The 300 days war rumbles on: McCain chooses moose mate

When I heard it on the radio news this morning, I thought John McCain had selected Michael Palin as his running mate. When I heard the female voice it was clear I was wrong (though I think the Yorkshire man would be a useful addition to any ticket). No, it wasn’t a stiff upper lipped Limey, instead it was the little-known Governor of Alaska and “mom of five” Sarah Palin that was now a good shot for the Vice Presidency. Andy Borowitz explained best McCain’s reasoning in his imagination of the senator’s own in-no-way defamatory words. "Let's say a constituent calls you and says that a caribou has wandered onto his front lawn," he said. "My friends, Barack Obama wouldn't know what to do."

But Sarah Palin would indeed know what to do. She’d shoot it. The 44 year old cleanskin and winner of the Miss Wasilla pageant must be a very formidable woman to get to be governor of a wildcat alpha male state like Alaska. Nevertheless, Palin is a long shot; but interestingly now, the Republican package is a good mirror image of the Democrats one as this long electoral war of attrition nears its end.

The war is taking its toll on all the players. Obama has lost his near impregnable lead over the last few months and is hoping the Clinton fairie dust works its magic after the Democratic Convention. The elephants are slowly clawing their way into the contest as John McCain seems most intent on provided nothing more exciting than an error-free campaign. Perhaps the biggest error is the name at the top of the ticket. McCain is barely tolerated in the Republicans and may not even be the best candidate in his family. The UK Independent asks why isn’t Cindy McCain’s name the one on the ticket?

Of course, the rest of the media ran with glee the offering about the McCain’s inability to remember how many houses they have (ten, apparently), the donkeys hee-hawed in Denver. This was an important moment. The fourth anniversary of Obama’s coming out speech at the 2004 convention. This time round, he set a TV record as 38 million people watched what he had to say. That was more than watched the Olympics or American Idol. And well more than ten million up on either Bush or Kerry in 2004.

The four-night Democrat convention ranks as the most-watched convention of either party since ratings began watching Kennedy and Nixon in 1960. The party had rejoiced in the But while American were happy to watch the asses in action last week, the elephants outside the room were being ignored. The Grand Old Party’s convention begins Monday in Minneapolis Saint Paul (Actually its in the state capital Saint Paul, but its Minnesota twin city Minneapolis, like the elephants, must always be mentioned in dispatches).

There is talk that the start may be delayed if Hurricane Gustav strikes New Orleans. Apart from the potentially embarrassing memories of Katrina, profit-driven media units are full stretch to cover two major stories in the same timeframe. The Republicans are worried that their precious news time will be stolen by all those great pictures of heavy seas and rooves coming clean off. Hence the move to announce Palin early. The sheer novelty value alone will eat bandwidth, broadcasting spectrum and column inches for the whole weekend until the storm hits, as well as killing off the buzz created by Obama’s own convention speech.

Nonetheless it is important to consider what this black-and-white scion Barack Obama had to say. He began by reminding his audience of the speech he made four years earlier. This was the story about “the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren't well-off or well-known.” The product of that union described the promise that set the US apart. Apart from what, he didn’t say. But the promise involved “individual dreams (that) still come together as one American family”.

Obama claimed we were in a defining moment – “a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more.” He claimed to speak for the unemployed, suffering home owners, those with credit card bills, and the poorly educated. While Obama said Bush was not to blame for all these people’s predicament, he said their lack of decency, generosity and compassion mean that America had to show it was “better than these last eight years”.

Many wonder whether Obama has the capability to match the fervour of his words. His extraordinary ratings numbers alone suggest this is a phenomenon that will be rewarded with victory in November. His voting record as a federal and an Illinois legislator shows him comfortably in the Democratic mainstream of sympathy for lower-income people. He has voted against Arctic and Gulf drilling and also against Bush’s choice for Chief Justice John Roberts. Obama was sceptical about Roberts’s deepest values and his “broader perspectives on how the world works” and his empathy. Why? “He has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak,” said Obama. Come November we will finally see who Obama’s own formidable skills will be used for.

