The Best President

A UK survey has revealed its results assessing the merits of 40 presidents of the United States (2 not counted for shortness of tenure) and it is an interesting read!

The BBC website has a good summary
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12195111
and the full results can be seen at
http://americas.sas.ac.uk/research/survey/overall.htm

In total, 47 British academics specialising in American history and politics took part. They were asked to rate the performance of every president from 1789 to 2009 (excluding William Henry Harrison and James Garfield, who both died shortly after taking office) in five categories:
- vision/agenda-setting
- domestic leadership
- foreign policy leadership
- moral authority
- positive historical significance of their legacy

Have a read and see who wins and how George W Bush scored!

What is the left for if it isn't for spending money?

Labour leader Ed Miliband has at last explained briefly what he stands for - it is somewhere between Blairist use of the market to ensure efficiency and produce centrally-driven public service reforms, and traditional left-wing big government initiatives to produce a "rebalanced" economy.

He has of course made a little headway with the Labour vote increasing slightly after the recent by-election in Oldham:

The Lib Dems didn't do too badly - while their vote did slip, they are in government and traditionally parties in government do badly in by-elections. That's not forgetting the issue of cuts which the Government is inflicting on the nation.

This item on the BBC web-site highlights the desire for MiliE to appeal to disaffected Lib Dem voters (how dare the party of liberal idealism actually have to make difficult choices while in government and actually, well, govern!). Interesting for G&P students in the way that MiliE tries to cast the choice that the Lib Dems made last may in going into Coalition as a "tragic mistake" - personally I don't think they had a realistic alternative. A Lib Dem-Labour coalition would have been weak and would have fallen quickly ("a coalition of the loosers"). It would not have had the necessary seats in the House of Commons to demand a majority.

This post from the BBC's Nick Robinson has some very pertinent things to say about the way that MiliE's thinking is going:

My sense is that Ed Miliband's speech is made up of the things he instinctively believes and those bits of political positioning he's been advised to adopt. His own views are interesting. At one point he argues: "We can't build economic efficiency or social justice simply in the way we have tried before. It won't be enough to rely on a deregulated market economy providing the tax revenues for redistribution. New Labour's critical insight in the 1990s and 2000s was that we needed to be stewards of a successful market economy to make possible social justice through redistribution. The critical insight of Labour in my generation is that both wealth creation and social justice need to be built into the way our economy works."

By this he says he means a high wage economy, the introduction of a Living Wage and respect for communities so that their concerns about government targets, out-of-town supermarkets and post office closures are not simply ignored in the name of efficiency. What he does not say is how this rebalanced economy - something which, incidentally, I have heard both George Osborne and Vince Cable call for - can be created. Watching how his thinking develops will be fascinating.

Ed Miliband does not yet have a convincing narrative which excuses the previous government for its mistakes and flagrant dishonesty with the obvious truth. Nor yet does he have a clear indication (beyond warm words) of where he will be taking his party, and how he can put Labour-friendly policies into action without any money to spend as previous Labour governments have done:

Ed Miliband needs not only to provide a credible alternative to the coalition's policy of cuts and "Maoist" public service reforms. He needs to explain what social democratic politics looks like in an era without easy money to spend. To do so he may need to develop an account of Labour's period in office that addresses more than just a failure to regulate the banks and a slowness of language. 

The Coalition has raised all sorts of  questions over how parties approach issues and probes the way that party allegiances are currently mapped out. It wouldn't be beyond possibility that the dissatisfied Lib Dem supporters (former SDP / Labour members) would return to the Old party fold. The trouble is, that while it's all very well to be idealistic and to promise not to raise University Tuition fees (as the Lib Dems did before the election) when you are not expecting to have to go along with any promise you make.

The Lib Dems have for years been the posturing opposition to business as usual. When thrust into Government, tough choices have to be made, especially at a time when there are significant questions over government debt. Any party not prepared to govern is merely a Pressure Group.

Extremism and Politics in the USA

The news here about the attempted killing of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the slaying of 6 others including Judge Roll, who was an Arizonan district court judge is, of course, shocking.

A good time to reflect on extremism in American politics - a question which can come up in various forms in the exam. Various interesting pieces are all over the news, but economist turned New York Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman has a good piece here which discusses the issue:

 I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence...
Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.

And there’s not much question what has changed. As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line....

But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand. Citizens of other democracies may marvel at the American psyche, at the way efforts by mildly liberal presidents to expand health coverage are met with cries of tyranny and talk of armed resistance. Still, that’s what happens whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, and there’s a market for anyone willing to stoke that anger.

Useful stuff for G & P students to ponder but for me the fact that stands out is the 300% rise in threats against members of Congress.

A worrying conclusion from Mr Krugman:

If Arizona promotes some real soul-searching, it could prove a turning point. If it doesn’t, Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning. 

As an antidote to all this, The Economist magazine's Democracy in America blog has this post which accuses Paul Krugman of "irresponsibility" and a left-leaning partisan opinion. It highlights as an alternative another article in the New York times which goes into the reasons for the attack and doesn't see much right-wing conspiracy, but rather overheated rhetoric from the media and political types of all stripes. The piece highlights other unfortunate political victims of violence:

Nine years after Kennedy was killed, George Wallace embarked on his second campaign for the presidency. This was the early 1970s, the high tide of far-left violence — the era of the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army — and Wallace’s race-baiting politics made him an obvious target for protests. On his final, fateful day of campaigning, he faced a barrage of coins, oranges, rocks and tomatoes, amid shouts of “remember Selma!” and “Hitler for vice president!”

But Arthur Bremer, who shot Wallace that afternoon, paralyzing him from the waist down, had only a tenuous connection to left-wing politics. He didn’t care much about Wallace’s views on race: he just wanted to assassinate somebody (Richard Nixon had been his original target), as “a statement of my manhood for the world to see.”

Republicanism and 2012

Journalist Stephen Budiansky's blog has an interesting graph; showing the relationship between the proportion of Republican votes and mean Obesity rates in red states. Obvious health-warning aside, it is interesting for anyone pondering the nature of America and its politics. However, anyone should bear in mind that correlation does not equal causation.

The original blog post can be found here.

The BBC's America Editor (and OE) Mark Mardell has an interesting post here about the possible Republican contenders for 2012's Presidential run. It'll be interesting to see how far Tea Party favourite Sarah Palin will continue to portray herself as a "Pit-bull with Lipstick" and whether the Republican base will continue to take the party to the right and ward off those RINOs. With the independent centrist voters who make up 1/3 of the electorate being conspicuously anti-Palin (they are the ones who will decide the result of the election) will the Republicans chose a moderate candidate rather than a divisive figure like Palin?

There is a chance that they will chose a comparatively moderate figure like, say, Mike Huckabee. This would rescue the Republican party from the cul-de-sac they are currently in and help to heal some of the unpleasant and partisan "Culture wars" in America at the moment.

Probably unlikely everything being equal. We'll see.