under is what political campaigners in Europe can learn from the US election.

The Guardian reports on the debate which has followed David Lammy's recent Fabian speech.

Lammy, and other party thinkers such as Sunder Katwala, the Fabian general secretary, argue: "Obama is showing the political messages and methods of the 1990s now look very tired and out of date." Lammy warns that managerial language has alienated people and left the public disorientated. "For many people, the good things that we are doing sound more like a list of bullet points, rather than a mission to change society. So they switch off, or worse, become alienated from a party that looks like it has become part of the establishment."

Andrew Grice also wrote about this recently in The Independent.

Mr Brown will probably not welcome Mr Lammy's speech but he should. His criticism of "the politics of control", made when he took questions, could be seen as an attack on a micro-managing prime minister, but it wasn't. Nor was his rejection of "triangulation" – positioning between left and right but also "above" them to move forward.

Mr Lammy was calling for a cultural revolution in our politics to reconnect it with the people, as Mr Obama has done. New Labour, he admitted, was never "a movement that filtered down to ordinary people".

UPDATE: I have written a Comment is Free piece about whether Labour and the broader British left could create a movement politics of our own, and how this can be "boot-strapped" without a George W Bush or John Howard.

What could Labour learn from America?

2008-07-08T07:11:00.004+01:00

It's been a really tough few time for Britain's Labour government, with defeats in the local elections, the election for London Mayor and by-elections. Many are looking enviously at the energy in the US campaign. But could there be more to it than that?

David Lammy MP gave a Fabian speech last week 'Lessons from America' arguing that both the Obama and McCain campaigns have important lessons for Labour.

I think it is one of the most candid and punchy political speeches given by a government minister in the last year. Lammy argued, taking questions, that, as the youngest member in the government, he should advocate an opening up of the cultures and structures of politics.

Lammy was pretty careful to speak warmly about both the Obama and McCain campaigns (and rather inventive in finding quite so many McCain reference points to do this), and to observe the formalities of government neutrality, but of course his personal views are very obvious.

In many ways much of the core argument is a statement of obvious truths, but it is sometimes difficult for government ministers to do that! And it is good to see some acknowledgement that we need to think radically about our message and mission, and the way we do politics too.

Some of the key arguments:
* The winning candidates are both political 'outsiders'.

"The real problem with the toff campaign was that it picked the wrong target. Because the issue is the political class, not the upper class."

* The 1990s looks very tired and dated.
"the use of triangulation, of defining yourself against your own party, of a managerial language which drains the values from policy also became a habit – a reflex –which alienated people in the party and left the public disorientated".

Labour needs a greater confidence in its distinctive collectivist mission and willingness to assert the values behind policies. Our achievements sometimes feel like bullet points on a list, not a mission for social change.

* Obama mobilised from below. He was prepared to let go. This is "light years away" from the culture of politics within the Labour Party, where the barriers to entry are much too high. Lammy went on to say that "New Labour was never a movement".

This is an analysis which is along similar lines to that of the Fabian pamphlet Facing Out.

As Andrew Sparrow says in his incisive blog post at the Guardian, I am sure that it is a contentful speech trying to open up a discussion about how we change how we do politics, rather than a Westminster critique of the PM, but the implications are pretty radical.

If these are the right lessons from the US, or about the culture of our politics, then the bigger question will be about how change can happen in practice.

Reblogging

2008-07-08T07:07:00.002+01:00

After rather a long hiatus, I'm going to start reblogging here.

Obama seems well placed for the General Election race, with the Obama-Clinton reconciliation going as well or better than could be people expected.

Obama as McGovern?

2008-04-23T22:15:00.004+01:00

You are a Democrat on the brink of your party's Presidential nomination, as long as you can calm down any late fears about electability. Which previous Democratic Presidential nominees would you be keenest to avoid being compared to?

I would suggest, in reverse order ...

5. Adlai Stevenson
4. John Kerry
3. Walter Mondale
2. Michael Dukakis
1. George McGovern

This is a pretty competitive race. I've let Adlai Stevenson pip Al Gore for the final spot. Stevenson lost twice. And, whatever the weaknesses of his campaign, Gore won. Sort of. Hubert Humphrey has faded from the frame.

EJ Dionne was worrying about whether Obama resembles Adlai Stevenson on Tuesday. Now John Judis asks if he has something of the McGovern factor.

if you look at Obama's vote in Pennsylvania, you begin to see the outlines of the old George McGovern coalition that haunted the Democrats during the '70s and '80s, led by college students and minorities.

Is Obama turning from a candidate with the ability to transcend the usual electoral blocs into a classic latte liberal insurgency Democrat?

Jonathan Chait has fired off a response to Judis, the most important point of which is that "Extrapolating from primary dynamics to general election dynamics is very dicey business".

However, it was not a good idea for Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod to make a similar point in a way which could sound as though the campaign is conceding the white working-class vote to John McCain.

The white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections, going back even to the Clinton years. This is not new that Democratic candidates don’t rely solely on these votes

Jay Cost's analysis suggests that Hillary Clinton's Pennsylvanian numbers don't change the voting dynamics enough from previous primaries. Still, the victory gives Clinton the opportunity of gaining momentum. The TV news narrative is about who won and who lost, rather than the expectations benchmarks of inside the beltway. That could make some difference in the next primaries. But she is some way short of giving the super-delegates reasonable cause to change the result.

Clinton's problem is that probably means turning up the volume again. But the charge that she went too negative in Pennsylvania was not confined to the media, and seems to have cost her votes.

The Clinton-supporting New York Times editorial page criticism of her 'low road to victory captures the fears of many Democrats that the last few weeks have made both candidates less attractive:

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

There was a fascinating set of interviews with the 'white house losers' - including Dukakis, Mondale and McGovern - in the Guardian's Weekend magazine at the end of last month. The next month may have a crucial impact on whether Obama can avoid joining their 'misery circle'.

Organising the movement

2008-04-23T00:29:00.002+01:00

One of the themes of the Democrat primary has been 'the movement against the machine'. A Time Magazine piece back in the Ohio primary did a good job at capturing the two campaigns different philosophies about the politics of organisation.

The Obama method involves giving away the tools for supporters to campaign for him. For the conventional campaign, this means a significant loss of control. But the gain to Obama has been clear - in his fundraising advantage, his ability to engage and mobilise new voters, and his striking victories in each of the caucus states.

But it would be a mistake to think that the politics of inspiration and engagement does not need organising too, as Noam Scheiber's fascinating profile profile of Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe shows.

The marathon continues

2008-04-22T23:52:00.003+01:00

It's something of a relief that the voters are finally getting another say in the Pennsylvania primary. The six weeks since the last primary have not been good for the Democrats, as the race has got more negative, and more trivial (not helped by the much critcised ABC candidates' debate)

Obama has firmed up as favourite for the nomination. But the long slog has exposed some weaknesses: his 'bitter' comments could prove a storm in a teacup or, in retrospect, seem like a clear clue about a Dukakis or Kerry style weakness. (EJ Dionne puts it well in a column asking whether Obama is JFK or Adlai Stevenson, or perhaps both. (It is an interesting contrast to today's politics of self-destruction to think that the Democrats ran the same candidate twice against Eisenhower).

Hillary Clinton is expected to win tonight. But the expectations game has her needing something like a 10 point victory. A race where she is favourite is more dangerous for her, since her campaign depends on achieving an 'away win' - overturning the odds in a state which Obama would have won - both to try to catch up on the popular vote, or put the issue in doubt for the super-delegates.

Obama seems to have weathered the storms without looking like imploding.

The excellent Jay Cost looks at the conventional wisdom and challenges some of it, defending Hillary Clinton's decision to stay in until the buzzer sounds.

Globe and Mail: The waiting game

2008-04-14T21:31:00.003+01:00

As Gordon Brown prepares to head to the United States, Doug Saunders in Canada's leading quality newspaper, The Globe and Mail, says a good deal of international diplomacy is on hold in an analysis piece published on Saturday.

Around the world, Jan. 21, 2009, has become the key date in politics. Diplomats and senior officials in a half-dozen countries have told me frankly that little of any significance is going to happen until that fateful Wednesday when either Hillary Clinton, John McCain or Barack Obama is inaugurated into office.

I am among the various think-tankers quoted in the piece - and there's even a plug for this modest blog.

"I think everyone's agreed that there is not going to be a literal Love, Actually moment — though there are certainly lots of people at Number 10 who would like to see that — but there is a real sense in this government that many important items on the international agenda are just going to have to wait until after Jan. 21," says Sunder Katwala, head of the Fabian Society, a venerable think tank with very close ties to the Brown administration (and keeper of a blog titled "Life after Bush").

How (not) to get a British Obama

2008-03-30T10:02:00.004+01:00

The Obama effect is being claimed by both sides of the debate about whether political parties should introduce all black shortlists for some parliamentary seats.

Harriet Harman has commissioned the pressure group Operation Black Vote to report on how the scheme would work. The report has not been published, but an accurate summary of the main proposals
was published in The Observer last month. Simon Woolley of Operation Black Vote told The Observer that:

Unless we take positive action measures we are not going to have a representative democracy for more than 75 years. It's not that we don't have Obamas, but we don't have the mechanisms for them to see the light of day.'

In a commentary in this week's New Statesman, I argued against the proposals as a regressive step, arguing that "ethnic faces for ethnic voters" would be a big step backwards - and the opposite of the Obama effect.

The Independent reported reaction from several MPs, and the criticism from several Asian MPs has been picked up by the Times of India.

Sunny Hundal on Comment is Free and Kanishk Tharoor on OurKingdom agree with me about the dangers of this approach.

Simon Woolley of the Operation Black Vote makes the case for all black shortlists on Comment is Free. In the Independent, Diane Abbott believes that critics are being 'both silly and selfish' and seeking to kick away the ladder from everybody else, and is reluctant to believe that anybody could have a different view. I don't think the claim that it would take 75 years to achieve fair representation stands up, and had a short letter published in response.

Clearly, it is a debate which will continue. Two thoughts about the reaction:

The claim that the division is between Afro-Caribbean and Asian MPs is not the whole story. The reaction does suggest that is one factor. But two of the most senior Asian MPs Keith Vaz and Virendra Sharma back all-black shortlists, while Chuka Umunna, recently selected in Streatham, is a sceptic. So this could equally be seen as a generational division. Those born before 1970 are more likely to be in favour; those born afterwards to be against. And MPs with high numbers of black and Asian voters are more likely to be in favour; those in seats which are predominantly white are opposed.

And, while Labour's black and Asian MPs are almost equally divided, this should not be a debate about minorities, among minorities.

I think we need to look at ethnicity, gender and class cohesively, and will be doing more work on this.

Five years on: the death of liberal internationalism?

2008-03-22T07:39:00.007Z

There has been an avalanche of commentary and analysis on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. Back in 2003, I was working for The Observer, which very controversially supported the war, primarily on liberal humanitarian intervention grounds against Saddam's regime.

A thoughtful five years on editorial last Sunday is probably as close as the paper is going to come to admitting that this was a mistake.

Terrible miscalculations were made in the preparation for war and a catalogue of blunders made in its prosecution. As an
intervention, whether for moral or strategic goals, it failed. The consequences are grave, and not just for Iraq.

The 2003 decision to back the war of recently departed Observer editor Roger Alton is lambasted in Nick Davies' Flat Earth News. However, Davies charge which is essentially that Alton turned the Observer into a pro-war propaganda sheet, simply ignores both the way in which both its reporting and commentary gave a great deal of space was also given to anti-war analysis and arguments, with columnists including Mary Riddell and Will Hutton arguing just as stridently against the war as David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen were arguing for it, while external critics including Terry Jones, Dilip Hiro and John Pilger also wrote scathingly about Blair and Bush for the paper. (It is interesting that Nick Cohen became the fiercest critic of left opponents of the war, many people forget that he took that position himself against the Afghanistan war, and argued against the Iraq war, before he was for it).

I am looking back on that now because that debate which raged inside the Observer reflected the way in which liberal-left thinking about foreign policy and intervention had shifted after 1989, largely in response to Bosnia and Rwanda.

The Observer on Sunday asked:

It is a blow to the idea of 'liberal intervention'. But does that blow have to be fatal?

For me, this is a central question. Can we learn from the mistakes of the Iraq war without forgetting the lessons of Bosnia and Rwanda?

Richard Norton-Taylor, as part of his extensive series reviewing the Iraq legacy for the Guardian, notes the retreat from intervention and asks if

Would there have been a consensus to intervene in the humanitarian disaster of Darfur, had Iraq not been invaded?

At the Fabian conference, John Kampfner accurately diagnosed liberal internationalism as at its weakest point for two decades. Andrew Grice makes a similar point in his column reviewing the Iraq inheritance this morning:

The other casualty of Iraq is the noble cause of liberal interventionism against evil regimes. Supporters expressed the hope this week that events in Iraq would not make it less likely to happen in future. I hope they are right, but fear they are wrong.

Still, a rescue, however difficult, is also necessary.

I argue in a Comment is Free commentary that a any rescue must also involved recasting liberal internationalism.

Rescuing liberal internationalism requires what Blair never offered: a much clearer analysis of where it should differ deeply from the neocon project.

This should be a central project for creating the 'after Bush' agenda we need.

Learning the lessons would create a different, humbler agenda. But if we have to accept that the neocon embrace has killed off liberal internationalism for good then it will prove impossible to replace Bush's unilateralism with the "new multilateralism" we need.

Obama in Philadelphia

2008-03-18T20:41:00.009Z

This is Obama's time of greatest peril in the primary race. Though he trails heavily in the last big contest in Philadelphia, Obama is all but uncatchable in pledged delegates and should be able to hold on to his popular vote lead too. The nomination is definitely his to lose. But that means a month, without a run of electoral contests to punctuate the campaign, where the overriding question is his viability as a General Election nominee.

Hillary Clinton has (only) performed well when the underdog. Twice - before New Hampshire, and before Texas - voters decided against crowning Obama, instead keeping the contest going. Now, the last hope of the Clinton campaign is an Obama implosion, sufficient to give super-delegates cause to put the nomination back in play at the convention. And Obama has had to address the issues - the Rezko relationship and Reverend Jeremiah Wright's 'God damn America' comments (video) - which could derail the candidacy, or (perhaps just as damaging) turn him into just another politician.

So today's Philadelphia speech (which is well worth watching in full: video; full text) mattered a great deal. Obama's response to a potential campaign crisis is being called bold and unconventional. Yet it was also entirely predictable. Obama could do no other. And that helps to explain why he got it so right.

It was good for Obama to be able to deepen the campaign message beyond the 'change' and 'hope' slogans; and to make sure his audience understood that the aspiration to a post-racial politics and society will be much more complicated than wishing it were so, but no less noble an ambition for that.

Obama's candidacy has been too much, too often discussed through the prism of race. That is inevitable. I have done it myself. But this has led to something of a tendency to patronise and underestimate Obama: because he will symbolise change, he can not hope to do more than that. Perhaps, that would be how it ended: that his Presidential campaign would prove the high point, of hopes promised but never fulfilled. But let us hold on to the possibility too that he could make much more use of the bully pulpit than that.

