Us politics

Congressman Paul Ryan (R – Wisconsin) has not courted much of a profile outside America, so I doubt many CoffeeHousers will be familiar with him. But rest assured: he is an excellent choice for vice-president. Here’s why. The 42-year-old is not a neophyte, having served in the House of Representatives for 13 years. He has cross-party appeal: he represents a Democratic district that he nonetheless has won comfortably on seven occasions. Ryan knows how to listen to and speak to Democrats. This is a priceless skill for a Republican running for the second highest office in the land. Two traits define him: his striking command of public policy (especially on

Mitt Romney arrives in Poland today on the third and final leg of a foreign tour that has already taken him to London and Israel. While he may not have the obvious charm of Obama, predictions of his campaign being derailed by this foreign tour misunderstand Romney’s strategy. Foreign pundits are perennially guilty of ascribing too much importance to the foreign trips of prospective presidential candidates from the United States. When Obama visited Europe, the Middle East, and Afghanistan in the run up to the 2008 election – to mostly fawning press coverage – he only enjoyed a short-lived boost in the polls over his Republican candidate. His lead grew

A couple of weeks ago, I took a look at the tight battle for control of the United States Senate. This week: the House of Representatives. The fight for the lower chamber of Congress is much harder to assess. There are, after all, 435 individual contests — each with its own unique candidates, characteristics and electorate — compared to the 33 Senate races. At the moment, Republicans have a strong majority, holding 242 seats (if you include the Michigan one recently vacated by Thad McCotter) to the Democrats’ 193 (including two vacancies). After a terrible set of results in the 2010 midterms, the Democrats have a mountain to climb to

David Cameron broke with Downing Street tradition today by meeting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But Romney might now be wishing that, like François Hollande, he’d been snubbed by the Prime Minister until the elections were over. He started his day with forgetting Ed Miliband’s name, calling him ‘Mr Leader’ instead when the two met. That wasn’t too bad: it’s not as if British people, or indeed the media, can remember what the Labour leader is called half the time, anyway. But once in Downing Street, he decided to get out a spade and dig a rather large hole for himself in the back garden (which he accidentally described as

Hillary Clinton is holding talks in Israel today after a turbulent weekend in Egypt, ending a diplomatically fraught trip with little obvious benefit. Officially, Clinton was there to open the American consulate in Alexandria after it closed in 1993 due to budget cutbacks, but the subtext was to manage the conflicting aspects of America’s strategic interests in the country. Clinton met with Mohammed Mursi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who is now Egypt’s new President, assuring him of the ‘full authority’ of his office. This was a subtle endorsement at a time when Mursi finds himself locked in tug-of-war with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces for power.

Via Kevin Drum, this is really rather remarkable: ‘The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative. They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name. Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review. The verdict from the campaign — an operation that prides itself on staying consistently