Barack obama

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Cameron lands in America

David Cameron’s plane has just landed in Washington. The next few days should provide him with a set of images that will portray him as a significant figure on the global stage. The Obama administration is giving Cameron the full works: a huge event on the White House lawn and the kind of banquet that is normally reserved for heads of state. This is an arrangement that benefits both sides. The Obama re-election campaign wants to foster the sense that the President is friends with a Conservative British Prime Minister given that their Republican opponent in the fall will accuse him of being a left-wing radical. I suspect, though, that

Peter Hoskin

Will Obama and Cameron discuss a faster pullout from Afghanistan?

The political theatre of David Cameron’s trip to America will have Downing Street drooling. The PM is, today, not only going to become the first world leader to fly aboard Air Force One with Barack Obama, but then they’re also going to take in a game of basketball together. It’s a carefully calibrated blend of statesmanship and down-to-earth-ship that will suit both men. Obama, because it might appeal, in some way, to conservative voters ahead of this year’s presidential election. Cameron, because, well… does Ed Miliband do this sort of thing? The theatre carries over into print too, with a joint article by Cameron and Obama in today’s Washington Post.

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Rising gas prices hurt Obama

Barack Obama’s re-election has been looking more and more likely in recent weeks. His approval rating has risen fairly steadily, economic forecasts have improved and he’s opened a nice lead in head-to-head polling against Mitt Romney, as the Republican primaries have taken their toll on his most likely opponent. But the latest polls show things moving dramatically in the other direction, for the first time since early October. A Washington Post-ABC poll conducted last week shows Obama’s approval rating dropping from a healthy 50 per cent last month to 46 per cent now. It also shows Romney leading Obama 49 to 47, compared to 51-45 to Obama last month. These

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Why Cameron should pay heed to Romney

Cameron flies out to Washington on Tuesday, and when he gets there he’ll have no need to play the infatuated teenager. The days of Gordon Brown-style adulation are over, and Cameron has a more mature, less needy relationship with Obama. The truth is that there’s precious little he can learn from Obama, but there might be a thing or two he can learn from Mitt Romney. I look at this in my Telegraph column today. Cameron has never loved America, in the way that so many people in SW1 do. He toured America in his youth, but had never been to Washington until he became Tory leader. Cameron is more

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Republican ‘negativity’ has improved Romney’s campaign

In the wake of Super Tuesday, lots of British journalists are saying that the Republican nomination race has been too ‘negative’ — i.e. the candidates have attacked each other too much ahead of the real contest in November. Mitt Romney may now be close to victory but he’s been badly damaged. This is thought to be an indication that American conservatism is tearing itself apart. But that isn’t necessarily right. Nobody thought that the Democratic party was in decline when Hillary Clinton and Obama were at each other’s throats in 2008. Hillary, if you remember, even flirted with racist tactics in an attempt to derail her rival. And yet the

Jonathan Jones

Obama wins Super Tuesday

It wasn’t a great night for Mitt Romney — but it wasn’t a particularly bad one either. He won by big margins in the four states he was supposed to: Massachussetts, Vermont, Virginia and Idaho. He also won Alaska by a four-point margin and managed to beat Rick Santorum by just one point in Ohio. The fact that he finished way behind Newt Gingrich in Georgia was no surprise, nor was his losing to Santorum in Oklahoma. He could have done with better results in North Dakota (third, 16 points behind Santorum and 4 behind Ron Paul) and Tennessee (second, 9 points behind Santorum), but six wins from ten states

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

Will Democrats decide the result of Michigan’s Republican primary?

