Hillary's potential path to 2016

This blog backed Hillary Clinton during the last US Presidential election campaign, even though Barack Obama was the clear favourite among many liberals here and in the US. There is no doubt that Obama's election was a remarkable historic occasion. He has also - after some flapping - delivered on some key policy objectives like health care. He has also made imaginative appointments to some top jobs, including the Supreme Court (and the Secretary of State). But what is remarkable is that he has also managed - not entirely due to the combined wackos of Fox News and the Tea Party movement - to lose so much of the goodwill that greeted his election.

Obama lacks the emotion expected of US commanders in chief - which may endear him to many in Europe, but doesn't work in domestic crises - and has a surprising unsureness of touch whether it is in handling the BP crisis where he has gained no credit for forcing them to establish a £20bn fund to help victims of the oil leak or on selling his health or banking reforms to a wider electorate. He has been better on policy delivery than might have been anticipated - but far worse at presentation and selling his policies. And that matters in politics.

Despite being a largely disorganised affair with Sarah Palin their only recognisable figurehead, the Republicans are averaging a six-point lead in November's midterm elections. They are on course to make a net gain of six state governorships, could regain the House (despite a slight Democrat lead in generic polls) and reduce the Democrats' Senate majority considerably. And it has to be said that a big reason for their ability to do so is the inability of Obama to reach out to the electorate: the very criticisms that were made of him in states like Pennsylvania in the primaries now appear writ large on a national stage.

At the same time, Obama's decision to appoint Hillary Clinton has proved, despite her initial misgivings about accepting the post, to be a boon to her reputation. Her personal popularity is much higher than his, in excess of 60% and sometimes as high as 70% approval ratings. She has been loyal to a fault, and largely successful on the international stage. She is highly respected in the military: even today, with General McChrystal ranting to Rolling Stone about her White House colleagues, he gives Hillary a pass. Now there is serious talk of replacing the hapless Joe Biden as VP with Hillary, either after the midterms or for as an Obama running mate in 2012, allowing her to run for the top job in 2016. While such talk may be fanciful and speculative for now, the evidence is growing that it isn't just Bill who knows how to be the Comeback Kid.

Obama's fine start

A brilliant start. Let's hope he can keep this tone and spirit going.

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.

What on earth is the BBC up to?

Could the Director General explain why the BBC believes it needs to waste thousands of pounds of taxpayer money sending hundreds of hacks to provide inferior coverage of the US elections, instead of running a feed from one of the US networks? It is a complete waste of money in these days of satellite and digital TV, when any sane person would turn to CNN's excellent coverage (or Fox, if that's your poison) instead.

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.

Transatlantic endorsements

William Hague is tut-tutting because Gordon Brown has penned an article - or, more likely, one of his political advisers has done so on his behalf - which praises Barack Obama for his "foreclosure prevention fund", whatever that may be.

According to the Shadow Foreign Secretary: "A responsible British prime minister needs to be ready to work with either presidential candidate after the US election, and should neither take sides nor be seen to be taking sides."

Quite. After all, Hague's former colleague John Major reportedly ordered the trawling of Home Office files for dirt on Bill Clinton's time as a student in the UK, during the 1992 Presidential election, and Douglas Hurd sent a message to Republican Secretary of State James Baker, "May you bring down every duck in the last flight of the shoot." (Tories sent messages like that then)

Clearly a mildly partisan article for Parliamentary Monitor is the more heinous offence.

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.

Palin for President (Michael, that is)

Hat tip to Tom Watson for this highly entertaining video:

Sneering at Sarah won't win the Dems the White House

Last night, the Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, gave a good account of herself in her new role as Republican vice-presidential candidate. There is no doubt that she is a strong right-wing conservative; and she has been embarrassed -though not as much as liberal critics might wish - by revelations about her family. But she showed last night in a well constructed speech, and in a particularly clever jibe about Obama's experience as a 'community organiser', that she is no slouch when it comes to gentle but devastating putdowns:

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organiser", except that you have actual responsibilities.

Those are the skills that may see her through a televised debate with her uber-experienced Democratic opponent Joe Biden. Since Obama thinks the same in private about his community organising years, this was a cleverer jibe than it might seem. But her performance should also serve as a warning to Democrats and their supporters who seem to think that sneering at Sarah will see them through.

Many swing American voters will be unimpressed by the sneering, which recalls Obama's putdown of 'bitter' small town Americans that cost him votes in the primaries against Hillary Clinton. Obama's lead has advanced since the convention, but it is still far lower than that enjoyed by Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Obama needs to embrace many of the voters who are impressed by the small town girl made good image of Sarah - and her family and hunting credentials - if he is to win in November. That they may not share her born-again Christianity or her opposition to abortion is beside the point; they will respect many of her values and will not respect those who sneer at them. Of course, it is fair game to attack her policies - and her approach to abortion, the environment or Alaskan independence are certainly fair game - but that is different from the sort of patronising putdowns that have characterised a lot of the coverage in recent days. And if it continues, it will backfire badly for the Democrats.

Obama needs to ensure that his campaign is seen to be on the side of small town as well as urban America, if he is not to repeat the mistakes of John Kerry. A McCain-Palin ticket would be disastrous for the US economy and healthcare reform; preventing it requires more tact and better tactics than many who claim to want an Obama victory have shown these last few days.

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.

Hillary's legacy speech

Barack Obama has a tough job regaining the initiative in Denver. But he has been given some great intros. His wife, Michelle, did him proud on Monday. And Hillary secured her legacy with a humdinger of a speech last night, showing just how great a speaker she has become since setting out on the Presidential campaign. She struck the right balance between policy and attack; she was clear that Obama should be supported; and she did herself no harm at all should Obama lose. Here's how it's done:

Baracks's 'boring' VP choice

Barack Obama's decision to pick Joseph Biden, the Delaware senator and Neil Kinnock fan, as his running mate has been criticised in some quarters for being boring. And there is a part of this blog which would have liked to see Hillary chosen; at the very least, the Obama team could have shown her a bit more respect. But Obama probably needs boring white male with foreign experience as his running mate to reassure those voters worried about the novelty of his own candidacy. The only question is: why didn't he pick a governor or a senator from a state with votes that mattered? Delaware hardly fits the bill, even if it watches TV from Pennsylvania. This is a neutral appointment; Obama needs to do rather more to regain the initiative in Denver this week if he is to establish a strong lead over McCain ahead of the Republican convention.

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.

Hillary's tour de force

Watching Hillary's gracious and decisive endorsement of Barrack Obama was also a sign of what might have been. Her speaking is far more assured that when she started her campaign. And she delivered a speech of enormous statesmanship and skill which was right for her campaign and right for the occasion. Today's Independent on Sunday is absolutely right to see it as a tour de force. Let's hope her supporters do throw their weight behind Obama now.