I can flinch at his appeal to 'unity'. Despite its rhetorical flight, Obama's breakthrough 2004 convention speech flirts a little too much with the anti-political zeitgeist for my tastes. Yet I am increasingly convinced that Obama is doing something more nuanced and more complicated and - crucially - that he will be able to engage his audience of this. Today's speech was strongest on the need to build coalitions for social justice - and, moreover, coalitions which recognise that grievances can be real, and yet still compete with others which may have no less validity.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans - the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family

.... In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.

Progressive politics has space to breathe only when it can bind these together so that coalitions for change defeat a battle of competitive grievances. Ever since the passage of the civil rights act, dividers have had better tunes than uniters. Obama is often accused of naivety. But there is a central strategic logic to an argument about how to call time on the politics of Nixon's piano strategy, of Lee Atwater and Willie Horton, of Dubya and Karl Rove. Progressives have been consistently outmanouvered by the mobilisation of white grievance politics.

I think Obama would, if President, be more likely than any President since LBJ to start a national debate about class disadvantage and the American dream. (Though the post-LBJ competition is not so strong). The interaction between class and race was a key theme of today's speech, albeit in a minor key.

Again, it is worth acknowledging that this language that pledges that "It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams" could be empty or substantive. The least conventional part of today's speech was Obama's explanation of Wright's anger. I can't imagine his campaign advisers were so keen on this, yet it added a depth and truth which the conventional politics of distancing and moving on would not have done.

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

What Obama again demonstrates here is that he has an unusual ability to empathise with those with whom he does not agree. (Normally, that extends to conservatives; today, more riskily, to his left). This talent offers the opportunity to offer his audience a defence of democratic politics itself and the opportunity to participate in it. The quest for consensus is not simply for consensus' sake. There was an excellent description of this in a response to George Packer's New Yorker blog.

His instincts are not confrontational, but rather dialogic. It’s not so much that he seeks consensus (although he does) as that he seeks to instill a commitment and desire for some solution to, or resolution of, a problem which the group now “owns.” Perhaps more significantly, Obama tries to get people to recognize that they will not succeed in achieving all of their policy goals, that not all solutions or resolutions will satisfy everyone, and that we can accept solutions with which we strongly disagree, so long as we are heard and respected in the political process.

The Wright-Obama contrast also animates Shelby Steele's analysis of 'challenger' and 'bargainer' strategies on race. Yet Steele has got Obama wrong. Steele wrote (again) in today's Washington Post that:

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

But this charge of opportunism, of cynicism, is misplaced. Obama is himself. Reading Obama's Dreams of My Father, published thirteen years ago, I was struck by the authenticity of his personal journey, how he reconciles himself to his family history, to being black and mixed race, how he is attracted by a range of different ways of dealing or not dealing with race, and how he comes to forge a sense of self and a set of views which are very directly reflected in his campaign message over a decade later.

That rootednesss lies behind the most impressive thing about this rookie campaign: how Obama has consistently turned every challenge and attack into a chance to reaffirm, to strengthen the core, consistent message of his campaign.

It was because today's speech rang true in its claim to be bigger than the politics of a presidential campaign that it will probably turn out to be good political strategy and tactics too. (Contrast Bill Clinton's 1992 challenge to Sister Souljah: he was right, and it was good politics, but how transparently tactically driven that was).

I've been consistently stressing that that this race isn't over. (Before Ohio and Texas, I was prepared to offer Obama the garlands of having won the campaign; but not the nomination).

But I feel ready to stick my neck out now. In two or three days time, I expect the conventional wisdom will be that this Philadelphia speech was the moment when it became clear that Obama had clinched the nomination. And - this time, just for once in this campaign year - I think the commentariat are going to turn out to be right.

Why Brown's Iraq inquiry pledge - to me! - matters

2008-03-17T17:26:00.009Z

I very much welcome Gordon Brown's commitment to an inquiry " to learn all possible lessons from the military action in Iraq and its aftermath" - even aside from the unusual experience of this very welcome political development coming in correspondence between myself and the Prime Minister. (Naturally, one also expects that other Cabinet ministers will take note. We were very pleased with last week's budget commitments on child poverty and will be thinking about where else we should now be pressing for progress).

On Iraq, the Prime Minister's spokesman says "that there is nothing new in the letter to the Fabian Society". I am not particularly concerned about a Westminster village debate about how much we have learnt from the letter. If an inquiry has been the government's intention all along, then I very much welcome the fact that this is now clearly on the public record and in the Prime Minister's own words too.

For me, the most positive aspect of Brown's letter are that it adds to the sense that he is planning and ambitious and rather different foreign policy for the 'World after Bush' - a pursuit to which this blog is dedicated.

But the letter has also naturally been the subject of considerable political and media interest today because of that clear, personal commitment by the Prime Minister on behalf of his government. The Independent's powerful front-page coverage of the Brown letter helps to take forward the newspaper's own sustained campaign for an inquiry. It is striking too that The Times and the Evening Standard, two papers which were editorially supportive of the government's decision to go to war, also report that Brown's letter marks a significant development of policy. That is also reflected in reaction from Labour backbenchers and the opposition parties, with Nick Clegg and William Hague stepping up pressure on the issue.

The Times reports that:

Since succeeding Mr Blair last summer Mr Brown has stopped short of calling outright for an inquiry. Last September he said the time would come to discuss whether one should be held. His letter to Sunder Katwala, the Fabian Society’s general secretary, suggests he has accepted that one should be conducted.

The Evening Standard says that

There have been hints before of an inquiry but this was the first confirmation from No 10.

I wrote my letter to the Prime Minister mainly to make the case as to why an inquiry is important, and why the fifth anniversary offered the government the right context to announce this. But, as I told The Independent, the letter was also motivated by the fact that I wasn't clear what the government's policy on an inquiry was, despite trying to follow these issues clearly. I am not omniscient about these issues, but I was not aware of any public statement from the current Prime Minister or current Foreign Secretary setting that out since the Brown administration took office in June.

Those of us trying to read between the lines of various statements as to what the final decision would be were coming to different conclusions. For example, David Miliband's comments rejecting an inquiry when interviewed by Fabian Review in December were reported as marking a significant cooling of the government's attitude towards an inquiry.

"I am obsessed with the next five years in Iraq, not the last five years in Iraq. And I think that the best 'inquiry' is putting the best brains to think about how to make sure the next five years in Iraq get that combination of political reconstruction, economic reconstruction and security improvement that are so essential."

Certainly, his words then were much more sceptical than both Margaret Beckett and Des Browne had been before the transition, in seeming to accept that an inquiry in due course would make sense. But as I - blogged at the time -

I think is too early to say "Government rules out inquiry into Iraq conflict". I don't see that Miliband has given a definite indication of future government policy ... The case for an inquiry will continue, within and outside government.

And, despite that scepticism. Miliband did, in his keynote speech to the Fabian Change the World conference, make a significant argument about the need to 'learn the lessons' from Iraq and Afghanistan.

'democratic institutions need to be built from the bottom up not just the top down; and military victories are never a solution in themselves; they need the backing of economic and social reconstruction'

By contrast, Tony Blair was, for the most part, strongly opposed to an inquiry. Competing quotes can be found on both sides. The authentic Blair view is, I would suggest, is the claim that "We have had inquiry after inquiry we do not need to go back over this again and again." It was only well into injury time towards the end of Blair's Premiership that Ministers began to suggest they were open to an inquiry - and again there was something of a guessing game as to whether this had been inspired by the Prime Minister in waiting, or might rather have been a case of other Ministers seeking to anticipate

It is certainly true that the Brown letter does not go into any detail as to the nature of an inquiry or its timing. However, it would be more than pushing my luck to complain about that, and I hope that the government will set out more details of its plans as soon as possible. (More formally, I expect, but I would like to place on record that the Fabian letterbox remains very much open).

Now, I hope somebody at Number 10 is also paying attention to the very cogent case made in Saturday's Guardian against the extension of detention without trial.

UPDATE: Andy Grice of the Independent also blogs about the Brown letter, pointing out that Brown had not previously said any more than that "there will be a time to discuss the question" of an inquiry. So the Prime Minister's support for an inquiry is new.

Iraq: the Prime Minister replies ...

2008-03-17T07:25:00.003Z

A reply to my letter to Gordon Brown last month on the case for a public inquiry.

11th March 2008

Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London SW1 2AA

Sunder Katwala
Fabian Society
11 Dartmouth Street
London
SW1H 9BN

Dear Sunder

Thank you for your letter of 11 February about Iraq. I agree with you that there is a need to learn all possible lessons from the military action in Iraq and its aftermath. This Government has already acknowledged that there will come a time when it is appropriate to hold an inquiry. But whilst the whole effort of the Government and the armed forces is directed towards supporting the people and Government of Iraq as they forge a future based on reconciliation, democracy, prosperity and security, we believe that is not now.

We are making real progress in Iraq. The transfer of all four provinces in southern Iraq to the Iraqi authorities is ample evidence of the sterling work done by UK forces and our coalition partners. But the work is not complete. Our troops will remain in Iraq to train and support the Iraqi army, whilst our diplomatic missions will continue to work with the Government of Iraq to use the space created by the improved security environment to make real progress on political reconciliation and economic development.

Despite the progress being made on the security, economic and political fronts in Iraq, the situation remains fragile and could easily be reversed. At this critical time it is therefore vital that the Government does not divert attention from supporting Iraq’s development as a secure and stable country. Since October 2006, Parliament, when debating the need for an inquiry, has twice supported the Government on this point.

I have put reform of international institutions at the core of the UK’s foreign policy strategy. I want international institutions to be relevant to the twenty first century challenges, and credible and modern in the way they approach them. They need to command international engagement and be responsive to the needs of member states, civil society and peoples. The UK wants a Security Council that is more representative, but no less effective in tackling threats to international peace and security. I also support changes to the World Bank , the International Monetary Fund and the G8 that reflect the rise of India and Asia. As I said in New Delhi in January “we can and must do more to make our global institutions more representative”.

The first change we must consider is reform of our international rules on institutions to reflect the urgency of tackling climate change and global poverty. I will continue to explore with EU partners how we can take forward this agenda together.

Yours sincerely

[signed]

Gordon Brown

Why Brown should rethink on 42 days

2008-03-15T11:04:00.005Z

I am a signatory to a letter in today's Guardian calling on the government to withdraw its proposal to enable detention of terrorism suspects without charge for up to 42 days.

Some will see those of us who have signed the letter as liberal-left 'usual suspects'. (As the letter was coordinated by Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy, so at least we can claim to be liberal-lefties who are 'out and proud'). Some, like myself, are pretty strong supporters of the Labour government in general (while challenging it on a range of issues) and I would judge the centre of gravity among the signatories as 'critically engaged' with the Brown government, though others probably represent strands of liberal-left opinion which is pretty disengaged from and despairing of Labour.

It is worth noting too that the signatories include those like Ed Husain and Martin Bright who have both tended to criticise the government for being too accomodating of Islamism, and who have challenged others on the liberal-left with being too inclined to underestimate this threat, but who can share the common ground of arguing that undermining civil liberties would be counter-productive for an effective anti-terror strategy.

The Guardian also reports today that the government may cut a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party. I hope that the low politics of buying their votes "in return for delaying the devolution of policing and criminal justice in Northern Ireland" are not on the table. That is too reminiscient of John Major's European policy, and would just highlight the central problem of the parliamentary and public politics: that many of the government's own supporters are not convinced of the case for change, still less is there a broader consensus for these measures.

As the letter points out,

It has become clear, as this debate has proceeded, that there is no consensus on the case for an extension of detention powers. Rather, it has resulted in a broad consensus among independent and expert opinion outside government that no convincing case has been made.

I find it difficult to think of many people who have been convinced by the government's arguments, beyond those on the government payroll. (While some of those on the payroll, such as Admiral West, have needed persuasion too). There is certainly extensive backbench concern about the merits of the measure, reinforced by a very effective Liberty lobbying campaign, although MPs are always more likely to seek a compromise than to rebel in the voting lobbies in the end. (The Guardian also reports also states that the government is delaying the Commons vote from March 28th, although earlier reports had suggested that the vote would probably take place at committee stage in April or May).

As the letter notes in quoting Brown's speech on liberty last Autumn, there have been some welcome, positive shifts on the language and strategy to counter terrorism since the summer.

But "if the rules of the game have not changed", and there is a commitment to a democratically legitimate response to the threat of terrorism, then the right move is to reopen the search for consensus, rather than trying to force through this measure in its absence.

Obama has given hope to a generation ... but we could easily tune out again

2008-02-29T22:47:00.009Z

Guest post by Ed Wallis

Its a well-aired myth that young people are uninterested in politics. What they are, in fact, generally uninterested in is politicians. But that's largely because my generation isnt used to hearing a politician being actively inspiring. Barack Obama, fueled by record turnout and unusual enthusiasm amongst young voters, has achieved the aura of inevitability in the race for the Democratic nomination by getting a new generation fired up and ready to go.

Cue sniffy dismissiveness about poetry, bubbles and fairy tales. This all somewhat misses the point Obama is speaking to and for a whole other set of concerns, and is doing so in a way that feels entirely natural and authentic. Yes its broadbrush, but voters under 30 are responding in droves. He doesnt feel like a fraud and is not making embarrassing attempts to get down with the kids. He is riding the zeitgeist, and inspiring star-studded campaign videos along the way.

This connection inevitably breeds a backlash. But it shows the slightly warped state of political commentary when charisma, freshness, and vitality become potential minuses to guard against. And the relative constitutional weakness of the Presidency requires an effective President to be a galvaniser, who can bring people together and get things done. The Obama campaign is being sniped at as a cult of personality, but being able to spearhead a movement for change seems no bad thing in a country crying out for some healing.

What particularly insulates Obama from these attacks, however, is that he reaches far outside the youth ghetto. That is the big difference between Obama and Howard Dean's insurgent campaign of 2004 - check out The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by his campaign manager Joe Trippi for an evangelical account - which used the internet to ride a wave of idealistic young supporters, and go from zero to hero heading into Iowa. Dean could not broaden his appeal enough to avoid being brought down by his own personal flaws as a candidate and the television attack ads of opponents. But he blazed a trail and showed that young people would still engage with politics, given the right circumstances.

Obama, unlike Dean, is a viable mainstream candidate who can command support from Williamsburg to Wyoming. So this could actually happen. But with great power comes great responsibility. On Obama's shoulders rest the hopes of a generation seriously engaged in politics for the first time. And theres the rub. Political scepticism still runs deep and hope for change remains fragile. If the Clinton Machine, superdelegates, or, most worryingly, legal wrangling in Florida can precipitate an unlikely Hillary comeback, then it will strike a devastating blow for the chances of a new kind of politics. A new settlement lies in the balance; the message is 'we are listening, but it won't take much for us to tune out again'.

As Anthony Barnett recently put it on OpenDemocracy, for many she will be seen as the conveyer of the dead hand of prerogative and the instrument of disappointment, who crushed the hopes of the young now mobilising in droves for Obama. They, in all likelihood will nurse their wounds, withdraw from the campaign and some may even vote McCain.

Obama's fusion of charismatic new appeal and electability in the face of an unpopular status quo is not unprecedented, but you have to go back to 1968 and RFK to see anything quite like it. The link between Obama and the Kennedy clan has been a feature of this campaign, and was made explicit by Teddy Kennedy's Obama endorsement. Bobby Kennedy appealed to the same type of constituency, and did so against the backdrop of a similarly unpopular war. And, albeit in more tragic and dramatic circumstances than can be foreseen today (although this spectre has been raised), the fall of his campaign was a landmark disappointment for a new generation of the politically conscious.

