Obama is showing early wisdom in his likely cabinet choices

The Clinton-haters are having a seizure. Liberals who convinced themselves that Fox News was right - and Obama would be a red-blooded socialist - feel betrayed. Meanwhile the President-elect is proving himself to be a shrewd seeker of real talent, as he makes his cabinet picks; a process, incidentally, at which careful planning has left him well advanced on his predecessors including Bill Clinton.

Of course, we don't yet know some of the key picks, such as whether Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State or whether Bush's Defence Secretary Robert Gates will stay in post. And Obama has already announced top jobs for team loyalists in his picks of Eric Holder as the first African-American Attorney General, Tom Daschle at health and Gov Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security.

So, why pick Hillary? Gerard Baker in The Times, no fan of Hillary, makes the case eloquently (even if he draws a different conclusion in the end):

First, few doubt that she is qualified to do it. She demonstrated on the campaign trail the breadth of her intellectual reach, a genuine depth of knowledge on global affairs and the sort of energy needed for someone who might fly half a million miles in the course of a year. What's more, it is not as though there was a great range of alternatives. John Kerry, first mooted for the job a while back, famously aloof and arrogant, might have proved a diplomatic disaster. Bill Richardson, the New Mexico Governor with the colourful past, was too risky for the global stage. Richard Holbrooke, the self-appointed dean of Democratic diplomacy, had alienated too many of the Obama foreign policy team through his disdainful dismissal of their inexperience during the primary campaign. Tony Lake, Senator Obama's principal foreign policy adviser in the campaign, said he didn't want the job. Tom Daschle, the former leader of the Senate Democrats and an early adopter of the Obama brand, seemed to lack the global heft to be the public face of the new president. So why not go with the best qualified candidate?

Baker thinks that there would be too much drama if Hillary is selected, and that she would be running a permanent 2012 Presidential campaign as the most prominent member of Obama's team. But Time magazine points out here that selecting her could have the opposite effect, and be as much raw politics in Obama's case as the politics of change.

At the same time, Obama is reaching out to Republicans including John McCain and Gates to show just how inclusive - and imaginative - his administration will be. Of course, there are the leaks and the briefings. But the process is still in better shape than the media lets on: Obama is not only well advanced, he is showing real imagination in the transition.

Obama's night of triumph

Barack Obama looks certain to be the next American President. There are still close races yet to call, but with Pennsylvania staying blue, Iowa and Ohio going blue also and Florida likely to do so, this looks like as good a night for the Democrats as they had with Bill Clinton in the nineties. For that he deserves great credit for a brilliant campaign. But he was also blessed in his opponent's bizarre strategy of turning right and embracing rightwing tactics rather than seeking the centrist votes he was elected to win.

Obama won on a mandate for change, but the one lesson he must learn from Clinton is that his capacity for change will be determined by how well he prioritises over the coming months. He must aboid any gesture politics, and show that he can make a real difference on the economy in the immediate term and healthcare in the longer term. He must make good cabinet appointments and he must show the right mix of caution and conviction with respect to foreign policy - experience he has gained as a result of the campaign.

Obama is fortunate in that he doesn't have the baggage that Bill Clinton had from the campaign - Ayers and Acorn may get Fox viewers steaming, but few others care - but he must show that his bipartisanship extends beyond campaign rhetoric. All that is for the weeks ahead. But tonight is a moment of history, and one to be savoured.

Is Obama really in landslide territory?

There are plenty of predictions around about tonight's result. There seems to be a consensus among many, including Luke, that Obama should pick up Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, giving him around 311-227 electoral college votes over McCain, a healthy margin of victory. Others would add Florida to the Obama column, and there are rumblings about places like Georgia, South Carolina and Montana. Such a result would be a remarkable achievement for Obama, and not just because he would become America's first black president.

But none of these represents the sort of landslide that Reagan or Nixon enjoyed over liberal Democrat opponents in the past, or - unless all the toss-up states go Obama's way - even those Bill Clinton had in his two victories.

