Obamacare lives.

The U.S. Supreme Court today voted 5-4 to uphold all parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as ACA, also known as Obamacare. Against expectations and party lines, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the majority, with perennial swing vote Anthony Kennedy writing for the dissent. Roberts sided with the Court’s four liberal justices, ruling that Congress had not exceeded its constitutionally-mandated powers in requiring Americans to buy health insurance.

Interestingly, the ruling stipulates that Congress has the authority to impose the law’s individual mandate provision under Congress’s taxing powers, but not, as had been argued previously by the Obama administration, under either the Commerce Clause, or the Necessary and Proper Clause (though they had also made the tax argument as well).

It seems that the ACA would not have been upheld solely on the basis of the Commerce Clause alone (that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance) – there simply weren’t the votes. It has been able to pass with the votes of five justices, however, because they ruled that the penalty someone must pay if they refuse to buy health insurance is in fact a kind of tax that Congress can impose through its taxing power. Congress has a specific power vis-à-vis the ACA – the power to tax. As the individual mandate survived, the whole statute was able to stand (apart from a little niggle about Medicaid and state compliance). The constitutional scholar Jack M. Balkin had a fine piece in the May edition of the Atlantic magazine presciently arguing that the healthcare mandate was clearly a tax, and therefore constitutional.

The decision – I think we can call it historic – means that thirty million hitherto uninsured Americans will now get healthcare coverage, and many millions will receive better insurance than they once had, whether it be extended drug coverage for the elderly, or the right to appeal against insurer treatment decisions from those who have to pay for said insurance. Really for the first time in U.S. history, millions of Americans will now always have the option of comprehensive healthcare coverage available to them.

Politically, the ruling is unlikely to change things much; if anything, it was an affirmation of the status quo, rather than a dramatic upturning of it. Republican voters may well be galvanised to turn out in droves come November’s general election. Speaker of the House John Boehner has already tweeted that “Today’s ruling by the Supreme Court underscores the urgency of #fullrepeal.” That’s a position you can expect to be repeated throughout the campaign, a Republican insistence that Obamacare must be repealed in its entirety. Democrats will be happy with the ruling, although they must guard against complacency. More broadly, today’s vote could have important long-term implications for the size and scope of the federal government.

The upholding of the ACA will be one of the key issues of the election campaign. Where President Obama and Mitt Romney are in fact very similar in any number of areas, Obamacare presents a wonderfully stark and binary choice to voters – keep it, or repeal it. We know Romney wants to repeal it, but what happens afterwards? Does he simply wish to return to a pre-Obama status quo? The ruling will shore up his core vote, but he needs his own healthcare policy, whatever that may be, to persuade independents to come into the red camp. Healthcare – which will soon account for fully one-fifth of the American economy – is far too important an issue to be dodged. But at least now the air has been cleared. The stakes are enormous, and only an election can settle the matter. 

Rubio ruled out of the Veepstakes (probably).

My continuing fascination with the GOP Veepstakes continues, with the story today that Mitt Romney’s campaign team, after only a “preliminary review”, are not seriously vetting the junior Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, instead focusing on someone who matches better Romney’s temperament and desire for experience.

In its own way, this is quite important. I’ve speculated on Mitt Romney’s choice of vice presidential nominee before, and Rubio was certainly an early favourite for many. Young, charismatic, equipped with an eloquence that would make grown men cry, and a family straight out of central casting. For Romney’s presidential team, this was apparently not enough.

Rubio would certainly have been a popular choice. He is a rising star of the conservative movement and a darling of the Tea Party, regularly topping straw polls when grass-roots activists are asked for their choice of nominee. He would have fired up the Republican base, and likely would have helped deliver a healthy portion of the increasingly important Hispanic/ Latino electorate. His state of Florida, a crucial swing state, would have been in play even more than it already is.

Things are not, alas, quite that simple. Romney and his campaign team have consistently expressed their key prerequisite in a vice presidential nominee to be readiness and suitability for high office, not simple popularity. Moreover, Rubio did not enjoy the same sort of relationship Romney enjoys with other frontrunners for the VP nomination, such as Ohio Senator Rob Portman and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. Romney and Rubio have only campaigned together once, back in April, whereas Portman and Pawlenty have been regulars on the campaign trail. Finally, Rubio is indeed very young and inexperienced. He has been a Senator for little over a year. Only today he has launched his autobiography, An American Son, as he seeks to make more of a name for himself.