As Hunter S. Thompson reflected, his assassination plunged a whole generation of hyper-political young Americans into a terminal stupor.

Of course there is no way for Obama to live up to the hype and expectation that currently surrounds him. At some point in the near or distant future, in the campaign or in government, we will be disappointed - such is the nature of politics and, indeed, life.

But if old-school politicking now conspires, be it in the guise of the Clintons, the Democratic establishment or the Republicans, and Obama falters, it will likely have a similarly numbing effect to that cataclysmic moment in California 1968 which opened the door to Richard Nixon.

No pressure.

Texas ad wars: that 3am call

2008-02-29T22:10:00.006Z

Hillary refused in the last candidate's debate to say that Obama was not ready to be Commander in Chief - wisely, as giving that line to McCain would also have enraged Democrats in the primary. Still, that is the theme of her latest Texas campaign spot, where Obama would not keep your children safe if the phone rang in the middle of the night. (ad script; watch the ad).

It may perhaps prove the closest that the Clinton campaign has come to an iconic ad. But there are several problems with it.

* Its 3am in the campaign too - and this seems too late. The Clinton campaign have never offered a substantive contrast on national security, beyond the 'knows world leaders' (from time as first lady)' claim to experience. There was a debate to be had about national security last summer. But Clinton somehow ducked it, while Obama was bullishly confident about taking on the conventional wisdom on national security.

* The attack plays straight to an Obama USP and Clinton negative - making the right call on Iraq. He has his one national security contrast - for Clinton or McCain - buttoned down, and it plays particularly well to the primary audience. And his campaign have been quick off the mark turning his fightback comments into a super-rapid rebuttal pastiche. In cutting to the candidate and the Oval office earlier, the attack response has a positive, Presidential feel.

* On first seeing it, I immediately thought of the infamous LBJ Daisy Girl 1964 attack on Goldwater, though that was a different 'whose finger on the trigger' argument to argue that the world was not safe in the hands of his opponent. However, as Karen Tumelty points out, its a direct copy of a Mondale '84 ad.

Perhaps the lack of originality doesn't matter much. But Mondale lost in a 49 state landslide. Meanwhile, EJ Dionne is the latest commentator to think there's something Reaganesque about the positive Obama appeal.

Expectations, expectations

2008-02-25T22:46:00.004Z

Barack Obama has won eleven primaries in a row, his streak extended by the Democrat Abroad result. The scale and demography of his Wisconsin victory saw him demonstrate much clearer momentum than before.

Everybody agrees that victories in Ohio and Texas are essential for Hillary Clinton to keep the campaign going. Bill Clinton has helpfully said so. Do the instant obituaries are being written for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The weekend papers were full of comments from inside the campaign about the darkening mood of pessimism. When will she admit its over? Who will tell her? What post-Presidential campaign career ambitions might she have?

But don't forget how much the media has got most things wrong in this topsy-turvy race. And the narrative of the lost Clinton cause is not backed up by the current polls.

The primaries are on Tuesday. A consistent lead in Ohio, usually of eight points, although the Texas race is much closer. But expectations have fallen through the floor for Clinton, even though there seems to be much to play for.

As a result, two victories would now look like one of the great upsets (and could transform the dynamics of the race), despite these long having been states where Clinton was ahead.

The polls Obama may well extend his winning streak on March 4th. He has been consistently winning the ground war, and winning by much more sizeable margins than polling predicts. But in failing to manage expectations, his campaign may be repeating a mistake they made between Iowa and New Hampshire, when 'signed, sealed and delivered' blared out at what everyone thought would be a victory rally.

It wasn't over then. And it isn't now either.

Why Obama should defend John McCain over the NYT

2008-02-23T10:40:00.012Z

So far, discussion of the New York Times' controversial feature on John McCain has been more about the NYT's decision to publish (on which Gabriel Sherman of The New Republic has a blow-by-blow backgrounder) than on the almost-allegations made about rumours of a McCain affair or inappropriate links to lobbyists. NYT editor Bill Keller admits to being taken aback by negative reader reaction and 'how lopsided the opinion was against our decision'.

Ezra Klein suggests that 'the path of wisdom' would be for Obama to 'set precedent' for the campaign, saying something like:

Look, you want to ask me about his plan for a 100-years in Iraq or more tax cuts for the rich or better deals for telecom lobbyists, we can talk about that. But his personal life is not only none of my business but, frankly, it's none of yours

Klein is right, though most respondents on his blog seem to disagree. Those charging Klein with naivety - saying that 'being nice to the Republicans doesn't make then nice to you' are missing the strategic point, which goes beyond the innoculation/self-protection of Obama further down the road.

This is an opportunity for Obama to do the right thing. (Any political advantage arises primarily from being seen to do the right thing, even if there might seem to be short-term political gain in not doing so).

But there is a political advantage here too. Obama would get to define and project what breaking with the 'same old politics' means for him. And an early counter-inuitive move could help to frame his candidacy and the race for those voters who wait for a General Election race to shape up before paying too much attention.

As that would become an argument about how he believes the General Election should be fought - and here he gets to set a challenge for McCain.

Obama would have to fight the General Election saying: there is a deep clash of different visions for America, of different policies and politics, but I respect my opponent and do not need to question his integrity to disagree fundamentally about these issues. (Hence Obama's saying in his victory speech on Tuesday night:

"I revere and honor John McCain's service to this country. He is a genuine American hero. But when he embraces George Bush's failed economic policies, when he says that he is willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq, then he represents the policies of yesterday. And we want to be the party of tomorrow. And I'm looking forward to having that debate with John McCain."

Those arguing that 'this is war, if we fight nice and they fight dirty, we lose' miss the point. That simply is not an option for Obama: it would be inauthentic given his core campaign message.

Obama then gets to challenge McCain to respond in kind.

If McCain does so, Obama has the tone and framing for the type of General Election he wants.

If McCain does not do so, then it is he that has the authenticity problem. What happened to 'straight talk' John McCain? Having been the victim of a Bush/Rove personal destruction campaign in 2000, is he now using or (more plausibly) passively benefitting from such tactics himself?

If Obama had publicly defended McCain, it would raise the bar for McCain to distance himself from attempts to Swift Boat Obama by Republican surrogates. Yet there is a political trap here too. McCain's distancing himself from such attacks could raise questions from the sceptical base about how much McCain wants to fight and win as a Republican. (And liberals doing the right thing by McCain now could help here too).

(Obama would also get to draw an implicit contrast with the Clintons. That is mostly in his favour, though would confirm the doubts of those who fear Obama will be chewed up and spat out by the Republican attack machine).

Ultimately, if Obama is offering a different kind of politics, he needs to use potentially defining moments to act consistently with that.

This has been the primary season when going negative backfired. And so Obama versus McCain could be the type of General Election that much of the United States wants and needs. (There is plenty there for partisans too: please, please, please don't give me the usual nonsense that you can't find any real differences between these two candidates).

Just not for those who believe that democratic elections should be all-out partisan war, with no holds barred. After all, both of these candidates would know that one of the lessons of the Bush era is that rules of conduct matter, even at war.

* UPDATE: The New York Times' own public editor Clark Hoyt argues against publication in his column.

Obama as Icarus?

2008-02-22T20:26:00.002Z

An Obama nomination isn't inevitable, yet. But Hillary Clinton's final, best answer in the Texas candidate's debate last night acknowledged the possibility of defeat. This was an important signal. Clinton will still fight on to win, but now within the limits demanded by partisan loyalty. (But what alternative is there when a desperate bid to go nuclear would almost certainly backfire?).

The insurgent is now the clear frontrunner and Democrats have a final chance to scrutinize the potential vulnerability of an Obama bid: could he really go toe-to-toe with John McCain in November and win? Will Higham of the think-tank Demos dreads an Obama candidacy, articulating the fear that Obama 'is a political Icarus who's just now nearing the beating sun'.

I think there are three big fears about Obama's General Election resilience. And each threatens to evoke recurring Democrat nightmares from the ghost of elections past.

The first is that Obama wlll prove 'achingly vulnerable' (as Higham puts it) to the negative politics of personal destruction which have dominated and polarized US politics for a generation. Unlike the Clintons, that 'vast right-wing conspiracy' just haven't gotten around to him yet.

The second is that 'outing' Obama as a liberal, not a moderate, could damage him just as it destroyed Michael Dukakis in 1988.

The third is that McCain versus Obama would expose the Democrat vulnerability on national security, so that Obama follows John Kerry in 2004 in being beaten in an election which seemed to be the Democrats to lose.

Any one of these threats could prove fatal to Obama's White House bid. Yet the alternative - audacious, hopeful - view is that a Clinton candidacy which would replay once again the Democrats' nightmares, in the hope of exorcising them, and an Obama candidacy which might transcend them.

Indeed, the Clinton campaign essentially accepts these Democratic vulnerabilities as fixed, operates within them, and attempts to win despite them:

On negative politics, that means treating the war wounds of having been 'vetted' by a generation of partisan wars as a credential. This means accepting polarisation as a given, mobilising your own base, and hope to shift one or two decisive states from red to blue.

On policy and ideology, it means triangulating within the accepted centrist constraints, while persuading your own side not to foster false hopes.

On national security, it means being acutely aware of the Democratic vulnerability and try to neutralize the issue. Don't let the Republicans open up any space to your right, and try to get the campaign back onto the economic and healthcare.

This approach was tried and failed in 2000 and 2004. Gore and Kerry made avoidable tactical mistakes and could have won those knife-edge contests. The Clinton campaign fears that any alternative approach risks forgetting the lessons which enabled the Democrats to win in 1992 and 1996. But Obama rightly believes that the Democratic Presidential campaign playbook now needs to be rewritten for different times.

I believe Obama is well placed to fend off negative personal attacks with style and grace. John McCain is much less likely to fight the type of Bush-Rove campaign of which he was himself the victim in South Carolina in 2000. Might we be heading for a deep clash over issues and future visions for America in which each candidate respects the other's integrity? That may sound naïve, yet eschewing the politics of personal destruction will be in the enlightened self-interest of both candidates in an Obama-McCain race. It would damage McCain's 'straight talk' brand of integrity and Obama's appeal to a new politics. (Obama called McCain 'a genuine American hero' in his victory speech on Tuesday, before contrasting their views on the economy and foreign policy).

So far, this has been the year that going negative failed. (Sorry Mitt, sorry Rudy, sorry Bill Clinton too). Of course, Obama can expect Republican surrogates to attempt to 'swift boat' him, but his biography long ago put potentially damaging material on the record on his own terms. His entire campaign frame has built in resilience to the 'same old politics'.

Could his liberalism be more damaging to Obama? Karl Rove now advocates making this the central Republican attack. A fascinating study of voter perceptions of the ideological positions of various candidates was published last month by the Pew Research Centre: Obama does needs to persuade an electorate which perceives itself as to the right-of-centre to back a left-of-centre candidate. (And there is something in the charge that Obama has rarely challenged his own supporters or gone outside their comfort zone yet).

However, despite his impeccably liberal Senate voting record, Obama's domestic policy positions are often a slight step right of Hillary's, for example on universal health care mandates. Obama's authenticity demands that he stands up for his public record, rather than triangulate away from it. That need not reduce his crossover appeal. Andrew Sullivan, who has been the most articulate pro-Obama Republican, has stressed Obama's ability to debate difference with respect: 'What strikes me about Obama is not that he is conservative or liberal, it is his policy liberalism with conservative temperament', Sullivan has written.

The central McCain theme against Obama will be the contrast on national security: 'is Obama ready to be Commander in Chief?'. Again, here Obama seems ready to break with the conventional wisdom of how Democrats deal with this vulnerability. EJ Dionne worried this week that 'every political consultant worth a six-figure fee will tell the Democratic nominee that fighting the election on broad foreign policy questions (as opposed to a limited dialogue built around a simple "Bush Bad, Iraq War Dumb, McCain Backs Both" theme) would be to play to McCain's strengths'.

Yet Obama's audacious strategy could well be to challenge McCain directly on national security. There was a glimpse of this when Obama was accused of foreign policy 'gaffes' early in the campaign last summer, over his comments on meeting leaders hostile to the US and his willingness to pursue al-qaeda into Pakistan. The audacious nature of the Obama challenge was fleshed out in a revealing memo on 'conventional Washington' versus change from academic rising star and Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power. The spirit of that memo would lead Obama to offer a significant challenge to McCain's foreign policy philosophy - to articulate clear divisions over national security, not to minimize them.

Each of these choices would involve risks. But the most striking feature of Obama's campaign to date is that he has forced his opponents to run within his campaign frame, which has enabled him to anticipate attacks and turn these into a reconfirmation of the choice he is offering voters. He has dealt head-on with the charges that he is offering 'false hopes' or that 'talk is cheap'. (Comprehensively out-organising the Clinton machine in every caucus state counts as action as well as words). Win or lose, it is hard not to conclude that the candidate who began as a clear outsider has won the campaign.

Still, there remains a final chance for buyer's remorse in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and beyond. Some cases of 'Obama comedown syndrome' have been diagnosed. And it would take a very serious dose of Obama-mania indeed not to admit that his nomination involves a leap of faith. It is a risk which Democratic voters seem ever more ready to take.

Should the super-delegates count?

2008-02-18T09:49:00.002Z

It is difficult to see how a Convention majority can now be won by either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the remaining primaries. So much attention is being paid to the role of the super-delegates at the Convention. (For updates on endorsements, and more in-depth analysis than anybody could reasonably need, see Democratic Convention Watch).

The superdelegates may not play as decisive a role as the arithmetic suggests. But a key question is how legitimate their role is - and what political damage would be done to the party's prospects in November if a candidate who was ahead on votes and elected delegates lost the nomination.

I am unconvinced by the characterisation of super-delegates as faceless party apparatchiks who should not have a say.

Firstly, the super-delegates are part of the rules and everybody has known it.

Secondly, the party's senior elected representatives - members of Congress, Governors and the like - can claim a legitimate stake in the nomination. The success of a Democratic Presidency will depend in part on the ability to work with them. They are public figures, who will be held accountable for their choices and role. The use of indirect democracy and an effective electoral college to select a candidate, fusing popular participation with checks and balances, this system is much more characteristic of the US conception of democratic politics than a genuine 'national primary' would be. I do agree with critics of the system that the growing proportion of superdelegates is problematic: I think it would be a better system if the superdelegates were a smaller group, not including the members of the Democratic National Committee. But that is an issue for future elections, rather than this one).

Thirdly, the Democratic party super-delegates are there for a reason. They are one of the very few examples, outside the allocation of power in Congress, where the idea of a national party in US politics has any meaning. The intention was to present an extra hurdle to insurgency campaigns, particularly to protect the party against enthusing itself into selecting a candidate likely to be hammered in the General Election, as had happened to George McGovern in 1972. The reform did not take place until 1982, the 1972 campaign had been one of the first where the primaries were decisive. (In the contentious and tragic 1968 campaign, the nominee Hubert Humphrey had not entered most of the primaries. Robert Kennedy, assassinated after winning the California primary, had defeated the alternative anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy while the favourite for the nomination held back).

Obama's is a challenger movement. But he is no McGovern. He would be not just a credible carrier of the party standard, but could well win an electability argument against Hillary Clinton.

