Archive for the 'United States' Category

America learns to love the United Nations

Published
by
Jonathan Power
on October 31, 2008
in Foreign affairs and United States
. 2 Comments
The US. Getting stuck in.

The US. Getting stuck in.

Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war in ex-Yugoslavia and President Bill Clinton’s former ambassador to the UN, is now going around preaching the virtues of the International Criminal Court (ICC), although it was the Clinton administration that did not have the guts to push the ratification of US membership through Congress. Holbrooke is also criticising the UN Security Council for not following up on its vote in 2005 to refer the conflict in the Sudan to the ICC, arguing that it was only the threat of a war crimes court that brought the protagonists of the Yugoslavia wars to the negotiating table, and that the same stick is necessary over Sudan.

The announced prosecution by the ICC of the Sudanese leader, Omar al-Bashir, has coincided with a major shift in American elite opinion about the usefulness of the ICC. Democratic foreign policy experts are talking as if the US were already a signed up, ratified, member. But more interesting is the stance of the Bush administration. In the first days of his presidency, George W Bush “unsigned” the US membership. Yet now it is pushing hard in the Security Council for the ICC to act faster over the Sudan prosecution. This turnaround suggests it may not be too long before the US formally endorses the court……

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Obama’s West Wing takes shape

Published
by
James Crabtree
on October 31, 2008
in United States
. 0 Comments
Josh, meet Rahm

Josh, meet Rahm

Imagine The West Wing was remade for the Obama era. Who would the main characters be based on? Leo McGarry, it seems, would be Congressman Rahm Emanuel, a politician and former political fixer pegged to be Obama’s Chief of Staff.

Emanuel is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, he comes from one of those accomplished families - like the Powells in the UK - whose every sibling seems off-puttingly gifted. Emanuel’s brother, Ari, is a famous LA talent agent, and the inspiration behind a character, also called Ari, on the HBO series Entourage. His other brother, Ezekiel, is merely a “noted oncologist and bioethicist.” Rham used to be an advisor to Clinton, before more recently being elected as a Congressman in Obama’s home start of Illinois. Once there, he played a leading role in the 2006 Democrat take-over of Congress, and wrote a fairly interesting book called The Plan, laying out a new policy direction for the party. (A pretty blatant British rip-off, also called The Plan and also featuring a scaffolding cover motif, will be reviewed in next month’s Prospect by Peter Oborne.) But most, pertinent to the discussion of Emanuel’s playing Leo in a remake of the West Wing, is the fact that he was also the inspiration for the character of Josh Lyman in the original series.

Such Rahm-related gossip about plum jobs in an Obama administration will continue in coming weeks. The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn recently did  an excellent overview of his most prominent wonks, and even included a handy map of their relationships. And not to be outdone, Prospect’s own DC insider - known as “Tumbler”, after President Bush’s secret service handle - speculated in the current edition about who might get what……

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McCain tops the windbag index

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on October 28, 2008
in Elections and United States
. 0 Comments
Who blows hardest?

Who blows hardest?

It’s official. Thanks to this comprehensive lexical analysis of the presidential and vice-presidential debates, we now know that John McCain is, empirically, more of a windbag than Barack Obama.

Who will the Economist endorse?

Published
by
James Crabtree
on October 27, 2008
in Elections, Media and United States
. 7 Comments
And the result is in

And the result is in

It’s endorsement season in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his commanding poll lead, Obama has to date matched his favour with wavering voters with a knack for tempting skeptical editors. The running tally shows the Democrat ahead 179 - 60 in major editorial endorsements. This is interesting, for a number of reasons. Such liberal bias is relatively recent. A reliable source told me a while back that until Bill Clinton, LBJ in 1964 (in the aftermath of an assassination) was the only postwar Democrat to gain more endorsements than his Republican opponent. This changed with Kerry. Now Obama has a handy lead. Such a situation makes the decision of right-leaning publications more intriguing. Some are predictable. Few can have been surprised by last week’s lengthy Obama hagiography in the New Yorker; it also would be a stretch to describe the Guardian’s endorsement as coveted. Others are more interesting. The Financial Times for instance, sometimes a swing endorsement, came out for Obama.