The RealClearPolitics polling maps are a great reminder of how things once were. In 1972, George McGovern won just 17 electoral college votes, taking Massachussets and Washington DC. In 1980, against Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter got just 49 votes, including his native Georgia. Four years later, Walter Mondale was reduced to 17 votes - his home state of Minnesota and DC. Mike Dukakis at least managed to add a few states - including the now blue state of West Virginia - to amass 111 votes. By 1992, the tables were turned as Bill Clinton defeated George Bush (the first) 370-168 picking up states now seen as solidly red for Presidential polls such as Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee (his and Gore's home states), Georgia and Kentucky, but not Virginia. Bob Dole lost 9 of Bush's electoral college votes in 1996 to get just 159 votes. Only the two more recent elections, with 271-267 and 286-252, have been relatively close.

So, will this really will be a landslide, or will the cautious projections be closer to the mark? Either way, it is likely to be a historic result.

Obama's strength on the home stretch

According to some of our Sunday papers, Barack Obama's campaign has been 'rocked' by revelations that a distant half-aunt who donated £200 to his campaign is an illegal immigrant. I don't think so. Far more damaging to McCain's campaign was the latest effort to make Sarah Palin look stupid. A look at the latest polls shows that far from tightening, the polls are widening in Obama's favour. RealClearPolitics now expects a landslide with Obama winning with 168 more electoral votes than McCain. It really does look now like Yes he Can.

Obama's strong lead and campaigning strengths

As a supporter of Hillary Clinton, I confess I was sceptical about Barack Obama. I felt he was policy-lite and that he would be scuppered by the Republican attack machine. Twelve days out from the election - with many people already voting - I have to confess I underestimated his strengths.

Obama has proven a resilient campaigner. His calm response to the economic crisis contrasted with the floundering of John McCain. His selection of the dull if gaffe-prone Joe Biden as his running mate has proven a wiser choice than the increasingly divisive Sarah Palin, who has become a figure of fun for independent voters as much as Democrats. In a characteristically powerful piece for Time magazine, Joe Klein explains how those qualities have been melded with a much clearer view of policies. (As Klein says, Obama's book Audacity of Hope was hardly audacious on the policy front.)

Of course, there are still 12 days to go, and one is naturally inclined towards the caution of Jonathan Freedland in yesterday's Guardian. But the polls are very different now: Obama is ten points ahead in Virginia, for goodness sake! He looks the leader that John Kerry never seemed. He has avoided the faux-populism that cost Al Gore the 2000 poll. And the feeble attempts by the Republicans and Fox News to crank up scandals about Acorn voter drives and 60s radical William Ayers just look pathetic, especially given Republican links to Acorn.

Obama has proved himself as the best Democratic candidate since Clinton. If, as seems increasingly likely, he is elected as their first president since then, he will need to show that his policies - and some such as his healthcare proposals need some work - can be put into effect at the same time as managing the aftershock of the financial crisis. And in doing so, he must show a sureness of touch that Bill Clinton lacked in his early days in the White House.

The Republican meltdown

Yesterday's extraordinary vote by Congress against the rescue plan for the US finance system shows just how far removed the Republicans in Congress have become not only from their President but from the rest of the world. It is not, as Janet Daley disingenuously claims, primarily the fault of an overly partisan Nancy Pelosi that the Republicans backed their President less than the Democrats did. It is the fault, as David Brooks points out, of the talk show mentality that has afflicted their politics, and some rightly wonder whether it could split the party.

All this is bad news for John McCain. The VP debate may not go as badly for Sarah Palin as everyone expects - Joe Biden has escaped lightly for his buffoonery of late, including his declaration to CBS News's Katie Couric that folks sat round watching President Roosevelt on TV during the Wall Street Crash in the 1920s.



And she will not be allowed by her minders to repeat her own performance with Couric, wonderfully satirised on Saturday Night Live, so could benefit from decidedly low expectations.



