Society

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Rooting Obama in the American middle class

Tonight’s message is going to be all about Obama and the economy. The Democrats want to paint Obama as a tribune of the middle class and as a member of it; they want to reduce the sense of otherness about him, what Mark Penn called his ‘lack of American roots.’  This is a crucial task, if they can’t do this then you have to expect the undecideds to break heavily for McCain which given the current closeness of the race would be enough to put him in the White House. In the security queue we got talking to one of tonight’s featured speakers, Tom Balanoff, a Union official from Chicago

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Michelle’s moment

James and I have now installed ourselves in a bit of space at the Pepsi Centre in Denver. The stage is all set up, Obamabilia is being sold in the halls and musicians are warming up for the opening night of the Democratic National Convention. Tonight is, essentially, Michelle Obama’s coming-out party, a speech from the woman everyone has heard of but hardly anyone has heard from. The narrative about her is already being spun furiously: a working class Chicago girl unlike the super-rich Cindy McCain, A headstrong woman and devoted wife, as she puts it “I’m married to this guy Barack and that’s about it.” The spouse matters in

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can the Democrats unify?

The Democrats want to achieve five things this week here in Denver: 1). Unify the party 2). Persuade voters that Obama is ready to be president 3). Tie McCain to Bush 4). Hone an economic message 5). Show swing voters that Obama is ‘one of us’ There is, therefore, intense irritation that this morning the story dominating the news is about tensions between the Clinton and Obama camps. The spark for this is that Bill Clinton, who seems much less reconciled to defeat than Hillary is, is unhappy about being asked to speak on Wednesday night about national security. Instead, he apparently wants to speak about the economy contrasting the

Sunday

Jamie Gardiner

The Sunday Essay: Why foreign aid’s broken – And how to fix it

Many thanks to Jamie Gardiner for this week’s Sunday Essay.  Thanks also to every other CoffeeHouser who sent in a submission.  If the various authors don’t mind, we’ll consider some of those submissions for future Sundays.  If any other CoffeeHousers would like to submit an essay, please click here for further information – Pete Hoskin There’s an old quip that foreign aid is a matter of taxing the poor in rich countries to help the rich in poor countries. Most of us aren’t quite that cynical. Empathy may be blunted by distance, but where we hear about unimaginable suffering that could be relieved for just pennies, our humanity compels us

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Don’t mention the ideology

Alasdair Palmer has a piece that is well worth reading in the Sunday Telegraph about the leaked MI5 report on what turns people into terrorists. Here’ the key section of his argument: “It conspicuously fails to mention the potential terrorist’s most obvious “vulnerability”: adherence to an extremist form of radical Islamism. It stresses that “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practice their faith regularly; many lack religious literacy and could be regarded as religious novices.” Which may be true, but does not alter the fundamental fact that all of the suicide bombers in the UK, and all of those who have

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 August 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles Bombast in Beijing Sir: David Tang is right (Diary, 16 August) that Zhang Yimou, the choreographer of the Olympic ceremony, produced ‘maniacal… bombast…’. Mr Tang suggested Pyongyang as a model. But years ago Mr Zhang told me that he could get his films on screen in China, where they were hardly shown, if he made one like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will about the 1936 Nazi Olympics. Mr Tang mentions the ‘sleight of hand’ of the faked fireworks — which would have got a similarly faking athlete sent home. But that is only one example of the ceremonial Potemkin. The Chinese internet sites

Alex James

Slow Life | 23 August 2008

The giant sequoia is the largest living thing on the planet: a tree. There’s quite a well-known photo of one with a road going through the middle. They’re indigenous to North West America but, far from uncommon in this country, great avenues of them are lining drives of stately homes like moon rockets, skewing the scale of everything; odd specimens in parkland dwarfing the ancient oaks. I reckon I’ve got the tallest one in Oxfordshire. Mr Taplin said it was the tallest tree in Oxford when he sold me the farm, but he may have been mistaken. For starters, it’s clearly not in Oxford — Oxford is 20 miles away

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 23 August 2008

I’m in the pub before the first match of the new Premiership season, a pint of lager in each hand, and I’m thinking here we go again, another nine months of the same old overpriced, overhyped rubbish. The same old faces are pushing their way into the packed bar — though some are browner than when I last saw them back in May — and ordering pints from the same old bar staff. Out in the beer garden, the same old groups of mates face each other in convivial circles, pints in hand, beer bellies straining against the shiny material of their replica shirts. I’m out in the beer garden,

Taki

High Life | 23 August 2008

On board S/Y Bushido Finally a gold medal for Greece, for cheating. Fifteen of our men and women have joined the pantheon of cheaters, the latest our 400-metres hurdles gold medal winner in Athens, Fani Halkia. It’s a disgrace but the athletes are not solely to blame. Ever since the Soviet Union began using the stuff that makes women grow moustaches for their shot putters, early in the Sixties, the athletes have been pawns of governments. What’s a dumb young person supposed to do when their trainer tells him or her to inject a substance which will turn them into winners? Report them to higher-ups who have given the order