Were Prospect to endorse candidates, ours would clearly be hotly anticipated. Our studious neutrality in such matters, however, means the The Economist is perhaps the most interesting decision. The magazine—socially and economically liberal—would like to endorse a socially-liberal republican. It would probably have liked the 2000-era McCain, but instead gave a hearty endorsement to Governor Bush. It has recently run a fairly tough editorial line on Obama, criticising his positions on trade and the economy in particular. And its editor, John Micklethwaite, wrote a (very good) book in which he predicted the long-term ascendency of American conservatives, a notion which has perhaps been slightly undercut by the recent implosion of that movement. The decision is one which I have a small insight into, as a former Economist intern. Under the previous editor, Bill Emmott, a poll was taken of the Economist’s hundred or so editorial staff. (In 2004 this was said to overwhelmingly favour Kerry.) This informed the decision, but ultimately the choice was for the editor alone. In 2004, in a rather woosterish editorial, Emmott sided with his staff and went grumpily for Kerry. What of this year? Obama’s lead, his self-evidently superior candidacy, and the need for newspapers to side with a winner, give three strong reasons to suspects an Obama nod. I’d be surprised if they don’t. Nonetheless, the Economist’s political staff tends to be more right-wing than its ordinary writers, its editor is a thoughtful, principled centrist conservative, and the magazine has traditionally taken a hawkish, McCain-ish foreign policy line on Iraq and Iran. Perhaps there is room for a very minor October surprise after all.

UPDATE: reliable sources tells me that the decision is made; in news unlikely to much bother the swing voters of rural ohio, the editor announced to his staff meeting this morning that Obama will, this Thursday, be able to count The Economist among his official backers. With back to back endorsements for Kerry and Obama, perhaps we should see it as a Democrat-leaning newspaper after all?.

How Merck made a killing

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on October 23, 2008
in Business, Inside Prospect, Science and technology and United States
. 0 Comments

In order to survive in the increasingly lucrative and competitive phramaceutical business, big drug companies need to have several billion dollar “blockbuster” drugs on the market at any one time. This has forced many to market their products ever more aggressively—and to pay less attention to their potential risks. In the case of Merck’s painkiller, Vioxx, this had disastrous and lethal results. Critics estimate that 140,000 Americans suffered heart attacks and strokes as a result of taking the drug during the seven years it was on the market.

There have been numerous scandals involving drug companies in recent years, but what makes this case unique is that Merck, instead of settling compensation claims out of court to avoid negative publicity, decided to fight every case—and so we have over 20m legal documents, telling the warts-and-all story of Vioxx: what Merck’s staff were telling eachother, but not necessarily anyone else. Jim Giles reports.

The Third Debate

Published
by
Erik Tarloff
on October 17, 2008
in United States
. 2 Comments

Before last night’s debate began, there were two questions dominating public discussion: First, will McCain come out swinging? And second, is there any way he might be able to alter the dynamics of the race?

The second question was always inherently a little fatuous, the journalese equivalent of a noisy promo for an otherwise dull television cop show. Sight unseen, one knew the answer: No, John McCain will not be able to alter the dynamics of the race with this one debate performance, regardless of how skilful. The final debate is inevitably going to be the least-watched, and the least likely to affect anyone’s perceptions of the contest. Even a thoroughly ignorant, hidebound American voter has been living with John McCain for over eight years now, and with Barack Obama for almost two. We’ve seen their speeches, we’ve watched them being interviewed, and before last night we had already seen them debate each other twice (and their primary opponents innumerable times). The impact of even a decisive debate victory for McCain — no matter how such a thing is defined — was likely to be minimal. In the first debate, such a phenomenon could arguably have made a significant difference, but not in the third, especially not when Obama was widely judged to have won debates one and two.

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The Presidential Election, Three Weeks Out

Published
by
Erik Tarloff
on October 16, 2008
in United States
. 1 Comment

During one of his more lucid moments, World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer observed, “People have been playing below strength against me for years.” It’s a shrewd statement that repays parsing; it essentially poses the question, Were Fischer’s best opponents playing, as their defenders alleged, at a lower than usual level when they lost to him, or was it instead that the intrinsic weaknesses in their technique were invisible until a genius of Fischer’s caliber came along to expose them?

