Us politics

With Barack Obama being returned to the White House, it’s worth considering what his key foreign policy challenges will be during the second term. I’ve outlined a few areas I think will dominate his thinking over the next four years. 1. Afghanistan and Pakistan Obama has committed to withdrawing American forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. This will be a far from smooth transition. As the number of US forces declines, expect to see a resurgence of the Taliban, greater instability across the country, and the accelerated erosion of Hamid Karzai’s authority. American frustrations will also heighten if the pace of ‘green on blue’ attacks (where Afghan National

Can Mitt Romney win the presidential election on Tuesday? The answer is yes, he can — but it’ll be tough. Although the national polls taken in isolation suggest the race is roughly tied, the state-level polling points to a much bigger lead for Barack Obama. It seems that either the national polls are underestimating Obama’s strength or the state polls are overestimating it, or both. Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight model  assumes it’s both, so adjusts the national polling slightly towards Obama and the state polls slightly away from him, so they meet in the middle. And that leads it to forecast a win for Obama of slightly more than two points.

The presidential debates are over, and Mitt Romney is within touching distance of the White House. Barack Obama was the better candidate – just – in last night’s third and final presidential debate, on the attack and with his trademark eloquence restored. But he needed to deliver a knockout blow to Mitt Romney, and failed. Everyone knows Obama is great with words. What is not entirely clear to voters is that Mitt Romney isn’t evil. As it turned out, Romney came across as moderate, articulate and well-informed- and a plausible commander-in-chief. The next election may very well be his. A snap CNN Poll called it 48-40 for Obama, wider than

I have a piece in this week’s magazine on the fall of Barack Obama. I’m not saying he may not still win, just that even if he does he will be a diminished President. It’s available online here.

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