Alan Judd

Motoring | 23 August 2008

Some at least of the 71 vehicles I’ve owned (68 if tractors don’t count) are probably best excused by a weakness for romantic impracticality. It was never inherent impracticality that attracted me but something else about them — rarity, unusual histories or locations, coincidence, the appeal of rescue. Hence the Daimler Conquest Century convertible, the Austin Gypsy fire engine, the Majestic Major mayoral limousine and the clump of stinging nettles in Oxfordshire marketed as a Series One Land-Rover. Recently there have been signs that the condition afflicts me still. The week began with a tour of the Rolls Royce factory at Goodwood, West Sussex. Nicholas Grimshaw’s design is an inspiration,

Robin Oakley

The Turf | 23 August 2008

Who would ever have thought that two wheels could prove as exciting as four legs? Watching the triumphs of Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins, Ross Edgar and Rebecca Romero in the Olympic Velodrome I cheered myself hoarse. Frankie Dettori might have difficulty managing a flying dismount from the mechanical steeds on which they scored their successes, and could end up with some anatomically inconvenient splinters if he did. We are, I suspect, some time off the day when Sir Michael Stoute will employ a full-time psychiatrist on the Freemason Lodge staff as Team GB did in the cycling equivalent of the pit lane in Beijing. But what a spectacle they provided,

Rachel Johnson

Diary – 23 August 2008

The fifth week of continuous downpour. Mouldiest summer ever. The children stay abed until lunchtime. I yell upstairs, Who wants to go for a massive walk? Who wants to come to Tesco in Minehead? Who wants to go to the Exmoor pony centre? There are never any takers. Exmoor pony centre was the scene of one of our many recent unsuccessful family outings, rivalling the lack of success of our visit to the Big Sheep ‘all-weather attraction’ outside Bideford. At the Big Sheep, we drove for two hours to watch a sheepdog herd three ewes. So the children basically get up for lunch, when we all crouch in the dingly-dell

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 23 August 2008

Monday Hooray! It’s official — Dave is no longer the Heir to Blair, he’s the Heir to Thatcher!! This makes all our hard rebranding work worthwhile. As Nigel says, it’s a measure of how far we have come that we are now able to wage war on benefit cheats, binge drinkers and Russia. None of us would have thought this possible a year ago. When you think of the ground we have covered, relentlessly forging ahead with different strategies at every available opportunity, it really does seem incredible. For those of you who may need reminding: We are now the party of: the environment; the NHS; the North; the arts;

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 23 August 2008

‘What are all these letters?’ asked my husband, unhelpfully stirring the pile on the doormat with his foot, looking without success for any addressed to him. They were about the BBC recommendations to announcers, published in 1928, that I wrote about last week. To entertain you further, I’ve been rummaging in a successor booklet, from 1930, on the pronunciation of English place-names. By then, George Bernard Shaw had taken over from Robert Bridges as chairman of the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English (in existence from 1926 to 1940). I’m not sure how that trimmed the vessel. Daniel Jones, the phonetician who worked with him, praised Arthur Lloyd James, the

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 23 August 2008

The debate between creationists and anti-creationists is nothing new. As David Sedley shows in his extraordinarily interesting Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Cambridge), it raged as strongly in the ancient world as it does in the modern. The ancients were, for the most part, creationists. The big debate for them was what happened next, i.e. how the physical world came to be. The natural science, therefore, was just as important as the ‘theology’. On this issue the spanner in the ointment [sic] was Socrates. He tells us that, as a young man, he was thrilled by speculation about the natural world: ‘whether it was blood that makes us conscious

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 23 August 2008

New York’s Eurotrash exude a preening self- regard that makes me sick to my stomach In New York, the big story of the summer is that the Eurotrash are back. Thanks to the weak dollar, rich Europeans have been descending on the city by the jet-load, irritating the locals by referring to ludicrously overpriced luxury goods as ‘bargains’. To add insult to injury, some shops have even put up signs saying, ‘We accept euros.’ The rapper Jay-Z seems to have caught the new mood. In his latest video, he is filmed cruising the streets of New York clutching a fistful of the European banknotes. Among the expat community, the resurgence

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 23 August 2008

Q. I have just moved into a sizeable townhouse which also comprises a separately owned basement flat (occupied by a young family). The entrance to the flat is set half-below street/garden level round the side of our property and down some steps at the back. The house has not been occupied for several months and it would appear that the family in the basement flat had taken to using the garden during this period. The garden is unoccupied during the day as we are at work and belongs solely to the house. (The family below know this.) However, the family’s two young children continue to use the garden when we

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Roots

I meant to blog about this earlier, but Toby Harnden’s Telegraph magazine piece on Obama in Hawaii is well worth reading. There is, for example, this: In late January, on his campaign plane as we flew from Kansas after the El Dorado visit, I asked the senator about the wanderlust in his family that he had chosen to reject. ‘Part of me settling in Chicago and marrying Michelle was a conscious decision to root myself,’ he told me. ‘There’s a glamour, there’s a romance to that kind of life and there’s a part of that still in me. But there’s a curse to it as well. You need a frame

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Another huge Tory poll lead

John Rentoul reveals that The Independent on Sunday’s latest poll, conducted by ComRes, shows another 21 point Tory lead. The Tories are on 46, Labour on 25 and the Lib Dems 16. Interestingly, among likely voters 38 percent think of themselves as generally speaking Conservatives, 30 percent Labour and 14 percent Lib Dems implying that Brown is acting as at least something of a drag on Labour’s numbers.