A similar question is worth pondering now, three weeks before the presidential election…

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Prospect online this week

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on October 9, 2008
in Africa, Foreign affairs, Inside Prospect and United States
. 14 Comments

Barack Obama has so far won the debates and is surging ahead in the polls—which is why he has more to fear from his opponents than than ever before, writes Susan Jacoby. For the past eight years, anti-rationalism of every sort been the defining strategy of right-wing American politics, so we can expect to hear a lot about how there’s something sinister and “un-American” about Obama’s education, reason, and logic in the weeks to come.

Meanwhile, Paul Collier looks at the impact that Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s president-assumed, might have on the future of African democracy and prosperity. With the spike in global demand for commodities, the continent as a whole has an unprecedented opportunity to lift itself out of poverty—but will bad politics get in the way?

Also, Anshuman Mondal defends his call for a “Muslim middle way” against criticism from the Quilliam Foundation’s Ed Husain. Husain, Mondal argues, seems to think that all Islamists eventually become terrorists. But why single them out? What about racists, left wing sympathisers, or even people who care about animals and the environment?

And Max Nathan of the IPPR takes aim at Prospect editor David Goodhart’s famous “diversity versus solidarity” thesis. A new IPPR study suggests that migration and diversity is benefitting Britain economically—with little sign that the country will suffer US-style racial divisions.

The Nashville Debate

Published
by
Erik Tarloff
on October 8, 2008
in United States
. 2 Comments

                Barack Obama didn’t have to win last night’s debate.  In fact, he could have afforded to lose it outright without doing serious harm to his chances in November.  Absent some earth-shattering mistake, the only debate that really matters in any given election cycle is the first one, and even there, it’s the theatrics rather than the substance that counts.  Does the perceived challenger (the younger, less-experienced candidate, say, or the representative of the party out of power) look more or less equal to his opponent?  Can one envision him as president?  If after the first debate the answers to those questions are affirmative, what the two candidates have said about policy and how they behave in subsequent debates won’t make much difference.   The image has been fixed.  To my eye, as reported in this space a fortnight ago, the first debate was a draw, but the public perceived Obama to have been the victor.   Whatever happened in the debates remaining was unlikely to affect the dynamics of the race significantly.

                That said, I still believe last night’s debate was close to a rout.  Obama didn’t need a victory, but he got a big one.  This was partly a result of his simply being the superior debater and the better candidate.  His answers were crisper and more cogent, his policies more realistic and thought-through, his mastery of the format — widely but foolishly predicted to play to John McCain’s forehand — overwhelming.  And in any case, his forensic burden was lighter, since he isn’t the nominee of the party that gave us George W. Bush and the concomitant catastrophe of the last eight years.  McCain has been forced into verbal jujitsu since before the campaign began, simultaneously defending his party’s policies and traditions while attacking its most prominent representative, and he hasn’t handled the challenge with agility.  It may be a challenge that defies agility.

                But McCain made matters worse for himself.  By initiating a really ugly advertising campaign against Obama in the week or so preceding the debate, and unleashing his disaster of a running mate in full demagogic McCarthyite fury, and promising his most rabid supporters that in this debate he would be “taking the gloves off,” he established an atmosphere and a set of expectations that could not, willy-nilly, work in his favour.  If he had indeed assailed Obama about his casual acquaintanceship with former radical William Ayers, or his former minister Jeremiah Wright, or any of the other ginned-up, racially-coded non-issues the McCain campaign has been furiously purveying in recent days, he would have alienated every independent voter watching.  And in the process he would have invited a potentially devastating counterattack he had every reason to know had been prepared for just such an eventuality.  But having introduced those kinds of attack into the public dialogue, and having promised supporters more of the same in a face-to-face setting, his decision not to follow through looked pusillanimous.  This was a quandary of his own making, and was only the latest in a series of other ill-considered tactical gambits that have turned around and bitten him on the ass.  Its inherent nastiness, along with its almost perverse obtuseness, makes it impossible to feel much sympathy;  McCain looks hapless, but he deserves to look hapless.