So the case for a super-delegate veto of the Obama candidacy is weak. But, by the same token, 'playing by the rules' (as the Obama campaign rightly insists over the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations) should simply mean Obama's team accepting the need to meet the super-delegate test, by splitting the super-delegate vote sufficiently to maintain a lead at the Convention. He should be well placed to do so. Having won most votes and most states will be a persuasive argument, both morally and politically, as would the evidence of his greater ability to reach beyond the core Democrat vote.

Much will depend on the margin between candidates. If the elected delegates were effectively tied - or if one candidate had a lead of about 50 delegates - then it would be difficult to cast the battle for super-delegates as illegitimate. It would become the 'final caucus'. But if one candidate was 500 delegates ahead, the trailing candidate will surely fail to persuade super-delegates to overturn that, not least because the charge of illegitimacy would stick. But there is a grey area between these two scenarios. All that can be said is that public, political and media perceptions of fairness will matter a great deal - and early pledges from super-delegates may well not hold.

Ultimately, it seems unlikely that the nomination will be decided in a dramatic vote on the Convention floor. In that sense, the super-delegate issue could prove redundant. However, the means of persuading one candidate to concede would in part be the ability of key non-aligned figures - Howard Dean, Al Gore and other mediators - to articulate the party's interest and persuade significant numbers of other super-delegates to swing behind them.

These will be political decisions. But talk of 'smoke-filled rooms' will prove wide of the mark, and not just because of greater health awareness. If there is a clear public sense that one candidate has 'won' the primaries, then the Convention is likely to swing very firmly behind them. My instinct is that the role of the super-delegates may well be less to choose the new King or Queen of the Democrats, but in helping to manage victory and defeat for a unified Democrat coronation.

How Obama won the campaign

2008-02-18T08:35:00.005Z

It certainly isn't over. The scale of Obama's victories last week took a neck-and-neck race into with one where he was the frontrunner. The Obama camp deny this and would prefer to stay the underdog - their last overdog phase lasted just days between Iowa and New Hampshire. But the central question of the Democrat campaign is now, in the face of greater scrutiny, he can close the deal.

And whatever the final result, it is difficult not to conclude that Barack Obama has won the campaign. Hillary Clinton's core problem is that she finds herself in the campaign which Obama has framed. His simply being there after Super Tuesday destroyed her 'inevitability' strategy in terms of strategy, public messages and campaign funding and organisation. Despite some mis-steps under pressure, Obama's campaign has been impressive in its consistency and relative calm.

Still, Hillary Clinton is not out of this. A good estimate might be that she has a perhaps 25%-33% chance of the nomination. But each of her routes there looks hazardous.

Going negative: The Clinton campaign complains about Obama being untested. Their latest negative ads in Wisconsin strike me as pretty tame, and unlikely to do much damage to Obama, while taking the hit from their opponent on 'going negative' and 'politics as usual'. Again, Obama finds his opponent is playing into his campaign frame.

The big state strategy: She has won some of the biggest states, and has poll leads in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania which could her back in front in elected delegates. But she is conceding most of the smaller states, and so is likely to have lost ten primaries in a row by March 4th. Shades of Rudy Giuliani?

Challenging the rules: It is difficult to find any non-partisan observer who thinks the Clinton campaign has a case over seating the Michigan and Florida delegates, who are barred because the state parties broke the February 5th on primaries or caucuses for those outside the four states given special privileges. The Clinton camp gave clear commitments, with all of the campaigns,that they would accept the rules. (The Michigan case is particularly risible).

The New York Times regards this move as 'potentially incendiary'. That may be an understatement, as Ezra Klein argues.

The Clinton campaign would do better to close this issue down - and quickly. It simply plays into the 'movement versus the machine' frame of the Obama-ites. It is difficult to see how this could be used to achieve the nomination without damaging the party. (Senator Chuck Schumer, Clinton's fellow New York Senator, gave a good and emollient performance, when billed as representing the Clinton campaign on Meet the Press yesterday, stressing the need for party unity) . A much better approach would be to propose that both candidates to agree to a new primary or caucus - if the practical logistics would allow it. That would be difficult for the Obama campaign to oppose.

Super-delegate edge: For some, the super-delegate issue is similar to the Michigan/Florida case. But the super-delegates are part of the rules and everybody has known it, as I argue in a longer post on this issue. But the ability of the super-delegates to save Hillary Clinton is much overstated. Her lead among super-delegates has fallen considerably, and pledges need not stay pledged. This is only likely to be a route to the nomination if the delegate race is very close to a tie.

So Clinton needs to win - and win well - in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and perhaps also find a legitimate way to bring Florida or Michigan back onto the map. It is not impossible. But it will be very dificult. And even a good performance in the key target states may take us back into neck-and-neck territory rather than a clear Clinton lead.

Obama's 'framing advantage' has helped him to respond deftly to attacks from his opponent. Demand more policy detail? He can do wonkery too and has a natural 'professorial' mode. Putting some policy heavy, somewhat boring passages in his speeches before getting back to the campaign uplift isn't too difficult for him, as the New York Times reports

“Today, I want to take it down a notch,” said Mr. Obama, of Illinois, standing on the floor of a General Motors plant. “This is going to be a speech that is a little more detailed. It’s going to be a little bit longer, with not too many applause lines.”

In return, he insists again and more powerfully that 'words do matter'. To respond, Hillary Clinton needs to combine the 'solutions business' policies' by showing she can soar and inspire. That's harder.

Perhaps as the Clinton campaign has adopted the unfamiliar role of the challenger, perhaps they have now become too focused on their frustrations in making the case against Obama when the problem is that they have yet to articulate a distinctive case for their candidate.

Dear Gordon: why we need an Iraq inquiry

2008-02-12T19:01:00.000Z

A letter to the Prime Minister, which is reported in today's Independent.

11th February 2008

Dear Prime Minister

Next month will mark the fifth anniversary of the House of Commons' debate on military intervention in Iraq in March 2003. I believe that this would be the right time for the government to set out plans to ensure the lessons from Iraq are learnt and inform the future of British foreign policy, by announcing an independent public inquiry into the Iraq war.

Iraq has been the most significant foreign policy and military engagement of the last decade. It has also been the most controversial and publicly contested episode in British foreign policy for half a century, since Suez, dividing Parliament, political parties and the country.

An inquiry can not change the course of events since 2003. But there is widespread recognition, among those who took different views about the war, of the need to learn lessons from the Iraq war and its aftermath. A full inquiry would ensure that a rounded assessment of the pre-war diplomacy, the intelligence failures regarding Iraq's WMD programme, the conduct of the war itself, and the difficulties of post-war political and economic reconstruction could inform future policy.

This is a particularly important moment for the future of foreign policy. The US election has provided a natural moment for America to take stock at the end of a political cycle: it is striking that the theme of change has been central to the campaigns of leading candidates for both parties. With a growing awareness among political leaders and broader public opinion in the United States of the limits to what even the most powerful nation in the world can achieve alone, it is important to show that working together for stronger international cooperation can provide a more effective alternative.

Britain, our European partners and other allies can make a major contribution to leading an international public debate about how we can work together to strengthen multilateral institutions for an age of growing interdependence. This should lead to new thinking about how to address the global challenges of our age, including security and terrorism, climate change, the responsibility to protect human rights, and spreading global development and decent chances in life to all.

This agenda should also be at the heart of the Labour Party's thinking as it creates a new progressive foreign policy agenda to put forward at the next General Election in Britain, and the party should seek to reach out and work with those outside party politics who are working on these great progressive causes.

But our ability to pursue this debate within Britain and beyond, and to engage people in it, will depend on acknowledging and learning the lessons of Iraq, showing a clear commitment to building from these to create the new internationalist agenda we need for the future. A public inquiry into Iraq would be an important way to achieve this.

Yours sincerely,

Sunder Katwala
General Secretary
Fabian Society

Much ado about Sharia

2008-02-09T08:17:00.000Z

Rowan Williams is shocked at the outrage his comments on sharia law have created: issuing clarifications of his lecture on religious and civil law in England and the World at One interview which provoked the furore.

Asim Siddiqui has an excellent commentary, putting the furore into context, though I think he is a little generous to the Archbishop's sagacity. The media may have gone somewhat overboard. But Williams needed to be aware of the impact he will have as a public figure, and given his office, on such a 'hot button' issue. And the views he expresses in the speech and interview are not clear and, at times, do discuss the possibilities and dilemmas of competing juridstictions.

Siddiqui says:

I would argue that the basic objectives of sharia (protection of life, family, dignity, intellect and property) are all covered by British law. The fundamental purpose of sharia is to achieve justice. This country is more just than most. So what more sharia do people want?

The aspects of sharia being considered by the archbishop are restricted to matters of family and finance law, ie civil matters. No one is suggesting introducing the so-called Islamic penal code - so let's not waste time debating something most of us don't want to see in the Muslim world, let alone Britain.

Many critical voices from within the Church of England have asked why the Archbishop seems to be making claims on behalf of Islam, rather than Christianity. What he is trying to do is defend and entrench the claims of faith in the public sphere against the most strident secular voices - and to make common cause across faiths to do that. But this was not the way to achieve that, or to begin a public debate. if that was part of the aim of this lecture, it has backfired spectacularly.

'Mathematically impossible' for Clinton or Obama to win without super-delegates

2008-02-09T02:29:00.000Z

The Democrat nomination is going to be decided at the Convention.

That is the prediction of Paul Kane of the Washington Post - though it is easier to find where his point is picked up on political wire - because of how even the race is, and because Dem primaries are not 'winner-take-all'. Unless a neck-and-neck race turns overnight into a landslide, the super-delegates will come into play.

Do the math. If they both have about 900 pledged delegates so far, they need to win more than 1,100 of the remaining 1,400 delegates to win the nomination through actual voting.

Of course, there are lots of versions of that scenario. The elections will have an impact on the super-delegates' choices, especially if either candidate can open up a lead. But both campaigns may shift up a further gear on the micro-targetting and arm-twisting as much as the public campaign.

Would McCain put Mike Huckabee a heartbeat from the Presidency?

2008-02-08T00:47:00.000Z

John McCain wants to build bridges with conservative Republicans.Mike Huckabee, having been written out of a two-horse race by the media, did strikingly well in the southern states, and has managed to stay on friendly terms with McCain.

So there is now a great deal of chatter about McCain-Huckabee being a good way to balance the Republican ticket. Huckabee has done well with evangelical voters in particular, but he has offended a good deal of the Republican establishment with his left-leaning economic populism.

Would it be a balanced ticket for conservatives or a 'dual maverick express'?

Many observers note that Huckabee has a great deal of conversational charm on the campaign stump. But this just makes him a disarmingly charming lunatic.

McCain may gain credibility with part of the conservative base. But Independents and swing voters, especially women, may worry about a 72 year old candidate sharing a ticket with a creationist.

When it comes to God in public life, Huckabee is an American revolutionary and risks sounding like a fundamentalist:

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards,"

He has made a great many controversial remarks on gay rights - and discussed this on Meet the Press before Christmas. He defended his claim in a 1988 book that:

"It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations--from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia."

Just last month, he was comparing gay marriage to bestiality.

I think the radical view is to say that we're going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal."

I am not sure that Huckabee for Veep is that much more likely than the Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton 'dream ticket', which strikes me as neither plausible nor strategically smart.

McCain may want a less controversial conservative standard barrier. Or could he break with the conventional wisdom and not go conservative at all? The most intriguing chatter is about the possibility of McCain asking Colin Powell to run on the ticket with him.

My hunch is that McCain would struggle to get Powell to agree to run - but that it could prove a very smart choice for the Republicans.

Why is it such a bad year for going negative?

2008-02-07T22:54:00.001Z

So, farewell Mitt Romney. Somehow, we never really knew you. Perhaps the real Mitt Romney should have tried for the nomination (pragmatic, technocratic, can read a balance sheet, turned around a Winter Olympics, and ideologically flexible enough for his Republicanism to prosper in the liberal heartlands). Instead, Romney ran as the faithful heir of the Reagan coalition, with everything (except his Mormon faith) straight out of Republican central casting. On paper, it must have looked a perfectly pitched candidacy, if only the voters had believed it. (Even his reason for quitting - the Iraq war - doesn't ring true though it offered a reminder of the gulf there will be between the major candidates over Iraq and national security this Autumn).

One of the most cheering things about the 2008 election is what isn't working.

Money: Of course, money still matters too much in US politics. But Mitt's millions couldn't get him the nomination, and he was outplayed by Mike Huckabee largely volunteer force. On the Democrat side, money has mattered and Obama's fundraising success during 2007 was an early signal that his could be a viable challenge to Hillary Clinton. But there is now a twist. Until the last few weeks, the Clinton campaign strategy was based around a decisive Super Tuesday result, reflected in the fundraising and spending plans. Now, the game is in overtime. That means a big headache for the Clinton campaign, many of whose high-value have hit the campaign spending limits, and a significant edge for the Obama movement's ability to raise millions in smaller donations.

Talk radio: The shock jocks of the US right have done a great deal to coarsen US debate over the last 20 years. But Rush Limbaugh has spent the last fortnight going ballistic to insist that John McCain (and indeed Mike Huckabee, for his economic populism) are betraying conservative America. They have been ignored. If your pitch is to be a self-apppinted and infallible populist voice of the people, it is a very big problem if the people stop listening.

Negative ads: From Lee Atwater's infamous WIllie Horton campaign attacks for Bush senior in 1988 to the swift boating of John Kerrey, there has been a sense of Democrats being helpless in the face of the evil genius of right-wing attack ads. But Romney has run a relentlessly negative textbook campaign - and it has failed. Overall, TV ads haven't had a fantastic impact or salience. There might not be an iconic campaign spot of 2008.

Personal attacks: There is no doubt that Bill Clinton's 'bad cop' routine damaged Hillary Clinton's campaign though, though it has also helped to polarise attitudes to voting around race and other demographic groups.

So what's going on? Are politics as usual losing their potency? I am not claiming that the remaining candidates are angels, but Perhaps this will turn out to be naively optimistic - and the candidates will go nuclear on each other from here on. Or an improved mood in 2008 might prove a one-off, another unusual feature of this most unusual race.

Perhaps. But it's worth considering the hypothesis that something bigger is going on. The public may be more media-savvy and sceptical than they were, so that techniques which seemed cutting-edge in the 1980s and 1990s now seem very dated.

And there is much greater scrutiny of what campaigns say - because of the scale of 24/7 media, and the ability of blogs to scrutinise and bite-back if dubious claims are made.

The sheer volume of coverage may mean that no future ad could ever have the sort of impact of LBJ's famous attack on Goldwater in 1964 or the Willie Horton ads of 1988. If voters don't want to be overwhelmed, they have to find their own filters. The Romney campaign changed messages too much for these to gain a resonance. Campaign themes and messages may matter less than voters' sense of a candidate's authenticity - that they embody the values and issues of their campaign.

While it will be a hard fought General Election, I think the tone of the contest could be rather more elevated than many people expect. John McCain was a victim of the politics of personal destruction in the Republican primaries of 2000. I don't think he is going to practice them in the General Election. And the Democrats would benefit from any sort of truce which could put the focus back onto the Games themselves.

