Barack obama

This debate was never going to be easy for Mitt Romney. After his evisceration of Barack Obama in the first presidential debate, encapsulated by the New Yorker cover of Romney talking to an empty chair, it was certain that Obama would be rigorously schooled before the second debate. Obama’s performance 13 days ago was so anaemic that some even speculated whether, subconsciously at least, he still wanted to be President. But there was renewed vigour in this performance – a refusal to display passivity of the sort that ruined the Democrats’ night in Denver. The Town Hall debate format helped too: the need to engage with the audience’s questions made

Ahead of the second presidential debate tonight, it’s worth taking stock of the task facing each candidate in the last three weeks of the campaign. It is clear that Mitt Romney has received a sizeable bounce since the first debate, closing the gap to Barack Obama by probably around 4 points nationally. Nevertheless, it looks like he still remains about one point adrift of the President, and Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight forecast makes Obama the clear favourite, with the odds against his victory at about 1/2. Before the debates, talk of swing states and the electoral college seemed superfluous. Obama looked likely to win the popular vote by around four points, a

The conventional wisdom dictates that debates between VP candidates are nights that should only interest political anoraks. But the last eight days have not been good for conventional wisdom: remember how boring Mitt Romney was meant to have no chance against a man of Barack Obama’s élan? Far more than any recent presidential debate, last night’s vice-presidential one was genuinely absorbing, pitting two contrasting, combative and forthright politicians against each other. They were helped by the performance of the moderator, Martha Raddatz. She was far more willing to engage the candidates than Jim Lehrer last week, providing the best possible opportunity for a stimulating debate. And that is certainly what

OK, cards on the table: I’m a big Obama fan. I desperately hope he wins next month, and I’m reasonably confident he will. But even to my biased eye, he clearly put in the weaker performance of last night’s debate. He knew his stuff, and had plenty of good points, but threw them out in such a way that none of them really stuck. ‘Is the reason that Governor Romney is keeping all these plans to replace secret because they’re too good?’ would have been a great line had it not been smuggled out at the end of an overlong response. The President’s answers were just too waffling to make an

‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ That was the question Ronald Reagan told Americans to ask themselves when choosing their President in 1980, and it’s a line Mitt Romney’s campaign has been hoping would work for them this time around. ‘The president can say a lot of things, but he can’t tell you you are better off,’ Paul Ryan told a crowd in North Carolina last month. And it might be one of the ‘zingers’ Romney throws out in tonight’s debate. But the attack isn’t looking nearly as potent against Obama as it did against Jimmy Carter. For one thing, Ryan’s claim might not actually be

Expect to hear Barack Obama talking about ‘economic patriotism’ in tomorrow’s first Presidential debates. The idea is a simple one: that American’s should keep their money within the United States, place their deposits in American banks, and pay the full measure of their taxes. It’s providing an effective way to undermine Romney’s complex financial arrangements which place much of his money in offshore tax havens. By doing so, Obama claims, he is proving himself a poor patriot. In a new campaign advert, the President argues: ‘It’s time for a new economic patriotism, rooted in the belief that growing our economy begins with a strong, thriving middle class.’ Its subtlety is

Failed presidencies have long half-lives. Just ask Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis. Jimmy Carter’s legacy wasn’t the only reason they lost but they certainly received no assistance from the great peanut farmer’s record in office either. Mitt Romney has a similar problem. The memory of George W Bush’s unhappy presidency remains all too fresh. It makes life more difficult for Romney just as it eases Barack Obama’s path to a second term. Bush’s legacy doesn’t grant Obama a free pass but it does give him a plausible-sounding way of explaining delays, setbacks and even the occasional failure. Look at the mess we inherited! It ain’t Morning yet but the darkest

Mitt Romney has been caught saying what he really thinks – or in modern journalistic jargon has committed a ‘gaffe’. Serious American commentators believe that his election challenge is all but over after he declared, that 47 per cent of the electorate will vote for Obama no matter what because they were ‘dependent upon government’. They saw themselves as victims, Romney explained. They believed the government had a responsibility to care for them, and that ‘they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. ..They will vote for this president no matter what. . . . These are people who pay no income tax.’ To Romney’s mind,

In America, the convention duel is over and there can now be little doubt that Barack Obama won it. Whereas Mitt Romney saw only a very modest boost in his polling numbers during the Republican convention, Obama has received a much bigger bounce, not only wiping out any advantage Romney gained the previous week, but actually leaving him with a bigger lead than he’d enjoyed before. On both Gallup and Rasmussen’s national tracking polls, he now enjoys a commanding five-point lead. And that could well continue to grow: the Gallup number still includes responses from before the Democratic convention even began. Nate Silver’s forecasting model  now gives Obama an 80.7 per