Tonight’s another very important night for the Republican presidential hopefuls, with primaries in Arizona and Michigan. Mitt Romney seems assured of a decent win in the former, where the latest two polls put him 16-17 points ahead of Rick Santorum. But Michigan is looking incredibly close — with the poll results of the last two days ranging from a four-point lead for Romney to a five-point lead for Santorum. It could go either way: Nate Silver’s model gives Romney a 55 per cent chance of victory to Santorum’s 45 per cent chance. With the polls this narrow, it will all come down to who’s best at getting their voters out

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

The Lib Dems step up their push for £10,000

Set your TiVos. At 6.55 tomorrow evening, BBC1 will air the Liberal Democrats’ latest party political broadcast. For those of you who can’t wait, here’s a sneak preview: In the video, Nick Clegg describes his proposed increase in the income tax personal allowance as ‘a £700 tax cut for ordinary working people — that’s an extra £60 in your wages every month’. I’ve remarked before on the similarities in both rhetoric and policies between the Lib Dems and Barack Obama, but Clegg’s ‘£60 a month’ pitch is as close as you get to the way Obama sells his payroll tax cut extension as ‘about $40 in every paycheck’. We can now surely

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Obama breaks clear

The rejuvenation of Barack Obama’s re-election hopes continues apace. He’s added seven points to his approval rating since November, improving it from the low 40s to around 50 per cent now. After months of polling neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney, he now boasts a six point lead. Just four months ago, the bookies thought he was more likely to lose the election than win it. Now Intrade gives him a 60 per cent chance of victory. Nate Silver has a great article on Obama’s chances in this week’s New York Times Magazine. He’s built a model to forecast the election results based on the three most important factors at this stage:

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

How Obama’s new budget fits into the UK debate

Yesterday, Barack Obama set out his budget for ‘Fiscal Year 2013’ – that is, for the year beginning October 2012 (in the US, the fiscal year runs from October to September, rather than April to March as it does here). Of course, the federal budget has to be passed by both houses of Congress before being signed off by the President, so the final version will look very different to this one. It is better thought of as a statement of Obama’s intent, and his starting point for the negotiations between Congress and the White House. Nevertheless, it throws up a few interesting points, not least in how it relates to our own

Friday

Jonathan Jones

The Republican race is taking its toll on Romney

Rick Santorum’s surprise clean-sweep of three states on Tuesday certainly suggests that the battle for this year’s Republican nomination will go on a fair bit longer than looked likely after Mitt Romney’s win in Florida a week earlier. But it doesn’t change the fact that Romney will, most likely, emerge the winner. But where it once looked like he’d make a decent — if unexceptional — challenger to Obama in November, he’s starting to seem much less electable. Just look at the slide in his poll numbers. At the beginning of the year, a Washington Post poll found that 39 per cent of Americans had a positive view of Romney,

Monday

Freddy Gray

Romney’s continuing religious troubles

Some well-informed people — Rupert Murdoch among them — have suggested that Mitt Romney could exploit Obama’s increasingly fractious relationship with America’s Catholics to win the presidential elections in November. The so-called ‘Catholic vote’ is often said to be the crucial swing factor in American democracy. Romney, however, may be facing a bigger socio-religious stumbling block than Obama’s: evangelicals. They don’t like him. Mainstream Protestant Republicans in the north have plumped for Mitt, generally speaking, but he has been far less successful in the evangelical south. ‘As a county’s evangelical population expands,’ says Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende, ‘Romney’s vote share declines.’ The obvious explanation is that southern Baptists

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

Romney gives Gingrich a ‘shellacking’ in Florida

‘A double-digit shellacking’. That’s how Gingrich endorser Herman Cain described Mitt Romney’s 14-point win over Newt Gingrich in last night’s Florida primary. It has certainly helped Romney get over the drubbing Gingrich gave him in South Carolina ten days ago, and recertifies him as the presumptive nominee. A big Gingrich win would’ve blown the race wide open. Instead, Romney comes away with a commanding lead in both votes cast and delegates pledged. Romney’s victory speech (above) was almost a rerun of the one he gave in New Hampshire three weeks ago. Then, he tried to cast himself as the inevitable Republican nominee, aiming his attacks at Barack Obama and calling

