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. 

Here come the Veepstakes!

Now that Mitt Romney has all but secured the Republican nomination for President, political anoraks such as myself get to turn away and indulge in a little Veep-stakes speculation – or, to the uninitiated, fruitlessly guess who Romney will pick as his running-mate on the Republican ticket.

It’s unquestionably an important choice for the former Governor of Massachusetts, particularly in light of the fact that recent polling shows him to have among the highest unfavourability ratings of any presidential nominee in memory. A competent, charismatic or respected vice presidential running-mate would in theory be able to complement, offset, or, if need be, distract attention away from the flaws or weaknesses of the presidential nominee. Mitt Romney certainly has his strengths as a candidate, but the wider electorate – Democrats and Republicans – have been exposed to many of his lesser qualities: a certain provincial aloofness, a disconnect due to his vast personal wealth, and an uninspiring and unexciting personality. For others, the fact that he ruled as a liberal Republican of already true-blue Massachusetts is nigh-on unforgivable. He has also been a notorious flip-flopper of any number of issues. In short, pick wisely, and Romney could help ameliorate some of this.

What we won’t be getting is a repeat of 2008, in which John McCain plucked from obscurity the woefully unprepared intellectual disgrace that was Sarah Palin, seemingly almost on a whim. Romney will be thorough and meticulous, poring over the data on each candidate with diligence and care. Different candidates will be able to better deliver the votes of certain states or crucial demographics. Now that the hard slog of the Republican nomination is (effectively) over, might Romney be able to relax a little and choose someone he is truly comfortable with?

The issue of demographics is important. There is the so-called ‘gender gap’, with women preferring Obama to Romney 49% to 39% on the latest numbers. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the racial gap is far wider: Obama is ahead among blacks 94%-3%, and among Hispanics 64%-24%. This should not be a one-way analysis, however: Romney leads among whites and men. Moreover, the historical precedents of picking a particular demographic to broaden overall appeal are mixed, Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 perhaps being the best example. People do not tend to vote according to gender. It also risks looking nakedly tokenistic.

So, without further ado, here are the runners and riders in the 2012 Veep-stakes, from the plausible to the implausible, the outside chances to the please-God-nos. 

Marco Rubio

The Florida Senator is a darling of the Tea Party movement, young, charismatic and popular. Hispanic (his parents were Cuban refugees) he could help Romney begin to overturn his poll deficits with minority voters, particularly in such a crucial swing state. One negative against him is that his compelling personal narrative appears to have been a little embellished. In fact, as The Washington Post reported, his parents fled Cuba over two-and-a-half years before Castro came to power in 1959. He is also politically inexperienced, serving less than two years in office. Rubio could, hypothetically speaking, stand a great chance at winning the nomination come 2016. On top of all of this, he has announced he would turn down any Romney VP offer down, so that seems to be that.

Chris Christie

The current Governor of New Jersey apparently considered seeking the Republican nomination himself, before turning the opportunity down. Christie played down expectations, believing he'll still be in the Governor's Mansion come November, although he has freely admitted he would accept a place on the ticket were he to be asked. A burly and charismatic political brawler, he could really take the fight to Barack Obama. He is, however, comparatively speaking, another North-Eastern moderate, something the Republican grassroots would likely be hostile to. 

Rob Portman

The junior Senator from Ohio possesses significant governmental experience and knowledge, serving both in George W. Bush's administration and as director of the OMB. A reliably safe pair of hands. Portman endorsed Romney before the South Carolina primary back in January. A political moderate by temperament, he is said to already enjoy warm personal relations with Romney, and could help deliver Ohio, a crucial swing in any election. There is, though, no getting around the fact that, as well as being relatively unknown, he is an exceptionally boring man. He remains, however, an early favourite for the ticket. 