Seven million all

2008-02-07T00:06:00.000Z

'Clinton and Obama trade victories' was the apt Washington Post headline. While it is delegates that count, where it is looking very even in the end, the most fascinating statistic from Karen Tumulty of Time aggregates the nationwide votes (not the final totals) to show both Clinton and Obama won almost seven and a half million votes each, and were very close to tied among voters choosing either one of the frontrunners.

Clinton: 50.2% (7,427,942)
Obama: 49.8% (7,370,023)

I took part in an interesting post-Super Tuesday panel debate at the House of Commons organised by Progress.

McCain will be the Republican nominee: he is the most electable Republican in a post-Bush age, and the party didn't quite hate him enough not to recognise that. So that will be tough for the Democrats. There are gains: on issues like climate change and torture, the debate will be on Democrat-friendly territory. And there are still huge differences between the parties - on Iraq, national security, healthcare and the economy.

There were different views about whether the Clinton and Obama camps could fight a close race without knocking lumps out of each other. I felt they could: not just because of the party's interest, but because the Bill Clinton-led attacks on Obama ahead of South Carolina suggested this may be a year when 'the politics of personal destruction' will backfire.

There was an interesting discussion about why money and negative advertising have declined in impact. Is it due to particular factors like the inauthenticity of Mitt Romney, or about a shift in media and political communication?

A few other interesting nuggets
* More Democrats voted in London yesterday in just one location of the international Democrats Abroad primary than in the Alaska caucus. Democrats Abroad, including in London, have voted strongly for Obama over Clinton.
* John McCain isn't going to choose Mike Huckabee as Vice-President, thankfully.
* None of the panel wanted to make predictions, though there was a general sense that Hillary Clinton could just edge the Democrat nomination, with mixed views as to what would happen in a knife-edge Clinton/McCain race.

MPs, bugs and a stupid own goal

2008-02-04T22:09:00.000Z

A report in the Sunday Times that Sadiq Khan MP was bugged by Scotland Yard while visiting a constituent has created a major stir at Westminster, leading to the swift announcement of a government inquiry and a statement in the House of Commons today.

The allegation, which appears to be true, would be in clear breach of the long-standing bar on the police bugging MPs under the Wilson doctrine, and it is important the government inquiry finds out how and why this was allowed to happen. It remains to be seen why this operation was carried out, whether proper authorisation was sought and from whom, and why this took place in the absence of any credible grounds for suspicion.

I should declare a personal connection. I know Sadiq Khan, who has recently become vice-chair of the Fabian Society for 2008 having been an important contributor in our work around Britishness, citizenship and integration, and has been leading a Fabian project with John Denham MP in this area over the last two years, which we will be publishing shortly.

But that is not the main reason I was shocked and angered by the report. A great many people will suspect that this was not entirely unconnected to the fact that the MP for Tooting happens to be a Muslim. It is of the gravest concern is that some in authority do not understand that they risk sending the message that every British Muslim is to be regarded as a potential 'fifth columnist' and object of suspicion. It is difficult to think of a more effective way to undermine the efforts of those working for integration, seeking to forge a confident British Muslim identity so that future generations have no reason to see their faith as a barrier to their being full and equal participants in British society.

Sadiq Khan has been a challenging advocate of integration and equality before entering parliament and since, as a civil rights lawyer and Chair of the human rights group Liberty. In a significant Fabian speech - being a British Muslim on the anniversary of the July 7th bombings, he challenged his own government on issues where it risks undermining an appeal to hearts and minds, and also vocally criticised all of those, from the BNP to Hizb-ut-Tahrir, who exploit community grievances to foster division.

These efforts should be supported, not undermined.

And the good news is that there are a number of positive signs that this thinking has had a significant impact in the British government rethinking its language and policy on terrorism since the departure of Tony Blair. While the Brown government's emerging agenda remains work in progress, the attempt to ditch the 'war on terror' for a more effective 'hearts and minds' approach is an important one, which those who have been critical of the government are watching with interest. (Sunny Hundal wrote a good commentary reflecting on this after the recent Fabian conference).

And yet, even as progress is made, it is undermined. How depressing that, for some in the Establishment, there is nothing that even the most prominent and integrated of British Muslims could ever do to pass some secret loyalty test.

UPDATE: I have a commentary piece about this - A very British subversive on Comment is Free.

Europe's leaders discuss their world after Bush agenda

2008-02-02T19:44:00.000Z

The Independent's political editor Andrew Grice's 'week in politics' column develops the World After Bush theme, reporting that Gordon Brown is trying to build European support for reform of the major global institutions and that the Downing Street summit of Europe's big players moved on from financial instability to post-Bush planning over goat's cheese and dessert.

This is good news. Despite Brown's commitment to a 'new multilateralism', he has appeared semi-detached towards the European Union, not least in scoring an embarassing own goal over the signing ceremony of the Lisbon Treaty. But perhaps that has proved a wake-up call: the attempt to play to the eurosceptic press gallery backfired.

But with the British political battle now joined over Europe, there has been a shift to a more positive case from the Brown government. And Britain's ability to promote a new multilateralism depends on building European support, rather than trying to leap over the most powerful multilateral club in the world in an attempt to reshape the global order.

Much of the agenda in my manifesto for the World after Bush depends on that commitment to Britain 'punching our weight in Europe'.

This credible global Europe depends on Britain being fully engaged. The jury is still out. The UK is the most globally engaged of any society, and the most globally open major economy. We have most to gain from global cooperation, and most to lose if it fails. We must make full use of our membership of the EU, the world's most powerful, democratic multilateral force.
So the British government needs to stop telling the public it is protecting us from the worst of the European project – and start making the positive case that we only punch our weight through Europe if we want our voice to count. Politicians who talk about climate change or global development are simply not credible if they shy away from the essential means to deliver.

There will still be choppy waters ahead, but I am rather more optimistic about this than before Christmas.

But a key question remains: whether Britain and France can, with Germany, find enough common purpose to make a shared European agenda possible.

McCain up, Edwards out, Giuliani never in

2008-01-30T23:37:00.000Z

John McCain's Florida victory makes the Republican race a two-horse race, and I can't see how Mitt Romney is going to become a more attractive candidate by going more negative. There is plenty to worry the Democrats here - the Republicans look like they might now effectively settle on their nominee first, and they look like they will choose their most electable candidate.

McCain was keen to stress that this was a Republican only primary in his victory speech. Romney won the pro-Bush Republican vote; McCain won Republican voters who are critical of the President.

The excellent Jay Cost makes a very interesting point about this: that this at odds with McCain's championing of the surge in Iraq and Romney's running as a pro-change outsider, but that it chimes with who voters believe the candidates really are.

I think one reason has to do with the long memories of voters. McCain's reputation as an anti-Bush maverick is still quite ingrained in their minds .... There is a lesson in all of this about the limitations of political campaigns. They only do so much to shape the thinking of the American voter. Those who have held opinions about political figures for a long time are not going to be easily disabused of them, despite how many political ads are run or adjustments in messaging are made. I think this hints at a mistake the Romney campaign made - it pivoted too late to a message about fixing Washington.

There is a message in there for Hillary Clinton too.

I don't agree with all of John Edwards' positions - but it was great to see a credible Presidential candidate putting poverty in the US absolutely front and centre of a major campaign.

What happens to John Edwards' supporters is going to be a crucial factor in the Obama-Clinton race, and it is very difficult to call. The candidate was siding with Obama - as 'change' versus the 'status quo' - but the demographics of the Edwards vote could favour Hillary Clinton.

Rudy Giuliani's failed bid will be taught in campaign school as an example of how to get everything wrong. Clearly, it was a mega-flop, and the strategy was too clever by half.

But I am not sure all of the criticism of a miscalculated campaign strategy is fully merited. To argue that Giuliani's later states strategy was the problem depends upon the counter-factual argument that he could have been much better placed had he fought seriously in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan. How well could he have done at best? Would he have gone into Florida with a better shot if he'd somehow squeaked a third place somewhere?

Still, the 2008 race offered the best possible opportunity for this unorthodox approach. And even this race could not stay open enough. It will not be a strategy that anybody will try again.

Even if Giuliani ran the wrong campaign, perhaps the real lesson is a more fundamental one. If you are a pro-life New Yorker, don't make a serious bid for the Republican nomination.

The state of the Presidency

2008-01-29T07:25:00.000Z

He seems to have become an unperson, never mentioned by the Republican candidates as they campaign in Florida, but President George Bush reminded us that he will still be here for 51 more weeks as political attention switched briefly from the campaign trail to the President's final State of the Union address.

But only briefly. Now that he is a President with little chance of pursuing anything beyond a blocking agenda domestically, Bush is left only with words, not action. And even the rhetoric fell flat as Andrew Stephen notes as he bids goodnight to the President in an online New Statesman commentary.

Even Bush’s best speech writers have now deserted him, and that showed in the 59 minutes he was at the rostrum. The grand, sweeping assertions of how a Bush-led America would transform the world, bringing it democracy and everything else that was both good and American, had gone - replaced by far more feeble, forgettable lines like “we are spreading the hope of freedom”.

The Kennedy factor

2008-01-28T23:16:00.000Z

Does it take a dynasty to beat a dynasty?

That may be the theory behind not one, not two but three Kennedys backing Obama.

Jonathan Cohn makes the case that this could have a significant impact.

Ted Kennedy's enthusiasm for Obama highlights one of the most unusual and interesting features of his candidacy - Obama's ability to combine what appears to be an almost impeccably liberal record with a strong emphasis on reaching out and bipartisan unity.

There is a potential 'Blair factor' here: if everybody can project their own image of what they believes the candidate stands for, it is very difficult to avoid disappoinment. Yet could it also prove a powerful strategy to unlock change in a polarised system?

On that theme. Ezra Klein has an excellent op-ed against unity, and for division in yesterday's LA Times.

Beyond race?

2008-01-28T22:51:00.001Z

Barack Obama's crushing victory in South Carolina should certainly close down the offensive claim that he "is not black enough" to appeal to African-American voters.

But that may not be an umnambiguous boon to Obama: his overwhelming lead among black voters while running third among whites does raise questions about a candidacy which promises to transcend race.

Perhaps Bill Clinton's much criticised attacks on Obama may have had the intended strategic effect, even if they cost Hillary votes in this primary. I felt Obama held his own in the most personalised candidates' debate yet - particularly by arguing that he was notsure which Clinton he was running against - but Obama's own campaign strategists may with hindsight they made more of Hillary Clinton's ill judged remarks about Martin Luther King than was wise.

Jay Cost offers his latest excellent analysis at RealClearPolitics. One interesting hypothesis is that Obama is polling more strongly among white voters in generally white areas, but less well among white voters in racially mixed areas.

However, there should be caution against jumping to conclusions. This has been a consistently fluid contest: the different state results haven't simply been about the different demographic groups. There havebeen several examples of similar demographic groups breaking differently in particular states. For example, the lack of a gender gap in Iowa and a strong gender difference between Clinton and Obama in New Hampshire; or Obama having a broader appeal to low income voters in Iowa and a more affluent liberal-left support in losing New Hampshire.

And while John Edwards now looks very much like the third candidate in a two-horse race, his relatively strong appeal having been born in South Carolina, and represented the state next door, offers another complicating factor in trying to extrapolate from the South Carolina result.

Goodbye Fred .. but might McCain put Thompson on his ticket?

2008-01-22T22:04:00.000Z

Fred Thompson's bid to be President is over. His supporters decided his laid back style could be an asset before his campaign began.

There is a case for small government conservatives not 'giving 110%'. If you believe in government doing less, then the Ronald Reagan style of governing fits the philosophy rather better than the workaholicism of a Margaret Thatcher.

But, when it comes to seeking election, there is laid back, and then there is not turning up.

Still, Thompson's lacklustre campaign might just prove to have played a decisive role in the Republican nomination, should John McCain now kick on to win. Thompson may well have drawn enough conservative votes in coming third to cost Mike Huckabee victory in South Carolina, having attacked Huckabee strongly during the primary campaign. And it could be argued that Rudy Giuliani's campaign strategy would look much more viable had Huckabee beaten McCain last weekend.

Thompson did sterling service for McCain last week - and could provide an obvious way to reassure nervous conservative Republicans about a McCain-led ticket. So might we see Thompson back in the 2008 race as a Vice-Presidential hopeful?

On the other hand, McCain might be looking for a V-P candidate willing to get out and stump for some votes.

Gordon Brown gets the message - and is planning for the world after Bush

2008-01-22T18:42:00.000Z

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is thinking about how to shape 'the world after Bush', reports The Independent's political editor Andy Grice.

Great idea, Gordon! And its always good to see Fabian ideas getting a hearing in Downing Street.

Grice links the behind the scenes thinking about life after Bush in Downing Street with the world after Bush debate kickstarted by the Fabian Society.

Although aides insist the Prime Minister has a good working relationship with George Bush, the outgoing President is seen as an obstacle to reform.

Since think-tanks need to start thinking ahead, the post-Bush debate we began back in Summer 2006, in the late Blair era, when our Gordon and Hillary cover image offered a wide range of hostages to fortune, with several publications and events ahead of Saturday's Change the World conference.

As Grice says:

it's tricky territory and there's only so much Brown can do above the radar - for now, at least.

But we need to keep the public debate going too.

As I wrote in Tribune this week

If there can only be new thinking on foreign policy behind the scenes or of it can only be discussed in code, this limits the chances to re-engage and repair the political damage.

On which note, its good to see David Lammy quietly rooting for Obama in his Comment is Free blog post on Saturday's conference.

There is part of a series of Comment is Free blogs with contributors reacting to the event.

---
UPDATE: I've chipped in on the Independent Open House blog site with some advice for Gordon Brown on his world after Bush strategy.

Snapshots from the Fabian conference

2008-01-20T21:19:00.000Z

Some musings from me on Saturday's 'Change the World' conference over at the excellent OurKingdom blog from OpenDemocracy.

My friend and former colleague Mark Leonard - director of the new European Council on Foreign Relations - made an important point at the event, that there is a danger that an obsession with America “infantilises” Europe:

“We must not let a running commentary on American foreign policy become a substitute for having our own foreign policy”.

The world after Bush debate we need should focus on what we can do - as progressives in Britain and Europe. That is also the best way we can engage with and help America's progressive voices in their own debates.

20th January ... just a year to go!

2008-01-20T19:30:00.000Z

A happy day for those anticipating the Bush countdown.

I have a piece on the 'year to go' theme in this week's Tribune - We can change the world after Bush on why we need to respond to the opportunity with a new British foreign policy.

But I also argue that the debate on foreign policy that we need to begin must take place publicly - and outside government.

Gordon Brown’s Government has shown it understands the need for change on foreign policy .... Brown’s “new multilateralism” must now be developed into concrete plans for how Britain and the EU can contribute to an effective multilateral agenda when the next US President picks up the phone. It must offer new foreign policies which can help to rebuild Labour’s fractured electoral coalition, offering a positive internationalist argument for the next general election manifesto.

One problem is that these two goals may conflict. Diplomacy and democracy do not easily mix. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary will stress the diplomatic reality that they must work with the incumbent US administration for another year, while preparing to work with any successor afterwards. Yet this will prove politically frustrating to many Labour supporters. If there can only be new thinking on foreign policy behind the scenes or of it can only be discussed in code, this limits the chances to re-engage and repair the political damage.

