I think that was a draw.

But watching these Obama-McCain debates, I keep find myself having to make two judgements. First, what do I personally think of what the candidates are saying? And second, what do I think the voters might think?

 On the substance, I think the only new thing that we learned was McCain’s proposal that the US government step in and buy all bad home loans and renegotiate them on more favourable conditions. This is such a large proposal with such mind-boggling implications that I find it difficult to get my head around it, at this early hour of the morning. But a couple of questions strike me, initially. First, how is this compatible with his proposal to freeze government spending? Second, what if the value of somebody’s house has fallen - which would be true for almost all homeowners in the US - but their mortgage is not ruinous enough to qualify for this government programme? Wouldn’t somebody like that be fairly irritated to see the government riding to the rescue of neighbours - who had made particularly reckless financial decisions?

Still, at this juncture, the key question is not whether McCain’s proposal makes sense - but whether it appeals to voters? Continue reading "The second presidential debate - squabbling while Rome burns"

The atmosphere was gloomy in Beijing this week - literally and metaphorically. When they weren’t worrying about poisoned baby milk (which is the scandal of the day), Beijing residents were complaining about the end of the traffic restrictions that were introduced just before the Olympics.

The city authorities kept the restrictions in force, even after the athletes departed. The rule was that only half the city’s cars could take to the roads on any single day - odd-numbered plates on one day, even-numbered the other. The effect was apparently dramatic. As one expat enthused to me - “You could breathe the air, you could see the mountains and you could hop into a taxi and get across the city in twenty minutes.” There was some official discussion about whether to keep the traffic restrictions in perpetuity. But the car-owning lobby won out.

And last Sunday it was back to traffic as normal. The locals I spoke to in Beijing were unanimous that they could feel the deterioration in the air quality immediately. Continue reading "Dreaming of blue skies in Beijing"

I appear to have endorsed Barack Obama by accident. Brad DeLong - well-known blogger and economist - has a note on his weblog headlined - “Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times endorses Barack Obama”. And WCM asked yesterday - “Gideon’s endorsement of Obama for (global) Commander-in-Chief. Premature? Politically motivated? Deserved? ”

Oddly, despite the headline on my column - “Obama for commander-in-chief” - I wasn’t consciously sitting down to write an endorsement column. What I was aiming to do was to respond to the polls that show that McCain is much more trusted as future commander-in-chief. But c-in-c is not the only role performed by the president.

There are a few subjects on which I prefer McCain. Trade is the most obvious. I also think he has taken sound positions on immigration and on campaign-finance reform. And I accept that McCain was courageous to take an unpopular position on the surge - and that he has been largely vindicated. (Although he was wrong to back the war in the first place.) Continue reading "The accidental endorsement"

I was re-viewing the opening episode of “The World at War” (as one does) - and was struck by the footage of Hitler looking cheerful, surrounded by yapping German shepherd dogs. The great dictator was a dog lover, and had a pet Alsatian called Blondi.

Churchill, by contrast, was a cat man.

Is there a political moral here? Obviously. Dictators like dogs because they are obedient, pack animals. Democrats like cats, because they are free spirits.

Once you start looking for the evidence, the trend becomes clear. Other famous cat-haters include Mussolini, Genghis Khan, Cherie Blair and Napoleon - the latter was once caught stabbing a wall repeatedly, because he believed there was a cat concealed behind it. By contrast, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt were well-known cat lovers.

Churchill’s political secretary, John Colville, made this diary entry at the height of the Battle of Britain:

“I went into the PM’s bedroom at around 10. He was lying in bed in a red dressing gown, smoking a cigar and dictating to Mrs Hill, who sat at his feet with the typewriter. The PM’s black cat Nelson, which he brought from the Admiralty and which has quite usurped the position of No.10’s official black cat, was stretched out across the bedcovers, and from time to time Winston would look at it lovingly and murmur: “Cat, darling”.

In the 1950s, Colville gave Churchill a ginger cat - which the great man called “Jock”, after Colville himself. In his will, Churchill provided a bequest for a ginger cat called Jock to live at his home, Chartwell, in perpetuity.

I will reluctantly acknowledge that there a a few exceptions to my dogs-dictators/cats-democrats theory. Lenin was apparently a cat lover. And so was Cardinal Richelieu - who went to the lengths of building a cattery in Versailles, and whose favourite beast was named “Ludovic le Cruel”. But Richelieu lived in a pre-democratic age. His heart was clearly in the right place.