Paul Ryan

The Wisconsin congressman and chairman of the important House Budget Committee, Ryan would constitute a real risk for the Romney team. Adored by his own party's grassroots and Tea Party activists, he would at the same time act as an extremely potent magnet for every single Democratic attack ad. No less a figure than the President has slammed Ryan's budget plan as 'thinly veiled social Darwinism' for its proposals to dramatically slash government spending, none more so than for Medicaid, the highly popular program which provides health care to those on low incomes. Romney would have enough trouble without picking Ryan. 

Bob McDonnell

The Governor of Virginia, a state which voted Democrat in 2008 for the first time since LBJ. He won handsomely in 2009 with the simple slogan "Bob's for jobs", and has remained broadly popular since. A retired U.S. army officer with a family straight out of central casting. He has a laser-like focus on what I will lazily call bread-and-butter issues, which could help Romney. He aroused significant controversy however when he supported a bill earlier this year stating that all women seeking a first-trimester abortion must have a vaginal probe inserted into them. McDonnell eventually declared he could not sign the bill into law until state Republicans softened the language, eventually managing to piss everybody off. Some have written his chances off, but I wouldn't be so sure.

Several other names have been touted: the Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal; Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson; South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley; Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels; and so on. These names remain, for now, long shots. FDR's Vice President John Nance Garner once described his ill-defined job as being "not worth a bucket of warm piss." Perhaps not. Many of us will still be waiting with bated breath to find out just who Romney picks.

New polls show Barack Obama is beatable.

Republican Party strategists will be heartened by the first national polling conducted since Rick Santorum bowed out of the nomination race last week. Three separate polls have each given the presumptive (okay, okay, dead certain) Republican nominee Mitt Romney slender leads over President Barack Obama.

Rasmussen has Romney three points up on Obama in a hypothetical election contest, 47% to 44%. FOX News has Romney up two, 46% to 44%. Finally, Gallup's tracking poll also has Romney up two points, 47% to 45%. The Real Clear Politics average still shows an Obama lead, but this has been chopped down to 2.8%.

The most significant import of these numbers is that they go someway to showing that Obama is beatable. It seems unimaginably obvious to state this, but I at least get the impression that many (and, often, distant European) commentators think Obama just about has re-election sewn up. Sure, it’ll be a hard fight, but once party loyalists and independents see the stark binary choice presented to them, so the argument goes, they’ll fall into line and vote for the man they know. The problem here is that grassroots Republicans have or will come to adopt the very same line of thought. Romney may not exactly make the blood flow faster or the heart beat a little quicker, but the same Gallup poll shows he enjoys some 90% partisan support, as does Obama.

What explains Romney's sudden bounce? In the short-term, most agree that Romney met Santorum's exit with grace and dignity and tact (contrasting, by-the-by, with Santorum's cantankerous and slightly long-winded speech). Much more importantly, the American economy is plainly still deep in the doldrums. For all the talk that it is slowly improving, unemployment is still a huge 8.2%, and this figure is almost certainly much below the actual number of jobless as many people have simply given up and left the labour market altogether. Job creation has stalled. No President since FDR has won re-election with unemployment higher than 7.2%. More people want the hated Obamacare repealed than kept on the statute books. On top of all this, international affairs (particularly an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities) could throw the whole contest into turmoil. 

I would like to see Barack Obama re-elected as President, for what it is worth. But many had invested their hopes in the Republican Party nominating someone so ideologically extreme, so divisive, so devoid of ideas, that Obama would be able to start remeasuring the curtains in the Lincoln Bedroom come the late summer. Whatever one may think of him, Mitt Romney is not this godsend/nightmare. He is smart, well-known, thoughtful, and equipped with a bulging war chest. He stands a reasonable chance of winning. These were of course only three polls in what promises to be a long, expensive and, one would expect, bitterly polarising election campaign. Predicting or second-guessing the future is the lot of crank astrologers, not careful political observers. You have every right to be disappointed if Mitt Romney becomes President of the United States come November, but no right to be surprised.