Change the World

2008-01-20T07:10:00.000Z

The big Fabian 'Change the World' conference on Saturday went very well, with over 700 people spending a day debating the big questions on the global agenda. A relaxed David Miliband was tie-less and jacket-less to give his keynote speech. I was suited and booted, so he got a laugh at the start by asking what the world is coming to when the Fabian General Secretary is better dressed than the Foreign Secretary.

Central to Miliband's argument was that we are experiencing fundamental shifts in power, including a new 'civilian surge'.

The left has talked a lot about the essence of globalization – a new interdependence born of rising flows of people, money, culture and trade across national boundaries. But we have not talked enough about its consequence – fundamental shifts in the distribution of power. Power is shifting from West to East. It is shifting from the national to the international level. But there is a third shift – in the balance of power between government and people.

And there was a big argument - applying to both domestic and foreign policy - about the need to bring together the insights of the social democratic and liberal traditions - the necessity of combining the principles of equality with a commitment to individual freedom.

More on the conference will follow, on the Fabian website and on this blog.

One idea to change the world ...

2008-01-18T21:05:00.000Z

The final session of the Fabian 'Change the World' conference is a Dragons Den style session, chaired by Ed Miliband who will be writing Gordon Brown's election manifesto for Labour.

We've been inviting ideas from Fabian members, conference attendees and others. Sunny Hundal is one of those who will be pitching - and he has sparked some debate over at Pickled Politics about ideas to change British policy towards South Asia.

Miliband's foreign policy causes

2008-01-18T20:59:00.000Z

The New Statesman interviews David Miliband ahead of his Fabian conference speech.

There are four great causes in current foreign policy, Miliband says. He lists them: tackle terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, "and that's what we're trying to do in Afghanistan"; try to reduce conflict, "and that's what we're trying to do in the Middle East, Kosovo and Sudan"; tackle inequality through low-carbon, high-growth economic aid and development policies, "and that's what we're trying to do in Bali and elsewhere"; and build durable international institutions that recognise international inter dependence, "and that's what we're trying to do with the EU and the UN". These, he says, "are all great progressive causes".

The Republican free-for-all

2008-01-16T08:09:00.001Z

Mitt Romney won by a strong margin in Michigan. This is good news for Romney, and a setback for John McCain, for whom victory would have confirmed him as the frontrunner.

It is also good for Mike Huckabee, who benefits from a more open race. It is a particular boost for Rudy Giuliani - whose waiting for Florida strategy risked seeing him look out before he was in. And perhaps the biggest winners are the Democrats.

Romney needed to win to survive. This was a different Romney to that offered in Iowa - with the focus on economics and managerial strengths (a potential USP for his candidacy) rather than the social conservative convictions which he has not held for very long. That suited Michigan well - and Romney made effective use of his 'favourite son' status, his father having been Governor to link to his economic issues.

While Romney's economic argument against McCain was popular in Michigan, it doesn't strike me as credible. McCain said he would tell the truth; that some of the auto and manufacturing jobs would not come back, and the emphasis should be on the skills workers need. It is the argument Bill Clinton used effectively in the 1992 primaries. As his Trade Secretary Robert Reich argued, an effective response to global economic change depends on persuading voters that neither 'save the jobs' (the protectionist left) nor 'let them drown' (the free market right) works. 'Train the workers' is an effective middle

Romney challenged the idea that some of these jobs won't be comong back as defeatist. From the self-styled inheritor of the Reagan coalition, this is pure opportunism.

Musharaff's last stand

2008-01-14T23:30:00.000Z

Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek is, I think, one of the best commentators on international affairs. I am a big fan of his book 'The future of freedom', which makes a nuanced case for democracy promotion but warns against illiberal democracy.

He has an excellent piece on the future of Musharaff in Pakistan, and how the west's ally has lost his raison d'etre.

But over the past year, Musharraf has embarked on a series of moves that have destroyed his claims to being a modernizer, his reputation as a statesman and his popularity with his own people. Many outside Pakistan do not quite realize the sea change that has taken place ... Musharraf's struggle to stay in power has also reinforced his alliance with thoroughly illiberal forces. Having packed the courts, amended the Constitution, muzzled the media and battled with the major political parties, Musharraf has alienated all the modern, secular and liberal forces in Pakistan, with the exception of some businessmen and his own community of "mohajirs" (refugees from India) in Sindh. He now relies for his support on the military, an assortment of feudal politicians and some friendly fundamentalists.

Zakaria believes Musharaff could still defuse the crisis, by gradually stepping away from power after the elections, now due next month.

There is a solution to Pakistan's political crisis, one that will allow Musharraf to leave on a high note. First, he must hold free and fair elections. Musharraf's current plan is to wield power as part of a troika—the Army chief, the prime minister and himself as president. This will work only if he is the weakest leg of that stool. He has already appointed a decent man as head of the Army, and he can allow a stable parliamentary coalition to elect a prime minister who can run the country. Musharraf should recognize that he has become far too controversial to be able to lead his nation and should instead recede from power. The example to follow is Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, now universally feted for bringing democracy to that country. Musharraf is said to be convinced that he is indispensable to Pakistan's future. He should remember the words of another general turned politician, Charles de Gaulle, who, when told he was indispensable to France, is said to have replied, "The graveyards are filled with indispensable people."

David Miliband to headline Fabian Change the World conference

2008-01-14T23:17:00.001Z

We have announced that Foreign Secretary David Miliband will be the keynote speaker at Saturday's Change the World Fabian conference.

He gives some of the best and most nuanced speeches of any Cabinet Minister - his speech for us in his last job, as Environment Secretary, on the future of red-green politics was one of the most challenging ministerial speeches we have hosted.

I will be interested to see to what extent Miliband can make a strong pro-European argument in the speech.

Life after Bush at the New Statesman

2008-01-14T21:26:00.000Z

The New Statesman is running an online series on Life after Bush.

Contributors who are taking part in Saturday's Fabian Change the World conference include former Ambassador to the US, Christopher Meyer, who doubts that much will change, Shirley Williams, European Commissioner Margot Wallstrom who finds cause for optimism about an emerging transatlantic partnership of equals, and Parag Khanna from the US, who is advising the Obama campaign, on how the next President will have to deal with the Bush legacy.

I have a piece on how British foreign policy should change, and my colleague Rachael Jolley has an interview with Jo Stiglitz.

The New Statesman is our media partner for the event, alongside the Guardian.

Over here

2008-01-14T07:46:00.000Z

The British weekend papers found little new to say about the race in the US, awaiting the next twists and turns. So the focus was on the impact on British politics. Saturday's Times reported that David Cameron tried but failed to meet Obama on his Washington trip last year, because he sees him as the US politician who embodies 'change'.

John Rentoul in the Independent on Saturday notes some rhetorical borrowings from JFK in George Osborne's latest speech, and notes that the New Tories will be flexible enough to learn from any winner:

The Clinton campaign was the big moment in the export to Britain of US political language, ideas and tactics. The formative event in New Labour history was the visit by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to the victorious Democrat campaign team after the election.

Cameron and Osborne are trying to emulate them, but they don't yet know which candidate will win. When they do, we can be sure that they will try to copy the winning campaign.

Andrew Rawnsley continues the Gordon Brown/Hillary Clinton comparison - even giving my piece on Friday a plug - and wondering if our Prime Minister has now back-tracked on the change message.

The race factor

2008-01-14T07:13:00.000Z

Hillary Clinton on Meet the Press on Sunday:

I don't think this campaign is about gender, and I sure hope it's not about race.

This responds to a tension which has been simmering since the Iowa result.

Clinton was accusing the Obama campaign of distorting her remarks to make race an issue; others have found the Clintons' remarks ill-judged, particularly her comments that 'it took a President', contrasting the impact of Martin Luther King with that of LBJ in passing the Civil Rights Act. (Video clip). But isn't Obama running for President too, not to be leader of a new civil rights campaign?.

One view is that, if a backlash to sexism helped Clinton in New Hampshire, then Obama might be helped by a sense that the race card is in play. The Obama campaign's approach suggests they may think this.

As Joe Klein writes, this is not an argument which the Obama camp should want to have. He is not running on race - while he is consciously pitching a unifying candidacy which allows America to heal the race tensions of past decades. There is not much evidence that a 'Bradley effect' was a factor in Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire win, but the discussion of that in the media has again put race at the centre, and the Obama campaign have not discouraged that.

There have also been a few references to the 'Do the Right Thing' factor, the Spike Lee movie about inter-racial tensions. As Ryan Lizza writes in the New Yorker, the Clinton camp are confident of strong support from Hispanics, in part because Hispanic voters are thought less likely to support a black candidate.

The electoral demographics of race will be a key theme in South Carolina and Nevada. Race and gender are unavoidably part of the story which makes this a compelling race. But it will be damaging for the Democrats if the two campaigns continue these skirmishes. The Clintons' record on race is strong. Obama's better argument is not that attacks on his experience have racial undertones, but that they are examples of a negative approach to campaigning that he rejects.

The West Wing comes to Westminster

2008-01-11T21:23:00.000Z

The US election is part of British politics too.

What can Gordon Brown learn from Hillary Clinton? Does David Cameron think he can create Obamamania in Britain - or is he really Mitt Romney? I have a West Wing comes to Westminster piece on Comment is Free.

The Clinton comeback numbers

2008-01-09T08:56:00.000Z

Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire victory is no less dramatic than Obama's in Iowa.

There are clear contrasts in the support for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, essentially between the materialist and post-materialist left. With Obama ahead among Independents, we now have a Clinton running as 'the Democratic candidate for the Democratic nomination', and seeking to create suspicion among Democrats about why non-Democrats prefer Obama. Remember the third way anyone?

Massive turnout for the Democrats was assumed to be an Obama factor. The overall turnout suggests that that Hillary is mobilising traditional Democrats, Obama is bringing in new people, and that the voters are mobilising themselves too. The Democrats are hyper-mobilised for November's race. Bill Clinton's outburst over the Obama 'fairytale' (video)is a sign of how a close race could get very heated. But the Democrats strike me as much better placed to unite around their nominee.

Obama the frontrunner, Hillary the underdog

2008-01-06T20:57:00.001Z

Hillary Clinton is fighting for her political life in New Hampshire. A number of factors have made Obama the frontrunner.

(1) The betting. Who is favourite at any one moment is a matter of fact. Follow the money. Overnight, Saturday night/Sunday morning, the mantle shifted as the markets tipped from Hillary to Obama.

(2) The New Hampshire polls. A 10 point Obama lead caught the headlines, though other polls are tighter. He has the big mo.

(3) John Edwards: His debate strategy - defending Obama against Hillary - revealed that he believes his best hope is to knock Clinton out and go head-to-head over change.

(4) The debate dynamics. Obama was comfortable in the role of front-runner. The strategic dilemma for the Clinton camp in adapting to their new underdog status - how to draw contrasts, aware of the price to be paid for going negative - was on display. Obama parried the contrasts effectively, particularly his answer on why 'words do inspire'

(5) The media narrative. Each of these factors has played into the media narrative that Iowa is giving Obama immense momentum. (It is not giving Mike Huckabee momentum on anything like the same scale).

There is some rationale to this, which the media reinforces and strengthens: the Iowa demographics were exceptionally good for Huckabee, as New Hampshire's are not. But there is nothing about Iowa that made it particularly promising Obama territory. The Iowa number-crunching Obama's turnout success and appeal to independents, and his ability to defeat Clinton among women, suggests he will do well in New Hampshire, given the high number of registered Independents. And there is also evidence of Obamamania on the ground in New Hampshire.

Hillary Clinton's problem is the loss of inevitability. There is one big Clinton argument. That the Democrats need to win - and that running Obama against McCain would be the greater risk in November. Hillary has negatives, but they are known. We don't know whether or not he has a glass jaw.

But the Clinton campaign are not going to get a hearing for that argument over the next 48 hours, and look likely to go nil-three in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

The problem with a hope squashing 'reality check' strategy is that if Obama is possible, Democrats want him to be possible. He is asking voters to suspend their disbelief. And, if they do so, he wins.

After Iowa: Obamamania

2008-01-04T09:01:00.001Z

The magic of the TV digibox meant I was able to see the candidate's victory and concession speeches this morning without staying up. Huckabee's was a reminder of how much better he comes across in person than if you read what he is actually saying. Obama's was quite a speech, especially if you watch it. It was textbook Obama - reprising his 2004 Convention theme - while creating that sense of occasion, momentum and the participation of voters in making the improbable possible.

I was struck by three things.

First, if he moves to national prominence as a co-frontunner, it will become clear that he is already running against Rudy Giuliani in his hope versus fear pitch.

I'll be a president who ends this war in Iraq and finally brings our troops home who restores our moral standing, who understands that 9/11 is not a way to scare up votes but a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the 21st century.

But that can also play to the concern among the Democrat base of a Hillary Clinton foreign policy risking being 'Bush-Cheney lite' without having to go too negative.

Second, that Obama's response to the Hillary Clinton argument on different approaches to change is to claim to represent and unify the Obama-Clinton-Edwards strategies, of hoping, working for and fighting for change.

For many months, we've been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path.

It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.

Third, that he is making the space to challenge the Clinton campaign if they change strategy and go negative.

That is what we started here in Iowa and that is the message we can now carry to New Hampshire and beyond. The same message we had when we were up and when we were down

Authenticity matters in politics - and Obama has it.

After Iowa: Hillary's challenge

2008-01-04T07:58:00.000Z

Both races are more open this morning than they were last night - but that also means it was a much, much better night for the Democrats than the Republicans.

It was difficult to see how the Republican race could prove decisive. The impact has been to make it more confused, though with one clear casualty. The Mitt Romney campaign looks fatally wounded. (John Ellis has a brilliant robust dissection of what went wrong with the most 'politics as usual' campaign offered to Iowans; while Michael Tomasky points out that his $6.5 million Iowa campaign comes out at $300 a vote).

I very much doubt Mike Huckabee will make the nomination in the end - nor how there could be a winning electoral coalition for Huckabee in November, as his economic approach is unacceptable to a large part of the Republican party, while his social agenda will scare off key groups of swing voters. This is good news for the absent Rudy Giuliani and for John McCain, though McCain did not do particularly well. But there is no Republican unity candidate - and that is going to affect their ability to mobilise in November.

Obama won big - by a striking seven point margin, exceeding expectations. The concentrated burst of primaries make timing matter more in 2008 than ever before. They may not pull it off, but right now, the Obama campaign have got everything right.

John Edwards edged Clinton for second place: a strong showing in such a competitive race. But it may prove the high point of his campaign, and may not be enough to keep his candidacy going into the Southern primaries after New Hampshire. Clinton-Obama will become a compelling media frame and Edwards will struggle to stay visible. What happens to Edwards fairly strong base of support in the South is an important unknown factor.

It is far, far too early to write Hillary Clinton off. This morning, she is probably still the favourite and frontrunner for the nomination. But for how long? I can see three strategic problems for the Clinton pitch, going into the next round of contests.

(1) Both results strengthen the sense that this is a 'change' election. The famous right track/wrong track indicator is at record levels, showing 7 out of 10 Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction.

Hillary presented two main 'closing' arguments on the eve of the poll and returned to these in her post-caucus concession speech.
- First, that she can win in November; she has been tested and presents less electoral risk;
- Second, that she is the President who will be 'ready of day one'.