                All one can say in his defense is that he knew he was losing the election and decided his only hope lay in a reckless gamble.  But my saying something in his defense isn’t the same as suggesting he’s defensible;  he has, in the last week or two, succeeded in poisoning public discourse in a way that even political incendiaries Lee Atwater and Karl Rove never attempted.  And in a way that, had it worked, would have poisoned racial relations and much else in this country for years.  Fortunately, it has looked and smelled as desperate as it actually is, and seems, at least up to the time of this writing, to have achieved no resonance.  His unwillingness to follow through along these lines at the debate underlines its failure to persuade anyone other than those already persuaded, those troglodytes shouting for blood in Pensacola, Florida and Southern California.

                There may be a few more ugly arrows in McCain’s quiver, but their number must be dwindling, and the prevailing conditions do not favour their efficacy.  October, I think, will be a very long and frustrating month for John McCain.  And therefore, alas, also for the country he will not, ultimately, be governing.

                In closing, I want to say a word about one of Obama’s secret weapons, to wit, his smile.  It isn’t merely that it’s an extremely winning smile;  most politicians (although not, as it happens, John McCain) develop those.  But as evidenced during the debate, it’s the sort of smile I haven’t seen on an American presidential candidate since John Kennedy, a smile almost subversive that registers almost subliminally.  (You can probably find a few old examples on Youtube.com if you look for clips from JFK’s 1960 debates with Nixon.)  In both cases, it’s a smile flashed, with every appearance of spontaneity, when the candidate’s opponent is speaking.  A smile of serene self-confidence, an ironic but gleeful smile that both acknowledges the absurdity of the blather the political game imposes on its practitioners and simultaneously revels in it.  It’s a very private smile of very private amusement that nevertheless manages to invite the rest of us in to enjoy the whole crazy spectacle.

The view from Gary

Published
by
Avirook Sen
on October 3, 2008
in Elections and United States
. 0 Comments

The last time Indiana voted for a Democratic president was in 1964. But with McCain only 2 per cent ahead in the polls, it is increasingly becoming as a battleground state.

If Barack Obama is to win here, the 100,000 odd people of Gary, Indiana will have a lot to do with it. Gary’s mayor, Rudolph Clay, claims that there’s hardly a vote that won’t go to Obama. In the Democratic primary, the town turned out a nearly 100 per cent vote for him.

Part of this has to do with the fact that Gary has the highest proportion of African Americans (about 85 per cent) of any city in the United States with a population of over 100,000. It is a town that has changed colour dramatically over the last few decades. Unfortunately, almost everything else that’s changed during that time has changed for the worse.

In the 1960s, the steel mills that lie around the city began cutting jobs. So when Obama talks about people who grew up on food stamps near the shuttered steel mills of Chicago’s south side, it has resonance in Gary, which is just 40 minutes away.

Its politics changed during that decade as well. In 1967, it became the first major American town to elect a black mayor. In 1972, Gary hosted America’s first National Black Political Convention. What followed was “white flight”: money moved out. A quarter of the people here now live below the poverty line.

Almost every shop on the west side of Broadway, the main street, is shut, and has been for the last quarter of a century at least. At the Palace theatre, it still says the Jackson Five are playing tonight.

The Jacksons did live here once, but by the time Michael Jackson was recording Thriller, Gary was topping the US crime rate charts and seemed in terminal decline. It remains among the 20 most dangerous towns in America. Last year, there were 71 homicides. Nowadays, the only place with a buzz—and a queue outside it—is Payday loans.

Unsurprisingly then, Obama’s message of change has resonated here. But change doesn’t just mean electing a black man. It means jobs; fewer visits to Payday; the opening of shops on Broadway, and if all goes well, even the Palace theatre.

But should Obama win, Gary’s voters will place a crippling burden of expectation on Obama. They wait for November like they wait for that loan, and they will be intent on collecting on every promise. He is set up for failure like no other candidate could be.