Some tragic and not altogether serious thoughts on London.

When a man is tired of London, it's probably because he's spent more than an hour there. My hasty update of Samuel Johnson's famous observation is admittedly unlikely to enter the Oxford Book of Quotations, but it may, I suspect, at least ring the very faintest of bells in the minds of those who have ever lived, worked, or merely encountered someone who has lived there. I proffer this thought against the general background of the upcoming mayoral elections, on 3 May.

I find London exhausting. Confusing. Impermeable. Off-putting. Enticing. If this sounds curious, it's probably because I've only ever actually been to London on four occasions. On the first of these, I bought a hotdog outside Buckingham Palace for £2.50. This, I suspect, marked the beginnings of my own hard-edged brand of republicanism. On the same occasion, I received my official Legoland driver's licence. You can imagine my shock upon discovering the blasted thing isn't even valid. In such a wild and tumultuous crucible my queasiness about London was inculcated and began to flourish.

But I'm rambling somewhat. If London is the greatest city in the world, why are those poor, busy, frustrated, hard-pressed Londoners forced to choose between the bad joke that is Ken Livingstone and the bad joke that is Boris Johnson? I made this point on Twitter yesterday and had literally some retweets and replies. One quite rightly suggested that this Manichean choice, shit and shit, was not really the fault of ordinary Londoners. I agree. I admit my sentiment was rapidly approaching the analogy of blaming the proceeding generations of ordinary Germans for the crimes of the Third Reich, a philosophical, moral and historical position I'm deeply uncomfortable with. (Thankfully nothing of that this year, except when Ken briefly called Boris Hitler). I can't imagine being a voter and staring blankly at the ballot paper come that fateful Thursday. Decide, mortals: the sub-Wodehousian, comically buffoonish, piccaninnies-and-watermelon-smiles BoJo, or the Jews-won't-vote-Labour-because-they're-rich, al-Qaradawi-embracing, grossly indulgent, shiftily-tax-evading Red Ken? Of course, as autonomous individuals you'll technically speaking have plenty to choose from - Brian Paddick, Jenny Jones, Siobhan Benita, BNP, UKIP, abstention, desecration. But it'll always, forever, wind up swinging back to the blue corner against the red corner. A plague on all their houses. Punishing the sons for the sins of the fathers. I'm just free associating in my very own little Euripides play here.

My advice? Come northward. Move the capital elsewhere. Plenty of countries get by perfectly well having capital cities that are decidely not their largest cities. The United States. Australia. Canada. Brazil. Park the new capital in the north, perhaps roughly equidistant between London and the border with Scotland. Say, for argument's sake, in Buxton, Derbyshire. The fact that I live here is entirely coincidental. Strip London of all the perks and attraction and glamour and reputation. Give it some breathing space, a rest. Cut ordinary Londoners some slack. Help kick-start the economy here in the north (we're flagging, by-the-by). Things might well become more sensible and practicable. The London mayoral contests would no longer be the electoral equivalent of cocks-on-the-table, or my cock's bigger than your cock, to restrict my analogies to the general crotch area. It may then attract some more decent, more thoughtful, more compelling, more feasible, less ridiculous, less polarised, less o tempora, o mores! sensations than heretofore. Plus, we do some great pasties here up north. 

Exit, stage (far) right.

In a rather sudden announcement, Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, making the decision late last night. Yahoo has reported he rang Mitt Romney some time before to confirm his decision. Thus the Republican contest has effectively been wrapped-up; all that remains is a little house-keeping.