While it is right to highlight the importance of the Hispanic vote, equally it should not be forgotten how important the white working-class vote is for Romney, and the importance of getting them out to vote for him come election day. Romney has been swinging through the Rust Belt these past few days, impressing white voters in important swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania that do not have a significant Hispanic voting bloc. If they turn out in force come November, he may not need minority voters, or at least as much. This is in part explained by Barack Obama’s deep and enduring unpopularity among non-college educated white (and working class) voters. Rubio's ability to help deliver some Hispanic voters was secondary to the need for a VP nominee who would have been viewed by the electorate as a person of gravitas and experience. 

The announcement that Marco Rubio is not being vetted (he has not been asked to complete a questionnaire or submit personal finance documents, as normally happens) may just be a wheeze to throw us off course. There might still be time to vet him thoroughly a little later on. Perhaps, but this seems unlikely. With Rubio out, attention once again turns to Ohio Senator Rob Portman (still my favourite to get the nod), and now, increasingly, Tim Pawlenty. Both are experienced and have a similar personality to Romney, and enjoy a strong personal relationship with him. And maybe, just maybe, with Rubio out, Barack Obama will be breathing a little sigh of relief.

Summertime, and the livin' is bloody hard.

“Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” So observes Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, in William Shakespeare’s Richard III. Gentle punning (sun/ son), historical accuracy and careful literary analysis aside, the swan of Avon had it all wrong. Summer is not glorious and winter is not a time of discontent. It is precisely the other way round.

Winter is in fact a time of great contentment for me. Luxuriating in the autumnal hangover of crisp leaves, bracing winds and mist-infused mornings, winter represents the delighted apogee of my normally misanthropic, perennially confused, darkly comic bellendry. Who here has not felt some form of fraternal love for one’s fellow man as one stalks the streets for a spell of late-night shopping, safely bathed in the warm, embracing glow of Christmas lights? No, me neither. But I certainly feel good ambling amid the bustling hordes as they try to secure that half-price olisbos for aunt Karen. Winter has my birthday, a time of shared national celebration. Winter has Christmas, Diwali, Hanukkah and Saturnalia. Winter has days off work because a thirty-year-old train carriage buckled and crumpled under the weight of a single snowflake. Winter has hysterical and often hilarious coverage of the snow, safely and easily ignored. Winter has real ale and mulled wine and mulled cider and good food. I’ll stop now, at the risk of coming across as John Major, all warm beer, cricket and heavy-breasted milkmaids cycling over cobblestones in the Cotswolds with a copy of the Daily Telegraph ensconced in their plump décolletage.  

Summer cannot hold a candle to winter. It is the season when humanity crashes and reverse metamorphoses into its very worst incarnation. The terasecond a solitary sunbeam ekes its way through the clouds, chino wankers are out in force, as if there were a whining, nasally alarm system audible only to them, altering their neurological pathways and forcing them into chino shorts, dreadful shoes, and the only Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt their unemployment benefit allows them to buy. An equally resonant second alarm then rings, bringing the older generations out in force too, deepthroating their ice lollies like they were trying to teach the rest of us an important life lesson, as my eyes feverishly try to escape the eaves of loose body flesh over-spilling the rims of their trousers.

You probably – and correctly – deduced that these sentiments are born from a healthy dollop of envy. As a heavy asthmatic chronically prone to hay fever, I am able to become so infected with various ailments and allergies that Bashar al-Assad turned down the opportunity to weaponise me into a biological WMD for fear it would be too powerful once unleashed. The sun simultaneously stops me getting to sleep in the night and exhausts me in the day. I do not tan; I do not burn. I merely remain the same. Whereas it is simplicity itself to warm myself up in the cold, cooling myself down in the heat is a Sisyphean task. Stupid, pointless insects which exist at no other point in time come into being during the summer and mercilessly attack my Hollywood good looks. I become even more irritable than usual. And if the human race will often strike up a conversation about a bit of a wind or a light drizzle, then they’ll sure as hell make a comment about the sunshine, lovely being the adjective of choice. (I realise I’m operating at some level of meta-, unconscious, hypocritical irony here, but, well, shut up).

Autumn, winter and spring are perfectly fine. Some sunshine is acceptable, too, as long as it doesn’t go above, ooh, 15 degrees. Forgive me: I live in Buxton. It is the highest market town in England. Any amount of rain less than monsoon conditions, and any wind blowing at less than 8 on the Beaufort scale is sure to frighten and confuse me. I don’t have to wait until summer to get intoxicated in some overcrowded beer garden: it is a year-round necessity independent of season. I have consistency on my side: I have always disliked it, and much preferred other seasons and weather systems. Perhaps I am destined to follow the path of Richard in Shakespeare’s imagining of him:

“And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”

Barack Obama and the bending arc of gay marriage.

