Free Republic

From the Battle of Plattsburgh edition of Lake Champlain Weekly First, my enormous thanks to the owners and editor of Lake Champlain Weekly for allowing me, an enemy national, to write this column at a time of war between our countries. This respect for freedom of speech is part of our shared Anglo-American heritage, which your country, to its great credit, has written into its Constitution. As my regular readers will know, I am a great admirer of America, and though your country is less than 40 years old, I am sure it has a great future ahead of it....

The separation of powers is right at the heart of the US Constitution. It was developed for several reasons. One is the basic one of checks and balances with which everyone is familiar, but there is another. Talent is not generalizable. Just because someone is good at one thing it does not mean they would be good at a different job. The American electorate understands this instinctively. In the whole of US history just three serving members of Congress – House and Senate combined – have been elected to the Presidency. Presidents are much more likely to be drawn from...

Ever since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister at the end of June he has had a lead in the polls over David Cameron's Conservatives. So speculation is rife that he will call an autumn election. I have already pointed out a couple of flaws with this. He would need to do so in September, on the basis of three months opinion polls, and two of those months would be July and August, when most people's minds are not really on politics. He is too cautious for that. He remembers 1970, when Harold Wilson, having trailed in the polls for some...

As the news from Iraq worsens, panic starts to set in. A major paper conducts a poll which shows a dramatic shift of opinion. The shift is so big that the paper doesn’t publish the results and commissions a new poll instead. When the new poll confirms the results they publish, but bury the story on an inside page and describe the shift as “modest”. Meanwhile a leading politician publicly worries about what General Petraeus may say in his report in September. If the report is as bad as he fears “it could be a real big problem”. What is...

Britain’s new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, recently made his first visit to the US since assuming power. I want you to imagine that a candidate for President said that we all know there are terrorists in London and “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and Gordon Brown won’t act, we will.” I think you can guarantee there would be a storm of protest from other politicians and the media. A Presidential candidate threatening to invade Britain, or make some sort of strike into Britain without the co-operation of the British government would be a massive story. All...

I am so impressed by Bill Richardson's 'job interview' ads, that I can't help wondering how they would go for other candidates. First, if you have not seen them, view here. John Kerry's in 2004 would have been quite fun. Interviewer: Thank you, Mr Kerry. Your résumé has over 20 pages describing a job you did for four months about thirty years ago. It doesn't really mention what you have been doing since. Do you think you could elaborate? Continued with Hillary Clinton, John McCaian and Barack Obama . . .

At the GOP debate two candidates were obliquely critical of Dick Cheney's role in the current administration. John McCain said: "I would be very careful that everybody understood that there is only one president". Sam Brownback apparently intimated that Bush had over-relied on Cheney's foreign policy experience early in his presidency. Well, McCain is right. There is only one President. But the President, inevitably, relies on the advice and support of a whole range of people. Some of them will have formal roles in the administration and others will not . . .

If Karl Rove, the President’s campaign and communications advisor had been exposed as misusing government resources to blacken the name of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, I think we could guarantee blanket negative coverage of this by the mainstream media. In fact we have had the bizarre spectacle of more than two years standing in which ridiculous non-entities like Joseph Wilson have been given huge coverage in their campaign against Rove. Wilson wanted to see Rove “removed from the White House in chains” over a leak involving Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame. Wilson’s evidence against Rove was little more than criminality...

It is a little over 200 years since Malthus predicted that the world was on the point of running out of food. Population grows geometrically, he pointed out, but food production just arithmetically. Starvation and poverty were around the corner. When Malthus developed his theories the world was home to just under one billion people. Today it is more than six billion, and they are better fed, better clothed and better housed than ever before. Malthus was more comprehensively wrong than almost anyone else in history, and yet he still has his admirers today. After more than 20 years of...

Let me take you back to 2004. It is just a staging post in our journey in time, but it will do for the moment. I was visiting Plymouth with my wife, who had never been there before. For her - she is American - it was an opportunity to see the Mayflower steps. For me it was an opportunity to revisit a city that had been my home for five years, almost 20 years before. We took a boat trip around Plymouth Sound, and saw the NATO warships on exercise. And then I saw it, and I saw how...