Perhaps the most engrossing aspect of Santorum's campaign was its sheer improbability, mtahced only by its stratospheric rise. Before December, nearly every Republican nominee - Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and of course Romney - had at some time or another enjoyed a lead in the opinion polls. The Santorum campaign was seemingly almost proud of the fact that it operated on a shoestring budget, effectively from the back of a pick-up truck. After eventually winning the Iowa caucuses in early January of this year (Romney was initially declared the winner by eight votes; Santorum eventually took the spoils by 34 votes, though the Romney campaign curiously pronounced this a 'draw'), his run for the Republican nomination eventually shifted up a few gears. Eventually, riding high on his reputation as the 'come back kid', Santorum went on to seal primary victories in Minnesota, Colorado, Missouri, and Tennessee Oklahoma and North Dakota on Super Tuesday. 

And yet, to me at least, his campaign never seemed truly viable. Richard Nixon once presciently observed that Republicans ought to run to the right during the primaries, and then move towards the political centre-ground during the general election. It seems unlikely that Santorum would ever have made this latter transition were he to win the nomination and get that far. The entire raison d'etre of his campaign on occasion peered to be to become America's pastor-in-chief, with Santorum bravely taking on the pressing task of reorientating a nation's moral standing against the dark forces of liberalism and government activism. Santorum himself, however, was certainly no stranger to turning a blind eye and dipping his hands in the pockets of the federal government, spreading the beneficent largesse (read 'pork') to his electors in Pennsylvania. For his troubles he was turfed out of office by almost 18 points in the 2006 Senate election (an oft-repeated fact that only gives credence to the claim that this year's Republican contest has been full of no-hopers, has-beens and never-will-bes). 

This, further, embodied a glaring right-wing hypocrisy: shrink the state economically and financially, enlarge as far as possible when it comes to regulating the activity of individuals in the bedroom. Part of the reason hypothetical head-to-head polls showed Obama crushing Santorum was the latter's unflinching, painfully dogmatic, off-putting comments on homosexuals, abortion, and women's rights, to say the very least. The next five contests in two weeks time are New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Only in the last of these did Santorum stand a chance against Romney's formidable, Super-PAC-lubricated election machine (and even there the opinion polls between them were narrowing ominously for Santorum). The remaining four states all enjoy, relatively speaking, better-educated, more prosperous GOP electorates, particularly those neighbouring Romney's Massachusetts. Romney already has a near-unassailable delegate lead, more than all of his competitors combined. Ron Paul will not win. Newt Gingrich is still, mysteriously, still here. Santorum admittedly possessed a certain charm and appeal among white working-class, blue-collar families due to his family's moving history, but, for varying reasons, their numbers are slowly shrinking, not enough to sustain a presidential run. 

I can't foresee a sudden surge to Gingrich or Paul now that Santorum has left the contest. Perhaps this will be the moment when the wider Republican electorate, downright unenthusiastic about the former Massachusetts governor, begrudgingly unite behind him. After all, hatred of Barack Obama transcends any ideological differences between the Republican nominees, and this election is still too close to call. Romney is  now the nominee. There are already suggestions Santorum is preparing to throw his lot behind him. What he now faces is a much more formidable opponent, the incumbent president. 

What ho and all the rest of it.

Brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, welcome to my new humble little blog. It was born more out of curiosity and experimentation rather than any grotesque presumptuousness that anyone would give a fig about what I think. It will remain, too, a work in progress. Quite obviously, I cannot attest to any future success or anything approaching a sizeable and regular readership. The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wrote that "the owl of Minerva begins its flight only in the gathering darkness." My own owl of Minerva is haplessly flapping around, soon to encounter the windscreen of some 18-wheeler. Perhaps it will be surprisingly popular. Instead, I may just cry pathetically into the night, "to hell with it!", and just post daily updates of my cat staring at her reflection in the oven. I think I could be at this. Then again, I may be unspeakably tedious. Comments and constructive criticism are always welcomed.

You can expect blogging on politics (mainly British and American, with reflections on other places), culture (well, some), and what I will just simply call other stuff. Book reviews.  Music. Impotent confusion. Incomprehension. Half-arsed jokes. Lazily captioned pictures of animals and politicians. Tea.

But anyway, I'll hope we'll both find this worthwhile.