Seemingly from nowhere, the issue of gay marriage was raised last week in the United States when Joe Biden, the loose-tongued Vice President, declared he was “absolutely comfortable” granting same-sex couples the rights and benefits of marriage hitherto enjoyed only by heterosexuals. When it rains it pours: soon afterwards, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s education secretary, also expressed his support for gay marriage. The president’s famously “evolving” views on gay marriage – the subject of many cubic metres of journalistic scorn – reached their terminus. He became the first president in history to formally endorse allowing same-sex couples to marry, telling ABC that “it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

A historic and important and laudable stance most of us would agree, but it all needs to be unpacked. First of all, Obama reiterated his belief that, though he believes same-sex couples should be able to marry, at no point can I remember (though I will happily be proven wrong) did he say his administration would take the steps necessary to confer such a right. This is because the president has taken an unusually federalist stance on the issue, believing it to be a state-by-state matter. A cancer patient smoking medicinal marijuana would quickly discover the overriding supremacy of the federal government, and likely find himself incarcerated in one of America’s overcrowded prisons. But the establishment and distribution of marital benefits is a state-by-state issue for the president. A bizarrely incongruous position, then.

In no fewer than 44 U.S. states are same-sex couples prohibited from marrying. As many have pointed out, there is a compelling case to be made under the equal protection clause of the Constitution, that, as the federal government actively prohibits same-sex couples from marrying solely based on whether or not the state they reside in recognises such marriages, gay people are being actively discriminated against. In short, the president’s position is all of a bit of a dodge. While he has endorsed gay marriage (again, a stance that is welcomed) he supports the right of marriage to be applied arbitrarily depending on which state someone lives in and a person’s sexual orientation. And I shouldn’t even have to point out that slavery and abortion were both formerly state-by-state issues.

Gay rights has admittedly come quite some way under president Obama, chiefly through the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, and the Justice Department’s refusal to enforce the Defence of Marriage Act (though this has not been repealed as yet). In 1996, just over a quarter of Americans supported gay marriage; today this figure stands at around 50 per cent. The views of the American people have been evolving alongside those of their commander-in-chief. But this leads me to my second point.

Martin Luther King Jr. observed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” At just the moment when the right of same-sex marriage is becoming increasingly accepted in the wider body politic, it may have to endure a setback. Previously you wouldn’t have been able to get an anorexic cigarette paper between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s substantive views on homosexuality and gay marriage. Things may now change, the ideological waters parting. Romney and senior Republicans have now reaffirmed their opposition. Thoughtful (or at least disinterested) Republicans and libertarians will likely now have to adhere to the party line this election year, as gay marriage goes from a moderately divisive issue to yet another weapon in the long-fought culture wars. North Carolina voted strongly in favour of a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to between a man and a woman; a bill legalising civil unions in Colorado never even made it out of committee.

I could well be wrong. Those who met the president’s endorsement of same-sex marriage with the most opprobrium were never going to be in the blue camp anyway; very few Democrats will decline the president their vote in November after his announcement, and certainly none on the left of the party over this issue. It is also not, let us be honest, an issue of great importance for the majority of American people right now. There’s perhaps a case to be made that Obama’s announcement helped rekindle the cultural divide, forcing Romney on the back foot – the former governor of Massachusetts is notoriously bad at lobbing out great chunks of red meat for his party’s partisans to devour. Any back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis would likely conclude this announcement won’t have hurt Obama’s re-election chances much. Yes it was a half-assed endorsement, and about bloody time too, but it was nonetheless an important moment. Voter turnout will almost certainly increase; the political bases will be full of ideological beans. We just need an election to sort it all out.

Book review: Tiger Head, Snake Tails

Tiger Head, Snake Tails - China today, how it got there and where it is heading
Simon & Schuster UK
2012
432 pages


In his 1776 work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observed that “China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous, countries in the world.” At the time of his writing this, it was an apposite summary of one of the great civilisations of mankind. Smith went on to write that “It seems, however, to have been long stationary.” Not so now. Today, the rise of China has become perhaps the dominant narrative of our time. In his superb new book, Tiger Head, Snake Tails, Jonathan Fenby has given us an intelligent and informative handbook on contemporary China, ably explaining its political, economic, social and geopolitical intricacies.

Such a panoramic and all-encompassing work might risk drowning in superlatives, but in Fenby’s hands they help bring this complex country to life. Many we are already familiar with. At 1.37 billion people, the People’s Republic comprises a fifth of humanity. The People’s Liberation Army has 2.28 million active troops, easily surpassing the 1.58 million of the United States. Half a billion people have been lifted out of poverty as a result of significant economic reforms first initiated in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping, the largest increase in material gain history has ever seen. It is the world’s third largest country and second largest economy, with almost all predicting it will surpass the United States by roughly 2020; some think even earlier. It is the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter. In 2009 the PRC contributed to more than half of the world’s total economic growth. It sits on monetary reserves amounting to some $3.2 trillion. It is the largest emitter on greenhouse gases.