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

Clegg echoes Obama’s message

Nick Clegg, this morning, advocating closing loopholes for the rich to pay for raising the income tax threshold: ‘Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.’ Oh, all right, that wasn’t Clegg. That was Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. But it’s remarkably similar to what Clegg just said in his speech at the Resolution Foundation this morning. On his account, the government ought to be ‘calling time on our out-of-whack tax system,’ as well as the ‘scandal of

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Obama’s a hypocrite, but a slick hypocrite

As Pete says, Obama fired some well-aimed arrows in the direction of Mitt Romney in his State of the Union address. But it was also a clear attempt to outline Obama’s re-election message, which would, I think, be the same no matter who he faces in November. The idea is to stress that Obama, unlike the corrupt Republicans who nearly bankrupted America, is a ‘fair shake’ candidate, who stands for hard work and responsibility. It is hypocritical rubbish, as I tried to point out last month. The idea of Obama as the straight-shooting, anti-corruption candidate is absurd. President Obama has proved to be a very different politician to the progressive

Peter Hoskin

Obama delivers his pitch for a second term

A Romney-seeking missile. That was what much of Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address amounted to last night. He didn’t mention the Republican presidential challenger by name, of course. That would have been too obvious. But he did dwell on those sorts of issues around taxation and jobs — including his ‘Buffett Rule’, by which, we learn, millionaires should pay at least a 30 per cent tax rate — that have been causing Romney trouble. To underline the point that ‘a billionaire [should] pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes’, Warren Buffett’s secretary was even among the Obamas’ guests for the evening. Obama’s ploy, when presenting

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

Romney’s tax returns provide ammo for his opponents

Finally, grudgingly, Mitt Romney has released his tax returns for the last two years. After much um-ing and ah-ing — and a lot of prodding from Democrats, Newt Gingrich and the media – he has disclosed that he paid $3 million in tax on his 2010 income of $21.7 million, and $3.2 million on the $20.9 million he made in 2011. Romney hoped that releasing this information would allow him to move past the focus on his financial affairs, but his rivals – both inside and outside his own party — don’t seem prepared to let that happen. The Democrats are naturally keen to emphasise both Romney’s large investment profits

Monday

Jonathan Jones

No more Mr Nice Guy | 16 January 2012

So Jon Huntsman is dropping out of the US Presidential race today. Apparently a battle with Rick Perry for fifth in South Carolina didn’t appeal. Even though he looked like the best bet to beat Obama, Huntsman was never likely to win the Republican nomination. When many Republicans were desperately searching for a more conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, running as the more moderate alternative to Mitt Romney wasn’t going to be a winning strategy. This year of all years, you couldn’t see a man who had served in the Obama administration as Ambassador to China and who tweeted ‘I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

The Obama-Romney electoral map

Of course, Mitt Romney hasn’t secured the Republican nomination yet. But now that the bookies have him odds on at 1/9, it’s definitely worth thinking about how he’d shape up against Barack Obama. Does he have much of a chance? Well, yes, actually. The head-to-head polls so far point to a close fight between Obama and Romney. And Obama’s approval ratings and GDP growth forecasts — better predictors of the result at this stage — also point to a very tight election. It’s shaping up to be one of those elections where the key to victory is not the national popular vote, but the Electoral College. It’ll be winning each individual

Monday

James Forsyth

Obama enjoys the high life

Amidst all the talk of Tony Blair’s post-office earnings, it is interesting to read in The Times of Barack Obama’s post-presidency ambitions. In Jodi Kantor’s new book on the Obamas, the president is quoted telling old friends of the couple that: ‘When I leave office there are only two things I want. I want a plane and I want a valet.’ Now, I am sure Obama made the remark half in jest. But it does show how quickly politicians become accustomed to the conveniences of office. Though in Blair’s case, his money-making seems to be motivated more by a desire to match the lifestyle of the global elite that he