Obviously, I am a cat lover. But I have thought hard before acknowledging this on my blog. When the FT first handed out some suggestions for blog-writers, one of them was - “Do not write about your cat.”

But why not? He is a magnificent beast - far more interesting than most of the people I write about. Here is a photo of him. (I also have four children, but I’m not going to bother you with photos of them).

And actually, there is a vestigial international-relations connection to my cat. He was adopted from a cat’s home in Brussels. We named him Louis, after the then Belgian foreign minister, Louis Michel - on the grounds that both the cat and the minister were hairy, over-weight, aggressive Belgians. Michel is now EU commissioner for overseas aid; and Louis has moved to London.

I’m afraid that newspaper columnists are incorrigible show-offs. As a species, we are constantly trying to draw attention to ourselves. So I have to hand it to my colleague, George Monbiot, of The Guardian. I thought I might attract a little attention by writing a scathing review of John Bolton’s book. It never occurred to me to actually try and arrest the guy. (Yes, I know that’s a split infinitive - I feel reckless today.)

But this is what George has done at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. Admittedly, it was a fairly ineffectual attempt at a citizens’s arrest. But the underlying issue is interesting. Monbiot claims to be in possession of a fat dossier on Bolton - and argues that the former UN ambassador is a war criminal. But I’m with Foreign Policy magazine when it argues that the grounds for arresting Bolton under international law are flimsy, at best. I don’t think that being in a possession of an offensive moustache is enough to take you to the Hague.

I find both Bolton and Monbiot puzzling in different ways. Why - for example - does Bolton spend so much time in Britain, when he professes to despise the place? It can’t be the money - the speaker fees are much fatter on the other side of the Atlantic.

As for Monbiot - the question that interests me is, is he a stunt man and publicity-seeking shyster or a sincere person, who is genuinely trying to improve the world? I fear that the answer is the latter. Continue reading "George Monbiot and John Bolton"

With the oil price heading upwards and President George W. Bush heading for Saudi Arabia, as part of a Middle Eastern tour, it is time to accept the truth. The pursuit of oil is fundamental to US foreign policy.

The importance of oil to American foreign policy is both obvious and curiously difficult to acknowledge in public. In the run-up to the Iraq war it was left to the left to make the argument that this was a “war for oil”. Establishment people – those in the know – rolled their eyes at this “conspiracy theory”.

Yet in recent months, both Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Senator John McCain have come close to saying that Iraq was indeed about oil. In his memoirs Mr Greenspan said he regretted that it was “politically inconvenient” to acknowledge that “the Iraq war is largely about oil”.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

It is difficult not to feel sorry for Barack Obama. The whole Jeremiah Wright thing is a complete nightmare. I doubt that Obama’s late-in-the-day repudiation of his spiritual mentor of 20 years is going to do the trick. Wright will be an issue for the rest of the campaign.

And so he should be. Obama has responded to Hillary Clinton’s assertion that she is the candidate of “experience”, by talking about his superior judgement. But what does it say about his judgement that he chose Reverend Wright as his pastor?

I don’t believe that Obama ever gave credence to Wright’s nuttier theories - such as his flirtation with the idea that AIDS might have been created by the US government as a genocidal weapon against blacks. I doubt that Obama agrees with Wright’s opinion that Louis Farrakhan is one of the great figures of 20th century history.

No, I think the “judgement” that Obama made was much more colder and more rational than that. One of his advisers once suggested to me that when Obama was looking to build a career in Chicago politics, it made sense for him to associate himself with the Rev. Wright. Someone with Obama’s middle-class and elite credentials might otherwise have struggled to build a political base in black Chicago.

That is the most plausible explanation I’ve heard for Obama’s long dalliance with Jeremiah Wright. It is understandable enough. But it is a rather calculating act for a man who claims to represent a new sort of politics. And the calculation looks rather less shrewd, now that he has made the transition to national politics

What is the cure for anti-Americanism in Europe? I have always thought that there is a one-word answer to that question - China.

And so it has come to pass. The FT-Harris poll released this week shows that a narrow majority of Europeans now regard China as the biggest threat to global stability - ahead of the United States. Of course, these kind of polls always reflect recent events. So the news out of Tibet - and, to a lesser extent, Darfur - will have hurt China’s image. Meanwhile the decline in coverage of the Iraq war - and the fact that the Bush administration is winding down - will help the US. Continue reading "Fear of China, fear of America"