This book is bursting with other such statistics, ones that begin to tease out a different yet equally compelling portrait of China. 35 million Chinese people are learning to play the piano. China produces 6 billion condoms a year, and state media report there are around 13 million abortions. There are more blind people in the PRC than there are people in Denmark. 54.6 million are illiterate. China executes more people every year than any other, with 68 crimes punishable by death. And so on.

One of the great merits of Mr. Fenby’s book, however, is to go a very great way in challenging – or at least helping us re-evaluate – some of the lazy assumptions about, and attitudes towards, modern China. Unquestionably it is an economic powerhouse and driver of global growth, but it faces unprecedented short- and long-term challenges, be they social, political or economic. While we can acknowledge that hundreds of millions have seen their personal incomes grow and economic opportunities expand, 100 million still remain in grinding poverty; this figure grows to 250 million if we apply the UN standard of $1.25 a day. The author relates that the wealth gap in China is more pronounced than anywhere in Europe. China’s Gini coefficient – the standard measure of income inequality – is 0.47, “a level generally taken as the point at which social unrest becomes a threat.” This explains in part the 150,000 popular protests China experiences every year, many of them drawing thousands of people, taking to the streets against endemic corruption and pronounced inequality.

This book also gives a far more substantial portrait of the Chinese economy than contemporary accounts of a seemingly unstoppable economic juggernaut might attest. Granted, per-capita GDP in China about thirty years ago was roughly 4 per cent that of the United States; now it is just under 20 per cent. GDP has grown by a factor of ten. But, for one, the U.S. and China have been locked in something of a currency war, with the former frequently raising concerns – or great annoyance – at the latter’s apparent manipulation of their currency. The economic (and, for that matter, the political) system is uncompetitive; growth to a large extent is built on a dependence on property construction, investment and exports; Mr. Fenby documents great swathes of unused property across the country. Any sort of boom and bust could leave the Chinese with zombie banks. Graver still, the economy as a whole is deleteriously unbalanced, a reality conceded by many CCP bigwigs in their interminably long speeches. Corruption, bribery, fraud, graft and smuggling are entrenched and endemic. Corner-cutting on grand infrastructure projects invites danger. Mr. Fenby alarmingly suggests that, when a high-speed train crashed in July 2011, the reported death toll of 39 was chosen by state media quite deliberately – investigations only apply to those accidents resulting in forty or more casualties.

Another great challenge facing China in the future is demographic. Slamming the brakes on natural population growth through the wheeze of a one child policy has resulted in an unbalanced demography in China. The average fertility rate for mothers in the United States is two children per family; in China it is roughly 1.5., but in some areas, such as Shanghai, that number collapses to just 0.5. This then reverberates through the system. The balance between the generations has become unstable (and perhaps even unsustainable); this is coupled in many areas with a marked gender imbalance. Such demographic problems will likely mean both social unrest and hamstrung economic and financial growth in the future.

Though no such work can truly capture the diversity and complexity of such a multifaceted country as China, Tiger Head, Snake Tails is as good a primer as one could hope for. Sweeping statements and generalisations from other commentators have proved unhelpful in helping us analyse contemporary China. No such narratives – whether they are China v America, China as the new Japan, China as the rising red dragon, and so on – are really borne out by the facts, or are quickly made redundant because of their timescales. Better then, as Mr. Fenby advises, to properly observe the many snake tails below the great head of the tiger.

Un-Super Tuesday for Newt Gingrich.

It's farewell, then, to the big, brainy and boisterous Newt Gingrich, who's expected to drop out of the race within the week and endorse Mitt Romney. After a short-lived stratospheric rise in the opinion polls came an almighty crash: heavy and humiliating defeat after heavy and humiliating defeat in the contest to become the Republican Party's nominee to take on Barack Obama. Tuesday's "un-Super Tuesday" contests - probably the most significant day of polling thus far behind the real Super Tuesday - saw poor old Newt suffering large losses in all five primaries he contested - Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and the "last chance saloon" of Delaware. Failure to win, or at least come close to winning, in Delaware would force a reassessment of Gingrich's candidacy, he suggested. A 30-point rogering by Mitt Romney meant the day of reckoning had arrived in all its indignity and finality. 