But McCain was underwhelming on the economy in his own debate against Obama last Friday and it is increasingly clear that his intervention helped push floating Republicans against the bailout.

The polls now show Obama opening up a significant lead, which he needs to translate into some more key states. But at this stage, the Presidency is Obama's to lose.

Wall Street turmoil highlights McCain's big weakness

Finally, Obama's team seem to have realised how to fight the Republicans. The polls are moving again in Obama's favour. McCain has not only made a prize ass of himself on the economy, Obama's team have seized the opportunity to put him on the defensive. He is back to attacking McCain and ignoring Palin, as her novelty is paling. As his ad which forced McCain on the defensive showed, this requires being on the ball politically.

Obama needs to show he means business

For all the phoney fuss over Obama's use of porcine colloquialisms, shrewder observers detect a bigger problem with his campaign. Newsweek and MSNBC's Howard Fineman offers a good summary:

• Declining to take federal financing for the general
• Declining McCain’s offer to hold ten town hall debates
• Failing to go all the way with the Clintons (not being nicer to them)
• The 22-state strategy (wasting time in unwinnable states)
• Failing to state a sweeping, but concrete, policy idea
• Remaining trapped in professor-observer speak
• Failing to attack McCain early

Obama can turn things around; he should do more debates with McCain for example. His team simply can't afford to keep letting the McCain team define the news agenda with their pseudo-controversies. As others have said, Obama should focus on McCain, leaving surrogates to deal with any misstatements by Sarah Palin. Obama's people need to start setting the agenda, rather than allowing themselves to be put on the defensive.

Overturning the McCain-Palin lead

Today's USA Today/Gallup poll gives the McCain/Palin ticket a 10-point lead among likely voters, helping give the Republicans their first advantage in weeks in the RealClearPolitics average. The candidates - Palin excepted, as she mugs up on likely interviewers' googlies before sitting down with ABC News - were on yesterday's talk shows, and one thing is clearer: Obama is by far the more impressive of the principal candidates, not least after a dismal, low key speech by McCain. But unless the Democrats can find an effective way of neutralising the political message that Palin brings without resorting to the personal and patronising, they will stay on a losing streak.

Obama's attempts both to respect her skills and to link her to Bush, pointing out that she holds more extreme views than McCain, strikes the right tone.

She wouldn't be governor of Alaska if she wasn't a skilled politician, and I think her performance at the convention showed what a skilled politician she is.....[McCain] chose somebody who may be even more aligned with George Bush – or Dick Cheney, or the politics we’ve seen over the last eight years – than John McCain himself is.

And there is plenty of opportunity for flip-flop ads on McCain. The Democrats need to able to do so with good humour and straight facts. As noted here shortly after Palin's selection, McCain played a political blinder in selecting Palin, notwithstanding her wacko views on creationism or her lack of a longterm passport.

The next move is with the Democrats. And it needs to be a smart one.

A smart move by McCain

So, John McCain's running mate will be Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Despite her right-wing politics, the 44-year old mother may prove attractive to those waverers who were disappointed by Hillary's loss, and remain unconvinced by Obama. It shows just what a tight race this is likely to be. McCain has played a blinder on this with all that talk about Mitt Romney, and he will doubtless play some more before this contest is decided. One can only hope that Obama has some people of similar tactical skill on his team. Having done the business in Denver, Obama needs to ensure he gives as good as he gets.

Obama can win, but he needs clarity on what he will do and how he will do it

Barack Obama's speech last night was every bit as impressive a performance as one would expect from someone of his oratorical skills. He rightly eschewed too much grand rhetoric for more down to earth detail, and was not afraid to start attacking John McCain, in that "respectful" way that Democrats do these days. One can hope that he will be more like John Kerry 2008 than John Kerry 2004 in that respect, not least when McCain has hired the entire Republican dirty tricks crew to do his 'straight talking' for him.