Doing Obama’s Biden: Delaware Senator is VP choice

Barack Obama formally announced Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his running mate at a rally in Springfield, Illinois yesterday. The news had first been released in the form of emails and text messages sent to millions of supporters earlier in the day with Obama hailing Biden as a “distinguished leader”. The 65 year old six-term senator offers an obvious differentiating factor to Obama with Democrats calling out his vast political experience especially in the field of foreign affairs.

The McCain campaign immediately went on the offensive calling the choice of Biden an admission that Obama was not ready to be president. While John McCain called Biden “a wise selection”, his spokesman Ben Porritt was less conciliatory saying Biden was a harsh critic of Obama. "Biden has denounced Barack Obama's poor foreign policy judgment and has strongly argued in his own words what Americans are quickly realising - that Barack Obama is not ready to be president,” he said. The McCain camp followed this up with an attack ad of footage of Biden criticising Obama.

Nevertheless, Biden is a carefully considered choice. With just three electoral college seats in a north-east state that were likely to go to the Democrats anyway, Delaware was not an obvious match for the Illinois presidential candidate. However Biden’s has three crucial aces in his pack that made him the stand-out choice to support Obama. Firstly his tenure as chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee gives him international gravitas sorely lacking in the younger man. Secondly his appeal to working-class Americans may see him pick up votes for the team that went to Hillary Clinton in the primary campaign. Thirdly is the fact that Biden is a native of Pennsylvania, one of the crucial swing states in the election.

Biden himself has run for President twice, firstly in 1988 and again this year. In 1988 his campaign was sensationally cut short when it was discovered one of his speeches was plagiarising British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Just days later the New York Times reported Biden had also plagiarised a law review article in his first year university law course. When Biden compounded the problem by claiming his degree was better than it was, he was forced to withdraw from the campaign blaming “the exaggerated shadow” of his mistakes.

Biden came out of the shadows twenty years later and announced he would run again for president in early 2007. This brought him directly into contention against Barack Obama who, like Biden, was then seen as an outside chance compared to Hillary Clinton. Biden had just spearheaded the Democratic pushback against President Bush’s plan to increase troop levels in Iraq and was keen to establish his credentials in this area against the other candidates. In February 2007 he told the New York Observer that Obama was “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” but doubted whether American voters are going to elect “a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate.”

But Biden’s own presidential campaign never got off the ground. Biden was a solid enough performer and avoided the mistakes of 1988. He probably had the best quip of the campaign when he said of Rudy Giuliani “there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9-11.” He was also contemptuous of the neo-con agenda and called Bush “brain dead”. However he was forced to withdraw from the race after picking up just one percent of the Iowa caucus delegates.

Now it will be Biden’s job to sell Obama despite the inexperience problem he himself had diagnosed a year earlier. Plenty has changed since then including Biden’s own views. In June he told NBC’s Meet the Press he was interested in the Vice Presidential position. "If the presidential nominee thought I could help him win — am I going to say to the first African-American candidate about to make history in the world that, 'No, I will not help you out like you want me to'?” he said. “Of course...I'll say yes."

It will be Biden’s job now to heal the faultlines the primary campaign exposed in the Democrats. Obama drew on overwhelming support from blacks and his strengths are among well-educated and middle class voters. Primary exit polls also showed mass support among the under 30 year old voters. Biden can help with the white, ageing underclass that Hillary Clinton won and that might be otherwise tempted to sway to McCain. He will be an effective attack dog without being “all that exciting”. With the media parsing every utterance from the candidates from here to November, a safe and steady run-in is precisely what the Obama campaign needs now.

Donkeys demolish elephants

The US ended its love affair with the Grand Old Party yesterday and handed the House to the Democrats in the mid-term elections. The Senate remains up for grabs with President Bush looking an increasingly isolated figure in his remaining two years in office. The fallout was immediate with Bush announcing the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. His replacement is 63 year old Robert Gates, Bush family friend and CIA director under Bush senior.