Romney blew Gingrich out of the water in all five contests, as expected, taking him up to 844 delegates, enjoying an insurmountable lead as he edges ever closer to the magic 1,144 delegates, the number needed to officially lock up the nomination (although Romney already had it locked up before Gingrich's announcement). Gingrich ought really to have bowed out some time around Mitt Romney's thumping victory in Florida in January; as such, he won only two states, the early contest of South Carolina, and his home state of Georgia.  He amassed 137 delegates in total. His campaign was deflated and indebted. And now it's over.

Throughout this campaign, I couldn't help but have something of a soft spot for Newt Gingrich. He was extremely well-versed in history, an "ideas man", throwing out bruising political punches and rhetorical tour-de-forces when the occasion demanded. It's perhaps no coincidence his campaign immediately started to flag when the number of live debates tapered off. For being sent to the back of Air Force One, he threw a tantrum and closed down the federal government. While he was investigating Bill Clinton's sexual proclivities, he was conducting his own illicit affair with the woman who would become his third wife while he was still married to his second wife. He wanted a colony on the Moon and lasers in space. He was the only Speaker of the House of Representatives to be formally disciplined for ethics violations. He had a gargantuan opinion of himself, self-identifying as a world historical figure, called forth by the sirens of history and contingency and necessity to do duty his by America and save it from the pernicious forces of liberalism and moral relativism. He was real, and authentic, and flawed; that was part of his problem. He was the striding definition of political baggage, the butt and punchline to too many jokes, the source of a veritable gamut of gloriously wacky and outlandish quotes. 

Now we must mentally turn to, and prepare ourselves for, the clash of Romney versus Obama. The only things most people remember about Mitt Romney are that he's rich, enjoys firing people, and had a dog who exploded excrement all over the Romneys' windshield when the unfortunate mutt was placed atop the family saloon and driven to Canada. In his speech Tuesday night, Romney had a good, memorable line: "It's still about the economy, and we're not stupid." He'll need more of those. Perhaps he could turn to Newt Gingrich for advice. 

France's first round.

A few quick thoughts on the first round of France’s presidential election. First off, round one goes to the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, who received over 28% of the vote, according to the most recent exit polls. This puts him in a strong position to go on to win the presidency in May; indeed, no single poll has thus far shown Sarkozy ahead of his rival come the second round, with Hollande enjoying a lead of anywhere between 6% and 16% (and mostly 10%).

Second place went to the incumbent Gaullist president, the ailing Nicolas Sarkozy. He took around 25% of the vote: again, results are slowly trickling in. Victory in the second round is of course not impossible, but it will assuredly be difficult for him. Mr Sarkozy is nothing if not tenacious, however; most pundits concur that he is a formidable campaigner. History may in theory be on the president’s side. Since 1965, there have been eight presidential elections in France; in three of these, the eventual winner only came second in the first round of polling. Despite this, the numbers do not look good for Sarkozy; Hollande’s lead seems near unassailable in the second round polling.

Yet the headline figure is the roughly 20 per cent of votes received for Marine Le Pen and her Front National. This figure, were it to hold, is far higher than many first-round polls had suggested, meaning most had underestimated her popularity. It would constitute the most votes the Front National had ever received in a presidential election, and indeed the highest total for any nationalist party in Europe.

From the far-right to the far-left: around 11.7% voted for the former Trotskyist and Communist-backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an undoubtedly disappointing result for the man who had seemingly run an energetic and populist insurgent’s campaign. Though a compelling orator and excellent campaigner, his hopes of helping to shape post-election France will have been dampened.

Finally, perennial candidate François Bayrou scored around 9%, leaving him stuck in fifth place. In the previous presidential election of 2007, Mr Bayrou took almost 19% of the vote in the first round, allowing him to act as something of a kingmaker. There may be something in the fact that he was, broadly speaking, the only candidate to confront France’s increasingly worrisome economic situation.

All the talk now will turn to how the votes of Le Pen, Mélenchon and Bayrou will be divided between the two frontrunners in the second round run-off. It seems safe to say that almost all of Mélenchon’s supporters will go straight to the Socialist Hollande. Le Pen’s voters will likely split, though not evenly. Some polls suggest around 40% will go to president Sarkozy, with another 27% going to Hollande. If this seems curious, many Le Pen supporters would not self-identity or think of themselves as necessarily right-wing. Sarkozy hatred exists among Front National supporters, too. Sarkozy may be able to collect Le Pen voters by talking up Islam and immigration; Hollande by playing up a soft message of protectionism and anti-globalisation. The challenge for Sarkozy and Hollande will be to retain their core support, hold the vital centre ground, and yet appeal to this great mass of divided voters. We wait to find out how they will both meet this challenge.