World

Barack Obama is finally going to take the gloves off against Hillary Clinton. Under pressure from donors who are disappointed by the fact that Hillary is maintaining her  dominant lead in national polls, the Obama campaign has decided that they have to make their criticisms of the frontrunner clear if they are going to stand a chance. In an interview with The New York Times to launch this new strategy, Obama is far more direct in his criticism of Hillary than he has been to date. This exchange, gives a sense of the change in tone:   Q: Has she been truthful to voters about what she would do as president?

As someone who has, er, fond teenage memories of being barked at by NCOs from the Black Watch during hours of drill on the parade-ground and rather fonder recollections of cricket matches against the regiment, I’ve been looking forward for months to seeing Gregory Burke’s prize-winning play about the regiment’s experiences in Iraq during its current run in New York. Today’s good news then is that – hurrah! – I snagged one of the two remaining tickets for the shows’ final performance on, appropriately enough, Remembrance Sunday. So it’s really just a bonus that the New York reviews have been tremendous. Here’s Ben Brantley in the NYT: “Black Watch,” which

Andrew Sullivan really doesn’t like Hillary Clinton. Fair enough. I look forward to seeing him make the case for Barack Obama in next month’s Atlantic. Andrew’s taken to calling Hillary “Nixon in a Pant Suit” and “She Who Is Inevitable”.  Again, fair enough and good knockabout stuff. The latter appelation, mind you, made me wonder whether Andrew is riffing on Rumpole of the Bailey’s wife Hilda who is, famously, “She Who Must Be Obeyed”. This itself, of course, takes us back to H Rider Haggard’s classic novel She in which a mysterious, beautiful and immortal sorceress somewhere in deepest recesses of the dark continent enslaves the local tribes: she’s a

Most people chuckled at California when it elected Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. But the sheer competence of the state government’s reaction to the appalling wild fires that are sweeping the state suggest that Arnie is much better at his job than many professional politicians. Certainly, as Newsweek points out, the contrast to Katrina could not be starker.  You have to be impressed by any disaster response that not only gets people out in time, feeds them and shelters them but also provides volunteer masseuses to help ease the stress for the evacuees.

If I was a betting man, I’d be very tempted by the 16 to 1 available on John McCain to be the 2008 Republican nominee. McCain has had a fantastic few weeks and is steadily clawing back some of the support he lost earlier in the campaign. He is once more getting some media love—crucial to a campaign that is desperately short of money and so can’t afford much paid for media—and conservatives are beginning to realise that McCain stacks up pretty well against the rest of the field. But perhaps most importantly, McCain has rediscovered his will to win. Earlier in the year it seemed that Iraq and the