At the beginning of the year the GOP had a ‘big three’ group of presidential contenders: John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. McCain and Giuliani dominated the polls, but Romney was putting together a very professional campaign under the radar and looked poised to strike. The only discussion about an outsider joining this group focused on Newt Gingrich. Giuliani had not officially joined the race, and some believed that if he did, or if Gingrich jumped in, Romney would not be able to stand the competition. He was the ‘anti-McCain’, and all it needed was someone with a higher...

It is a long time since any primary campaign has remained open all the way to the convention. In 1976 Ford was thought to have a narrow lead over Reagan, and so it turned out. But, in theory, that nomination could have gone the other way. In the same year Carter had a strong lead over his nearest rival, but with only a small majority overall. Certainly, his primary campaign went to the wire with the result in doubt up to the final primaries in June. Could either party take their campaigns all the way to the convention this time?...

Figures for second quarter fundraising by the various presidential candidates are now in. There are a number of key stories below the headline figures and, as usual, good news for some and bad for others. Obama: In the first quarter Obama narrowly trailed Clinton. This time he beat her by a handy $5 million. But it gets better. Nearly all of Obama’s money is for the primaries. Some of Clinton’s is for the general, and cannot be legally spent on her primary campaign. On that measure Obama won the first quarter too, and in the second quarter he outperformed Clinton...

Whether you spell it with an 's' or a 'z', I don't like the word. It is used so lazily and it starts with a rather dubious (French) assumption. Let's assume that you favour the legalisation of something that is currently illegal. Shouldn't you be campaigning for its legalisation? Well, not really. You have surrendered before you start. You make it sound as though the default position should always be the status quo unless there is a good reason to change it. That's problematic. People will ask you to spell out all the possible consequences. Might there not be a...

Dateline: 04 July 2007 What exactly, does a Vice-President do? The original version of the Constitution gave the job to the runner up in the Presidential election. The post attracted heavyweight leaders: Adams and Jefferson. But this proved unworkable. Jefferson was both Vice-President and leader of the opposition. And giving Electors two votes lead to the Jefferson-Burr tie in the 1800 election. The Twelfth Amendment effectively downgraded the Vice-Presidency. It became a position without a role. In today’s continent-sized country we are used the Vice-Presidency being a stepping stone to a Presidential run, but for most of the history of...

It looks like the figures are in, and there are two big stories: Obama definitively beats Clinton and the Republican candidates took a big hit. After the first quarter, Clinton captured the headline for the overall lead, but the small print told a different story. Everyone discounted her transfer of $10 million from her Senate campaign, but even without this, early commentators, including this blog, reported that she narrowly beat Obama in total receipts. It turned out that this was counting money donated for the general election - which she can't legally spend in the primaries. In the race for...

Imagine you are running a business and you suspect something has gone drastically wrong. Let’s say it appears that some money is missing. Your reaction, of course, is to call in an investigator with sweeping powers. Let’s say that after two years, and millions of dollars spent on the investigation, the investigator comes to you with some preliminary conclusions. One of your staff – let’s call him Jones – has tried to disrupt the investigation. This is pretty serious, you agree. Jones needs to be disciplined. But your principal concern is with the original investigation. Where’s the money? “What money?”...

Each of the two parties has a ‘big three’ of Presidential candidates; one outsider challenging; and a wild card who may enter the race. For the Republicans the wild card is Newt Gingrich, whom Common Sense discussed last year. For the Democrats it is former Vice-President, Al Gore. Gore, if selected, would be the first major party candidate since Richard Nixon to get a second chance at the presidency. They have other things in common. They were rather wooden senators selected as running mates by charismatic candidates. Both served two terms as Vice-President and lost narrow – and controversial –elections...

Being a billionaire has a number of well-documented advantages. One is that if you are running for President you can start out-spending your opponents pretty early on, and use your spending to define them before they can define themselves. You don’t need to wait while you raise money, or while you get nominated by your party. You don’t even need to wait while parties select their nominees, as you can start defining messages which play well against potential opponents. Let’s look at a few possible Bloomberg messages and how they might work. 1. “I’m the outsider. The others are just...

For about a year, bloggers and the commentariat have been talking about the ‘big three’ in the Republican primary campaign: Giuliani, McCain and Romney. By now people are getting bored with this field, and the weaknesses of the three have been explored endlessly. Understandably, some have been calling for a new candidate to enter the field, and it looks as though those calls have been answered. The only question that remains is this: is Fred Thompson just a temporary blip in the polls, as a response to big-three-fatigue, or will he stay the course as a leading contender? First, the...