From Obama's point of view, this has been a good convention. There have been great performances by his wife, Michelle and the Clintons. Ted Kennedy's emotional appearance and Joe Biden's contribution will have helped galvanise Democrats, and may improve Obama's credibility with blue collar voters. But it is still not yet clear what Obama's strategy is to win over centre ground voters and moderate Republicans. In part, he needs to remind people of Bush's failures, and do so unapologetically. In part, he must hope that McCain's tetchiness gets the better of him, as it seems to have done with Time this week.

But in big part, this is also going to depend on persuading enough people that he is the right man for these times. He has made some silly gaffes, the biggest of which was the Berlin rally; despite his difficult upbringing, he has allowed himself to appear more elitist than seven-home owning John McCain. But his basic platform is stronger and (education excepted, where he is too beholden to vested interests despite some frankness on sacking poor teachers) a lot more consistent than his liberal critics contend. He needs now to find a few clear policy areas - Iraq aside -on which to define himself in ways that transcend the historical nature of his candidacy.

The polls may be close now, and are likely to be no less so after the Republican convention. If Obama gets it right, he can transcend the attacks and win in November. But his team need to be attuned to winning a national election not just carving up liberal caucus votes. He needs to be clear what his key pledges are and repeat them until people know what they are and how they will be delivered. He made a good start last night. But it is just a start.

Maybe he can't?

Barack Obama has proved himself to be exactly the candidate many of us feared he would be - aloof and elitist, with little capacity to deal with the Republican attack machine. Sure, he has the right image for crowds in Berlin or Guardianistas in Britain. But his lack of the common touch is proving his Achilles heel. News from Zogby that he trails John McCain 46-41 confirms this blog's worst fears. With next week's Denver convention, Obama still has a chance to turn things round. He can get a good VP candidate; and he can hope that McCain's notorious temper gets the better of him. But as the candidate who won on the basis of leftist caucuses rather than popular primaries, it is a tall order to win through. I hope he succeeds. But the odds are now stacking up against him.

Obama's chances in November

Bill Clinton was right about one thing. The media has been hopelessly biased in favour of Obama and against Hillary. The coverage of her was mysogynistic, boarding on the hysterical, and the glee with which BBC and Channel 4 correspondents recorded Hillary's final defeat over the last 24 hours confirmed their extraordinary lack of objectivity.

Yes, Hillary made some mistakes; and Bill sometimes misspoke. But where Obama did the same, with a few days' exception, he was given a pass. His people could trash her and her supporters with impunity; if she attempted to draw attention to his flaws and flawed supporters, she was the one at fault. Despite all this, Hillary remained - though the media haven't shared this - the stronger candidate against Obama with a stronger chance of winning more crucial electoral college votes. She beat him marginally on the popular vote when Michigan is included, or came within 0.1% of him without it. She won South Dakota last night, which polls said would go to Obama. So, even though the bizarre weighting of the Democratic primaries and caucuses meant she lost, she was hardly the sure-fire loser that our media would have us believe.

Nevertheless, Obama is clearly now the candidate, and it is vital that Hillary does all she can to bring her supporters behind him, particularly in crucial swing states. He has shown a graciousness of late that had hitherto eluded him, which is a good sign. And he is clearly a much stronger candidate than either the woeful John Kerry in 2004 or Al Gore in 2000.

But both Obama and McCain now face some real testing on issues of the economy and international policy, with McCain weaker on the former and Obama on the latter. Rhetorical flourish will get Obama far but he will need to become stronger in longer TV interviews and dealing in details; he will need to show a ruthlessness about his team and 'advisers' over the coming months that has previously been lacking. The fact that far more of his support has come from liberal caucuses in the Democrat contest should not deceive him into imagining that such positions will propel him to victory in the autumn, not least in those same states.

Obama will need to appeal to the centre-ground now - and that will require a change of tune and a clearer understanding of the issues that matter to middle America. Obama may be (just) the favourite now; but he has had an extraordinarily fair wind behind him up to this point. His challenge now is to anticipate the next phase of the campaign - and the changes needed by him to win it - with the same skill that he used to appeal to liberals to win the Democratic nomination. I hope he succeeds in doing so.