So Hillary wants to stand for 'the experience to deliver change'. But the contrast with Obama risks making her 'the Establishment' against the risk of 'Change', in a race with no other status quo candidate.

(2) The high turnout and Obama's crossover appeal to independents may strengthen his core 'uniter, not a divider' argument. The risk of Obama is reduced if he demonstrates the ability to deliver. Over the next week, a sense of what these results and New Hampshire mean on 'electability' will emerge, from detailed number crunching and how that then turns into a new common sense among the commentators, bloggers and activists. That is a primary consideration for many Democrats this year, and will be the substance at stake in the post-match spin and counter-spin.

(3) If the momentum of Iowa and the media focus propel Obama to victory in New Hampshire, Obama would become the favourite. The Hillary Clinton campaign has been a 'safety first' campaign of the frontrunner. Could she emulate her husband's 'comeback kid' reputation? They are very different politicians.

Time magazine is already this morning reporting talk of a change of strategy but I doubt she could change her argument significantly without it looking like panic, and costing her in authenticity. If, as Time's report suggests, this means 'going negative' it would backfire and play to Obama's strengths.

The Obama campaign is still an unlikely insurgency - yet that is precisely its appeal if it can be shown to be a viable one. Hillary Clinton will have to hold her nerve, but she may find that she is in the campaign race on the terms that her opponent wanted to define.

Before the spin comes in ...

2008-01-04T00:10:00.000Z

Every campaign will want to declare that they are on the road to victory.

Real Clear Politics has a good ready reckoner as to what they really need

And here's a good spin explaining the thinking behind the campaign strategy we won't find out anything about tonight - Rudy Giuliani's unconventional bid for the Republican nomination.

Whose theory of change?

2008-01-03T23:08:00.000Z

The Democrats have perhaps their strongest, and most progressive, field for generations. The party looks more able to unite around its nominee than after most hotly contested nomination races historically, and has the unusual experience of being much more cohesive than the Republicans this time around.

So what is the difference between the candidates? One of the most interesting pieces of analysis previewing the primary contests has been Mark Schmitt's essay in the American Prospect on the 'theory of change primary'.

This is not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates' implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track. It's the first "theory of change" primary I can think of.

Hillary Clinton's stump speech is built around the speechwriter's rule of three, applied to theories of change: one candidate believes you achieve change by "demanding" it, another thinks you "hope for it," while she alone knows that you have to "work for it."

That's accurate as a rendering of the candidates' language: Her message of experience and hard work, Obama's language of hope and common purpose, Edwards' insistence that those with power will never give it up willingly.

But Schmitt goes on to offer a deeper analysis of Obama's pitch - and helps to explain how Obama manages to reconcile being probably the most conventionally 'liberal' of the major Democrats seem with his bipartisan appeal to independents and Republicans.

His piece has been much praised by commentators and bloggers. While this is a little late, this seems a good moment to link to it, just before we begin to find out which theory chimes most with the voters.

Kenya should face suspension from the Commonwealth

2008-01-03T22:26:00.000Z

I have a piece on Comment is Free arguing that a multilateral diplomatic effort could be crucial in pressing both sides to negotiate a peaceful political solution following the deeply controversial Presidential election and the violence since.

The Commonwealth is playing a useful mediation role. But if the Kibaki government resists international pressure to negotiate a political solution, then Kenya should face suspension from the Commonwealth.

Richard Bourne, the best informed observer of Commonwealth politics and founder of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, argues that the Commonwealth can contribute to a political settlement but also suggests that suspension would be on the agenda if this fails.

The Commonwealth has been a pioneer among international institutions in basing membership of principles of democracy, but this could prove a difficult test of its internal cohesion. Suspension would be largely symbolic. But symbolism matters in international politics - and this would be an appropriate way to signal the lack of legitimacy of the Kibaki government.

I have a long-standing interest in the Commonwealth, and co-wrote a couple of Foreign Policy Centre pamphlets in 1999, launched at the Commonwealth summit in South Africa in 1999. At the time, the report was rubbished by Zimbabwe's Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge who called it "the toilet paper of the summit", though our warning about the need for earlier action to prevent crises was borne about by events since.

The Republican race

2008-01-03T07:30:00.001Z

I want the Democrats to win in November. But there is widespread dissatisfaction among Republicans at the choices they have, and how the race has failed to crystallise.

It is difficult to know what to make of tonight's Republican contest in Iowa. The Mitt Romney - Mike Huckabee contest for first place may best be seen as a potential eliminator from which the right-wing contender for the nomination will emerge.

Somehow, the Mike Huckabee campaign is giving the impression of having turned into a serious Presidential bid. It shouldn't be. Huckabee has some charm, some startlingly absolutist right-wing views and no Presidential credentials at all, especially on foreign policy. Picking the low point of his campaign to date is difficult.

Was it attributing his poll surge to divine intervention?

There's only one explanation for it, and it's not a human one. It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people.

Not having heard of the Iran intelligence report the day after it had dominated the news agenda was worrying.

But he topped that this week as his spat with Mitt Romney got nastier. Huckabee's decision to defend John McCain from negative Romney attacks - John McCain is a hero - was a smart move. Somewhat, less smart was declaring that he was resisting the temptation to go negative himself in retaliation - before showing the negative attack ad he had decided not to air at his press conference. Huckabee is putting himself beyond satire.

Mitt Romney is deeply unimpressive. Apart from the high profile issue of his being a Mormon, he stirkes me as a something of an identikit Republican, running a nasty, negative campaign from the Lee Atwater-Karl Rove textbook. ( Joe Klein's Tale of Two Romneys nails this). His credentials to be President don't seem to stretch that far beyond running the Winter Olympics. He has already struggled with his various campaign misstatements.

I haven't been able to work out what Fred Thompson is for. Neither, I think, has the candidate.

For a long time, Rudy Giuliani seemed the Republican most likely to threaten the Democrats in November. He is a worrying prospect as President. Nuance would not be the watchword of his foreign policy. But the Democrats have not yet worked out how to counter their vulnerability on national security in the General Election - and a single issue 9/11 Giuliani campaign could exploit that. Giuliani's problem has always been the strategy to secure the nomination, given that he is beyond the pale for a significant part of the Republican base. He is rewriting the rules of the primary contest. It will be another month before we know whether his unconventional gameplan of marginalising the early contests has paid off, or has cost him his frontrunner status.

My Republican pick is John McCain. He has the credibility and experience to be President, as the (London) Times set out in a well argued editorial this week. I don't agree with his views on foreign policy - and he has done much to bolster President Bush - but he is a candidate who commands respect. McCain has problems with the Republican base but perhaps also, by trying to reposition towards them, with the independent voters he appealed to in 2000. He has struggled for momentum, but seems to be picking up as the voters think seriously about the Presidency.

I suspect Huckabee or Romney would be easier for the Democrats to defeat in November. But Clinton, Obama or Edwards are capable of winning against any of the Republican nominees. And, given that the US Presidency is at stake, it might be a good idea for both parties to put up somebody who could do the job.

The race is on ...

2008-01-03T06:45:00.001Z

The race for both nominations remains incredibly open as the first votes are cast. Firm predictions are probably foolish.

I have felt that John Edwards would do better in Iowa than many expect. He could come through to top the poll on the night. His union support and strong appeal to the Democrat base on economic inequality should help him in a caucus. It is less clear whether, even if it happened, that would make the nomination a genuine three way race for long.

The influential Des Moines Register poll was very good for Barack Obama. Still, that might not help him in the expectations game. (A lower profile CNN poll had Clinton ahead). That Obama's lead was based on his appeal to independent voters strengthens his claims to electability in November. But will they caucus tonight? (The New Republic blogunpicks the numbers).

Obama's chances depend on increasing the caucus turnout. The university holidays don't help him. (However, Time says his strategy is to 'campaign young, but organize gray'). First place would be a remarkable achievement. It is still an outsider insurgency campaign, but victory could give Obama the momentum into a closely contested New Hampshire primary to make the February 5th contest too close to call.

Hillary Clinton is still the frontrunner with a strong national lead, and remains the most likely Democratic nominee. She is electable in November, particularly this year. The experience and credibility cards are her strongest suit. But this is a 'change' election: standing for 'change' and for 'less risk' is a balancing act. With no President or Vice-President in the race, there are dangers in Clnton becoming the establishment 'continuity' candidate, despite being a Democrat bidding to succeed a Republican President. But a credible bid to be the first female President will mobilise support (as well as anti-Clinton opposition). The 'big bang' nationwide contest in 22 states on February 5th is good news for her campaign, but she needs to win one of the first three contests to prevent the campaign dynamic changing against her.

So I have a feeling its still going to be Hillary - but quite probably not tonight. And there is still everything to play for.

Ten steps to a better world after Bush

2008-01-01T23:23:00.000Z

I have a new year's day commentary ten steps to a better world on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.

This is extracted from my 'Manifesto for the World After Bush' in the new year Fabian Review, published on Thursday.

Kenya's democracy crisis

2007-12-31T19:23:00.000Z

Kenya's election campaign was a good advertisement for democracy. While Kenyans fear political polarisation along ethnic lines, this was a hard fought and vibrant campaign. The President was under pressure because he has disappointed, particularly on corruption, having had a clear mandate for change in 2002. The opposition ran a vigorous campaign, but was not promising a fundamental change of direction on economic or social policy.

But elections are also very much about how the votes are counted.

While reports on irregularities and complaints are still coming in. But it is already clear that the re-election of President Kibaki lacks credibility in Kenya, across Africa and internationally. Kenya has gone from one of the possible success stories of African democracy to a violent crisis which risks doing much to undermine its reputation for stability and gradual progress.

There can be no doubt, from the parliamentary results, that this was a 'change' election in Kenya. The Presidential contest was widely tipped as a knife-edge race, and may well have been closer than the parliamentary rout of government ministers. However, the scale of the difference between the parliamentary and presidential voting patterns is hard to credit or explain.

It is the coincidence of so many issues which has undermined the democratic credibility of the declared Presidential result: the lack of agreement on independent election commissioners; the delaying of the results from Kibaki's electoral stronghold; with specific irregularities in turnout which would support the theory that the delays were to find out how many votes were needed to win. The hastily rushed inauguration and the blackout of broadcast news in Kenya after the result have fuelled the crisis atmosphere.

The US government was slow to adapt its standard congratulatory message, but is now expressing concerns similar to those of the EU election monitors. The Commonwealth observers gave a mixed interim report - but have yet to give a verdict on the counting controversies which are now the central issue.

There will be a need for reconciliation among all parties. This may be difficult for an opposition with grounds to feel that it has been cheated. The hope must be that the parliamentary result and presidential controversy means that there is a need to negotiate some sort of effective power-sharing deal. But international pressure on a President who lacks legitimacy will be needed to achieve this.

The best round-up of news and commentary from inside Kenya and across Africa is on the AllAfrica.com site's Kenya pages.

Does Rawalpindi matter in Iowa?

2007-12-28T23:36:00.000Z

The parochial concern on the 2008 campaign trail was the need to appear Presidential in responding to news from Pakistan.

Despite the Bhutto assassination throwing US policy into deep flux, most candidates realised that their immediate responses should simply mirror the statements of President Bush and other world leaders - expressing shock and sympathy at the tragic news and pledging to redouble efforts for democracy and against terrorism.

Still, Mike Huckabee messed it up, bizarrely apologising for the assassination, before correcting his remarks later.

Fred Thompson was particularly concerned to make sure that people around the world didn't get the wrong idea from the apology.

With more time to consider, Huckabee put up a policy argument. The Bhutto assassination showed why the US needed to build a border fence with Mexico to keep out Pakistanis.

“We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country", he said.

Further clarifications defending these remarks did not seem to clarify much.

Mitt Romney had picked a bad day to argue that foreign policy experience doesn't matter all that much, though stressing the Reagan rather than the Dubya precedent to make his case:

“If the answer for leading this country is someone that has a lot of foreign policy experience, we can just go down to the State Department and pick up any one of the tens of thousands of people who’ve spent all their life in foreign policy.

Rudy Giuliani and John McCain stressed the opposite message to highlight their own experience.

On the Democrat side, the issue played to Hillary Clinton's experience on the international stage. Her personal relationship with Bhutto allowed her to stress that she will be ready on "day one" for the international demands of the Presidency. Perhaps for that reason, the Obama camp took an aggressive approach, bringing the issue back to the question of judgment over Iraq, sparking controversy about comments by Obama's strategist David Axelrod, who seemed to imply that Clinton's support of the Iraq war had contributed to the causes of the assassination.

Meanwhile, John Edwards placed a personal call to President Musharraf himself to press the case for democratic reform.

UPDATE: CNN quotes Huckabee campaign staff, explaining that his immigration comments were intended to distract attention from the fact that he has "no foreign policy credentials". Let's hope Iowa and New Hampshire care more about foreign policy experience than that.

Why the west must think again on Pakistan

2007-12-28T07:06:00.001Z

PThe desperate news of Benazir Bhutto's assassination in Pakistan yesterday brought back the memory of my father watching and being deeply affected by Indira Gandhi's funeral, broadcast on television here in Britain. I remember the strange spectacle of the funeral pyre which, to my ten year old self, seemed to burn for an age. My father's family in India, as middle-class Gujeratis, were natural Congress supporters. It was some time later that I learned that Indira had been a flawed, often divisive politician. Certainly a powerful female icon of political leadership but rather an ambiguous democrat. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, remains one of my political heroes. The key moment in embedding the world's largest democracy came in the 1977 emergency as India showed its democratic culture and institutions capable of rejecting the charismatic appeal of its founding dynasty.

Benazir Bhutto was also the flawed heir to a great, progressive political legacy, though hers was a bloody and turbulent inheritance defined by her father's execution by General Zia's military dictatorship. She had little to show for her two spells in office. Still, her death - and the courage of her final campaign - will rightly make her an enduring symbol of the desire for Pakistani democracy. That was not just the central theme of the tributes paid by world leaders. It is also echoed in the more nuanced and critical accounts from commentators and political opponents.

Bhutto's assassination also marks a failure of US and western polcy towards Pakistan. Over recent months, the top priority of the US administration had been brokering a Musharraf-Bhutto alliance, a strategy fraught with risk since the rift between the military and the Bhutto clan has dominated Pakistan's recent political history. The ostensible rationale was to bolster stability and western influence, yet those aims seemed to have become indistinguishable from the wish to 'bail out' President Musharraf.

It should now be clear that this broader strategy of backing Musharraf has now failed. The Washington debate has been about stability versus democracy - yet history is littered with evidence that making the 'strongman' choice for stability frequently delivers neither stability nor democracy. The broader mistake has been to place far too little emphasis on backing democratic principles and institution building, and instead too much on backing individuals, whose rhetorical commitment to those long-term goals has been, at best, contingent and more often lacking credibility entirely.

The argument for a change of policy is made powerfully by newspapers on three different continents today.

In London, The Guardian anticipates that Musharraf will claim to be the alternative to chaos, but notes that the claim has become threadbare:

This is by now a familiar speech. He made it when he first seized power as chief of the army eight years ago. He had made it when he launched a mini-coup by declaring a state of emergency on November 3. And he made it again last night. Each time he claims that the chaos in society justifies emergency powers, he fails to deliver that stability.

The New York Times is hopeful that the right policy might now be followed since all alternatives now appear to have been exhausted.