The senate race is particularly tight. At the time of writing, 99 of the 100 seats have been decided. 50 of these are Democrats (including two independents Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders who will vote Democrat on caucus issues) and the other 49 are Republican. The one undecided seat is in Virginia. Democratic challenger Jim Webb holds a slight lead over incumbent Republican George Allen. The closeness of the vote means the final result may not be known until 27 November. At the moment Webb leads by 8,000 out of more than 2.3 million votes cast. Webb claimed victory last night but Allen refused today to concede. An Allen campaign adviser refused to say if the Republican candidate would ask for a recount if he loses. Under Virginia law, he will have 10 days after 27 November to ask for a recount. If a recount reverses Webb's apparent victory, the Senate would be split 50-50, leaving Vice President Dick Cheney with the deciding vote for Republicans.

The margin in the House of Representatives was more emphatic and gives the Democrats control of the House for the first time in 12 years. As reps are elected for just two years, all 435 seats were up for grabs. The Democrats needed to win 17 seats to take control and as of Wednesday (US time) appear to have gained 27 additional seats. The Republicans are heading for a net loss of 26 seats. The last seat to changes hands was from the House’s only independent to the Democrats. The main factors for the Democrat win were the public anger over the conduct of the war in Iraq as well as scandals that engulfed a number of high profile Republicans in recent months. Seats held by troubled ex-senators Tom DeLay, Bob Ney and Mark Foley all fell to the Democrats.

Aided by public dissatisfaction with President Bush, Democrats won gubernatorial races in New York, Ohio and Massachusetts for the first time in more than a decade, and also won in Colorado, Maryland and Arkansas. Several GOP officials said they expected outgoing Illinois Speaker Dennis Hastert to step down as party leader and possibly even retire from Congress. Massachusetts elected its first African-American governor and first Democratic governor in 16 years, Governor-elect Deval Patrick. And for the first time in over 50 years, Maryland voters unseated an incumbent governor. 36 governorships were decided this year and post election, 28 of the 50 states now have Democrat governors. Arnold Schwarzenegger bucked the trend and was one of the few high profile GOP successes. Although the Democrats hold both senate seats in California, Schwarzenegger easily accounted for his Democrat rival winning by 15%. His success is based on a recent conversion to consensual politics. He has impressed this year by enacting greenhouse gas-cutting legislation and by increasing the minimum wage. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton also easily secured re-election as New York senator heightening speculation about her as yet undeclared bid for the White House in 2008.

A less high profile woman, Nancy Pelosi, is the new Speaker of the House. She is the first woman to ever hold the role. The 66-year-old mother of five has served as representative for San Francisco since 1987, and became House minority leader in 2002. Pelosi learned her politics early in life - her father was a congressman for Maryland and also served as mayor of Baltimore. She is also independently wealthy; her husband Paul made a fortune of $25 million from portfolio and property investments. Her wealth has enabled her to finance other Democrats’ campaigns. In return she has demanded discipline and loyalty. Her relationship with Bush will be critical to their mutual fortunes over the next two years. Their relationship to date has been marked by mutual disdain. Bush regards her as a high taxing Democrat and Pelosi is on record describing Bush as an incompetent leader.

Incompetent or not, Bush bowed to the inevitable yesterday and announced the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was one of the key architects of the Iraq war. Congress members welcomed his departure as a sign that Bush is open to new ideas on Iraq. Critics said the outgoing defense secretary ignored advice from his generals, encouraged the abuse of war captives and failed to develop a credible post-war plan. Delaware Democrat Senator Joseph Biden hailed the resignation as a “death knell of the neo-conservative approach”. In contrast to Rumsfeld, his replacement Bob Gates is considered to be pragmatic and a foreign policy realist. The appointment is likely to lead to a more conciliatory approach on Iraq and the first step towards a phased withdrawal of US forces.

Political analysts are still digesting the consequences of a Democrat controlled Capitol Hill. Nancy Pelosi has said her priorities will include a higher minimum wage, the promotion of stem-cell research and a push to enact the recommendations of the September 11 congressional report. She and the president will now have to learn to live together; any legislation passed by a Democratic House will need Bush's signature. And with Pelosi controlling the House, he will need her agreement to get a subject on to the political agenda. At this stage, no one can say if the result will be consensus or gridlock.