Why Hillary can win, where Obama can't

Despite the continued demonisation of Hillary Clinton in the European press, it is worth reminding ourselves why she is still in the race - and why only she is likely beat John McCain in the autumn. Since this is not the received wisdom in our liberal media, some facts may help. First, according to the most reliable latest polling, Hillary would defeat McCain by three points in a general election, whereas Barack Obama would merely score a tie (and even that is before the Republican smear machine gets to work). And the reason lies in states like Pennsylvania where Hillary is scooping up Reagan Democrats, as a fascinating article and poll in this week's Time magazine demonstrates:

Democrats rarely have to worry about the urban centers or the college towns falling into line. Clinton's core constituency, by contrast, is a group that Democrats must win but frequently don't. Working-class whites, despite their historical ties to the Democratic Party, have shown time and again that they will defect if they don't like the nominee.....Ever since he launched his campaign in Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Obama has been happy to have himself compared with the original skinny outsider from Illinois. But as this race goes on, the image of another Illinois icon looms. The shape of the Pennsylvania electorate, and the prospect of a contentious convention, evokes 1952, when Adlai Stevenson--the darling of "every thinking person," as one woman later famously phrased it--captured a fiercely contested nomination by putting the urban and the urbane blocs together. But he never won over the white working class, and that's why there never was a President Stevenson.

Has Hillary blown it?

Last night's Texas debate set few hearts racing. Meanwhile, the polls suggest that Hillary's Texas and Ohio leads are being cut to single digits, although she is still strong in Pennsylvania. But it is looking increasingly likely that Barack Obama will be the Democratic candidate come November. Yet the result may not be the Democratic triumph that the current polls suggest. As Gerard Baker points out in a characteristically caustic assessment in today's Times, the comments by Michelle Obama this week about her lack of pride in America until her husband starting winning primaries do not bode well for a full-on fight with the Republican attack machine. Not that John McCain hasn't got his own problems. But one strength that Hillary had was her careful positioning over several years on a range of issues that had previously turned off potential voters. To be fair, Obama has been as careful to cultivate churchgoers as Clinton, abandoning the astonishing ineptitude of the Kerry campaign in 2004. But the winning of independents in caucuses in not the same as winning independents in the general election; and it is not clear that the Obama campaign recognises this yet or the pitfalls that await them. Hillary may defy the pollsters - as, to be fair, she did in California and New Hampshire - and regain a much bigger lead in Texas and Ohio (at least postal votes may help there). Unless she does, her husband is right to conclude that she will have blown her chance of becoming the first woman president in the United States.

Las Vegas pays out for Hillary

Hillary's win in Nevada yesterday doesn't mean she will take South Carolina - Obama must still be the favourite there - but it puts her firmly on course for Super Duper Tuesday in February. And she owes her win not only to women, but to Hispanics and to Las Vegas casino workers, who ignored the union diktats that they should support Obama. Hillary is now even more firmly the favourite to win the nomination; however, she is also more likely to face her toughest potential opponent, John McCain, given his victory in South Carolina's Republican Primary. It will be an extraordinarily tight race if that happens.

McCain is the only real rival to Clinton or Obama

Mitt Romney, the unimpressive flip-flopper who has tried to disavow his relatively liberal governorship of Massachusetts, should savour his Michigan victory (or 'comeback' as he tried to call it, though it wasn't clear from what). Democrats - both Clinton and Obama supporters should do so too - because the truth is that the only Republican who has much chance of defeating a Democrat for the White House is John McCain. All the polls show the two Democrat front-runners substantially beating Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani (who seems to have blown his chances) and the ridiculous Ron Paul. But several still put the independent-minded McCain ahead (though CNN recently had him behind). So let's hope the Republican voters continue to muddy the field to give Hillary (or Obama) a clear run.