Betting America’s security (and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal) on an unaccountable dictator, President Pervez Musharraf, did not work. Betting it on a back-room alliance between that dictator and Ms. Bhutto, who had hoped to win a third try as prime minister next month, is no longer possible.

That leaves Mr. Bush with the principled, if unfamiliar, option of using American prestige and resources to fortify Pakistan’s badly battered democratic institutions. There is no time to waste.

The Times of India puts a related point perhaps most powerfully of all. The argument that "the top priority has to be stabilising the nation" is correct, but should not now imply once again reinforcing emergency powers for Musharraf. "Making Musharraf the main prop of the nation's stability has failed, decisively".most powerfully of all. says the paper, noting the highly questionable focus of this supposed path to democratisation in recent months.

Musharraf's administration has focused its energies on targeting lawyers, political activists, supreme court judges and mediapersons, sending thousands of peaceful activists to jail. While being unable to prevent terrorists from striking at will, not even in Rawalpindi, which is a garrison city as well as ISI's home base. The military has also been diverting aid meant for frontline troops fighting the Taliban and the Al-Qaida, for the sake of trophy arms purchases if not outright corruption.

Independent voices in Pakistan have expressed similar views. The day before the assassination, an editorial in Dawn, Pakistan's leading English language newspaper noted the lack of substantive foreign policy progress in the Karzai-Musharraf summit this week, noting that 'the president's decision to shed his uniform, the return of the exiled ex-prime ministers, and the on-going campaigning have not given Pakistan even a semblance of normality.

Yet one lesson of the failure of current western strategy is to appreciate the limits of what can be engineered from outside. The possibilities for constructive external diplomatic pressure will depend on internal developments. Benazir Bhutto's PPP was a strange hybrid - a wholly owned family fiedfdom and yet still perhaps the best hope for democracy. Turning a dynasty into a democratic movement must be the task of those seeking to construct the viable alternative to military rule or Islamism which Pakistan needs.

Will there be a public inquiry on Iraq?

2007-12-26T07:05:00.000Z

Today's Independent reports on the David Miliband interview in the new year issue of the Fabian Review. Asked by my colleague Tom Hampson about the case for a public inquiry, the Foreign Secretary said:

"I am obsessed with the next five years in Iraq, not the last five years in Iraq. And I think that the best 'inquiry' is putting the best brains to think about how to make sure the next five years in Iraq get that combination of political reconstruction, economic reconstruction and security improvement that are so essential."

As the Independent correctly reports, this is rather cooler than a number of previous Ministerial comments. The paper reports that this suggests that the government has "backtracked over demands for an independent inquiry into the mistakes made in the run-up to and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq". That could be a significant development.

However, the headline goes a bit further than the story itself. (As can often happen: reporters don't get to write or approve the headlines on their pieces). I think is too early to say "Government rules out inquiry into Iraq conflict". I think it is equally plausible to regard David Miliband's comment as an attempt to give a fairly neutral/open answer - that the focus should be on the future - because no decision has yet been taken or announced. Fabian Review is very important, of course. But it isn't Hansard! I don't see that Miliband has given a definite indication of future government policy.

In my view, the issue remains an open one. The case for an inquiry will continue, within and outside government.

The call for a public inquiry is one of the points in my own 10-point 'Manifesto for the World After Bush', which will also be published in the Fabian Review.

"Learn the lessons of Iraq to rethink intervention"

We must learn many lessons after the Iraq war – from the failures of intelligence and diplomacy to the shameful lack of a reconstruction plan. In the UK, Gordon Brown should announce that a full public inquiry will begin once British troops leave Iraq. Increased government contributions to the Iraqi Reconstruction Fund (IRFFI), and civil society engagement with Iraqi media, trade unions and other bulwarks of democracy is the best way to reflect our continuing moral responsibility to post-war Iraq.

Learning the lessons of a catastrophic pre-emptive intervention should not involve ignoring genocide in future. The UN Responsibility to Protect principles should be at the heart of a new European Security Strategy: national governments should promote much greater awareness of how these principles address public concerns about how intervention can be effective and legitimate

...

Bush and Blair: the million dollar question

2007-12-21T15:03:00.000Z

This blog is about looking forward, but that also depends on learning the lessons of how and why we got here.

Ben Furber asks me this million dollar question:

'Why on earth did Blair have this relationship with Bush and why doesn’t Brown now run a hundred miles in the opposite direction?'

Response follows later on

Could inexperienced Obama still claim an edge on foreign policy?

2007-12-18T23:50:00.000Z

Obama has gone on the front foot on foreign policy, countering charges of a lack of experience. This area of comparative Obama weakness is a key message of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Despite this, Obama can also claim three advantages over the Democratic field.

Firstly, he made a brave call in opposing Iraq. And his measured reasons for doing so look ever better with hindsight. Hence his slogan 'Judgment to Lead'.

He also says he is "running to do more than end the war in Iraq. "I'm even more interested in ending the mind-set that got us into it. It's easy for us to lay all of the problems of the world at George Bush's doorstep."

Secondly, does being a third culture kid give Obama with 'superior intuition' on foreign policy, as Zbigniew Brzezinski, chief national security adviser to the Carter Presidency, suggests?

Thirdly, and most powerfully of all, image.

The day I'm inaugurated, not only will the country look at itself differently, but the world will look at America differently

For that reason, President Obama would be the most likely to engage and excite non-Americans. But will that help or hinder him at home?

For, while the world is watching, it is Americans who will vote.

Experience versus inspiration?

2007-12-18T22:53:00.000Z

EJ Dionne offers an incisive analysis of what he calls Hillary's moment of great peril, as the campaign got interesting again at just the wrong moment for the long-time front-runner. As Dionne says:

if Obama, with his soaring and idealistic rhetoric, has been more theme than pudding, Clinton's campaign has been more pudding than theme.

Obama's broadside against "the same old Washington textbook campaigns" does score an effective hit against the guarded tactics and caution of his opponent. (But at least, the Clinton campaign pulled back from what looked like a potentially fatal flirtation with 'going negative', which would surely have played to Obama's strengths with primary voters, by giving him the moral high ground to go with his recent momentum).

Many Democrats' priority will be to pick a winner. But the contrasting strengths and weaknesses of the front-runners make the balance of risk a more open question than it had seemed. The Des Moines Register's endorsement may well capture the conundrum faced by undecided Democrats in trying to weigh experience and inspiration.

Indeed, Obama, her chief rival, inspired our imaginations. But it was Clinton who inspired our confidence.

Perhaps the experience card will still prove trumps for Hillary Clinton - but that may depend on playing it less defensively and with a smite more inspiration too.

Coming soon: A manifesto for the World After Bush

2007-12-18T00:53:00.000Z

The new year issue of the Fabian Review has gone off to the printers.

The cover story is our 10 point manifesto for the World After Bush. The issue is full of practical ideas for a better world, as we gear up for the big Change the World conference in January.

Malcolm Chalmers' essay on Iran sets out what should happen next, now that the US intelligence report appears to have taken the imminent threat of a military confrontation.

And my colleague Tom Hampson has a very interesting interview with foreign secretary David Miliband.

Fabian members receive Fabian Review every quarter as part of their membership, along with our influential pamphlets and invitations to free lectures and debates.

You can join the Fabians here

Clinton v Obama: a generation divide?

2007-12-18T00:23:00.000Z

Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic Journal essay on Obama was extracted in this week's Sunday Times here in London.

Sullivan does more than make the moderate conservative case for Obama; he claims that only Obama can end the culture wars of post-Vietnam United States. (That these are strange times for the Republican Party can be seen by Sullivan's decision to back Ron Paul for the nomination).

I was particularly struck by this claim that the generational divide between the candidates explains why Obama is less defensive than Clinton about progressive values.

A generational divide also separates Clinton and Obama with respect to domestic politics. Clinton grew up saturated in the conflict that still defines American politics. As a liberal, she has spent years in a defensive crouch against triumphant post-Reagan conservatism. The mau-mauing that greeted her health-care plan and the endless nightmares of her husband’s scandals drove her deeper into her political bunker. Her liberalism is warped by what you might call a Political Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Reagan spooked people on the left, especially those, like Clinton, who were interested primarily in winning power. She has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives. And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.

Obama, simply by virtue of when he was born, is free of this defensiveness. Strictly speaking, he is at the tail end of the Boomer generation. But he is not of it.

This is a contrast between the tactical politics of triangulation, and what Sullivan takes to be Obama's instinctive and principled moderation. (Closer tom home, Sullivan's critique of Hillary Clinton chimes strongly with the lack of confidence being shown by the Brown government here in the UK. The scars of Labour's 1992 defeat still run deep: both Blair and Brown have feared that Britain remains an essentially conservative country).

Sullivan's neatly argued conclusion captures why it is so difficult to work out where voters will decide the greater risk lies, with Hillary still favourite but the momentum having been very much with Obama this past week.

The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable.

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary.

Huckabee's worldview: treat Saudi Arabia like we treat Sweden

2007-12-17T00:38:00.000Z

Setting out your would-be Presidential worldview for the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal is one of the rites of passage for any candidate. It is a worthwhile exercise, in a campaign where the rest of the world can become an afterthought, though there aren't many surprises, as candidates add a little intellectual polish to the usual stump speech.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's contribution may merit more attention than most. Huckabee is fast becoming the joker in the Republican pack, with the polls suggesting he is a serious contender.

But it is difficult to imagine any Presidential candidate - including, probably, Bush in 2000, having less experience or interest in foreign policy.

Huckabee's worldview is somewhat all over the place. But most striking is the opening in which he sounds like Obama on foreign policy and how America should lead in the world if it wants others to follow.

Huckabee writes:

"The United States, as the world's only superpower, is less vulnerable to military defeat. But it is more vulnerable to the animosity of other countries. Much like a top high school student, if it is modest about its abilities and achievements, if it is generous in helping others, it is loved. But if it attempts to dominate others, it is despised.

The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad".

He writes too of wanting to "treat Saudi Arabia like we treat Sweden" and makes energy independence a priority.

The article has evoked criticism from Republican rivals for using the Democrats' playbook and talking points.
Yet Huckabee's evident talent has been for empathy for the public mood. Whether his quirky campaign maintains its momentum remains to be seen. But the changes needed to restore respect for America may be becoming a bipartisan theme.

Beyond Bali: what should happen to those who don't sign up?

2007-12-17T00:01:00.000Z

It is not difficult to point out flaws in the Bali agreement on climate change, such as the absence of hard numbers from the commitment to make carbon cuts. But, as a mandate to negotiate, it is important in opening the possibility, at least, of a post-Kyoto deal by the end of 2009.

Climate change is unlike any other diplomatic issue.

On global trade, for example, negotiators might consider that they had made significant progress if everybody could get 50% of what they came for. On climate change, half a loaf would simply not be enough. The imperative must be to get a deal which meets the scientific evidence - not the best political deal possible.

Yet what is negotiated internationally also requires deep domestic change. Our way of life will have to change because of what is negotiated around the conference table.

The drama of the final hours of the Bali summit showed how the debate has shifted. The US had to concede, under pressure, because an unenthusiastic White House did not want to be isolated and accused of wrecking all progress. This demonstrates the way in which US opinion has changed a great deal (below federal level). With Australia having changed sides following Kevin Rudd's election victory, the divisions are not nearly so deep as they were over Kyoto.

If we can achieve a deeper consensus by 2009, this will raise another important question where the public debate has barely begun . What should happen to countries which don't agree to fair binding targets for carbon cuts in a post-Kyoto agreement? There will be much hostility to those attempting to 'free ride' on the efforts of everybody else - and we can expect calls for protection where 'unfair' competition is not bound by the same rules.

The world after Bush: the positive agenda we need

2007-12-16T20:26:00.000Z

On a bright, cold day in January as the Washington clocks strike twelve, you might just, if you listen carefully, be able to hear a swooshing sigh of relief as it travels around the world. As the 44th President of the United States takes the oath of office at noon on the 20th January 2009, George W Bush's Presidency will enter the history books.

But what happens next?

We will need much more than a critique of what should have done differently.

Those of us who believe we need a 'new multilateralism' to deal with the global challenges of our age must show that we can find the ideas, the policies and the political strategy to make it work.

The Bush revolution in foreign policy has failed. But that does not mean there will be automatic swing back to a more internationalist approach. Traditional realists, for whom foreign policy must be a values-free zone, and left oppositionists, for whom western iniquity is at the root of every global problem, feel vindicated by events, while many liberal internationalists are divided and demoralised.

This blog will seek to contribute to debate about the new ideas which can be turned into an effective multilateral agenda.

It will discuss the impact of the US election campaign, as voters prepare to elect a new President. But it will place at least as much emphasis on what those outside the United States - particularly in Britain and the rest of the European Union - must do to make a 'new multilateralism' effective.

The blog will draw on and debate the ideas of a significant Fabian Society strand of activity on the world after Bush, including the major 'Change the World' conference in January 2008, and further events and publications across the year, as well as drawing on a wider range of contributions and ideas.

The Fabian Society has run a series of activities on this theme over the last 18 months. Here are some selected highlights:

* Sunder Katwala's Fabian essay, 'The World After Bush' published in the summer 2006 Fabian Review, a global politics special issue, calling for a more confident 'neo-prog' agenda to challenge that of the neo-cons.

* Charles Clarke's Fabian Next Decade lecture, 'The World After Bush' in November 2006, argued for a recommitment to liberal internationalism and arguing that this requires a stronger British commitment to the EU, and a rethinking of the renewal of Trident.

* Glenys Kinnock's Fabian Review article ' in 'What needs to change in foreign policy, in December 2006, argues that returning ethics to the centre of foreign policy demands a rethinking of the 'special relationship' with the United States. Glenys Kinnock debated this with Hilary Benn
at the Fabian new year conference in January 2007.

* Tony Klug's Fabian freethinking paper 'How peace broke out in the Middle East: a brief history of the future, which has been widely acclaimed for its advocacy of the possibility and necessity of a just settlement for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Our fringe debate (full transcript) 'What do Iran's democrats want from us?' held by the Fabian Society and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Bournemouth in Autumn 2007.

The big event: "Change the World", Saturday 19th January 2008, London

2007-12-16T14:38:00.000Z

The Fabian Society will kick off a year of new ideas in global politics with the Fabian New Year Conference, Change the World. Programme and speaker information will be updated on the Fabian site. Tickets can be booked online

Exactly one year and one day before a new US President takes office, the event will debate the ideas that can change international politics, and ask what progressives in Britain and Europe should do to make a new multilateralism effective.

Key themes include democratic responses to terrorism, climate change, intervention after Iraq, Middle East peace, Iran, migration, and development.

In addition to a major keynote speech, confirmed speakers include Hilary Benn, Shami Chakrabarti, Catherine Fieschi, Timothy Garton-Ash, Will Hutton, Mary Kaldor, John Kampfner, Sunder Katwala, Mark Leonard, Catherine Mayer, Ed Miliband, Sir Christopher Meyer, Polly Toynbee, Margot Wallstrom and Shirley Williams.

The Fabian conference has a strong reputation for kicking off the political year, with the next decade conference previewing a year of transition in 2007, and the future of Britishness conference with Gordon Brown continuing to reverberate.

The event is held in association with media partners, The Guardian and the New Statesman, and our international partners E! Sharp, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Policy Network, Oxfam, Amnesty International and Critica Sociale.