I’ve always felt a bit queasy about columnists who debate with each other on the pages of their own papers. It can seem a bit vain and self-referential. On the other hand, the whole phenomeon of blogging is vain and self-referential. So here goes.

Clive Crook has given me a bit of a going over because of my critique of Obama’s speeches. Here is my response; (more…)

Even his most bitter opponents grant Barack Obama one thing – he makes great speeches. The senator from Illinois is generally held to be a competent debater and an electrifying orator.

The notion that Mr Obama is the new Demosthenes has even made it across the Atlantic. On BBC radio the other day, there was a long discussion of the art of rhetoric, illustrated with clips of the best of Barack. William Rees-Mogg, a venerable former editor of UK newspaper The Times, asserts that Mr Obama is the most inspirational presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy and that “he is, in my view, a better speaker than Kennedy”.

All this leaves me baffled. I have watched Mr Obama speak live; I have watched him speak on television; I have even watched his speeches set to music on a video made by celebrity supporters (www.dipdive.com). But I find myself strangely unmoved – and this is disconcerting. It feels like admitting to falling asleep during Winston Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech.

I will admit one thing. Mr Obama has a nice, gravelly voice – which is perhaps a legacy of his days as a heavy smoker. But his most famous phrases are vacuous. The “audacity of hope”? It would be genuinely audacious to run for the White House on a platform of despair. Promising hope is simply good sense. “The fierce urgency of now”? It is hard to see what Mr Obama means when he says this – other than that some inner voice has told him to run for president. (more…)

I was glad to see that the subject of adultery - which has long played such a central and entertaining role in American politics - has reared its head again. Hillary Clinton made a guarded reference to her marital problems in her closing remarks in the most recent debate.

But the big news - of course - is the New York Times’s suggestion that John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist.

McCain has denied the story. His wife Cindy has said that he “would never do anything to disappoint our family and, more importantly, to disappoint America.” More importantly? That seems excessively high-minded of her.

I’ve no idea whether these latest allegations are true. But McCain has not denied accusations of adultery during his first marriage. He left his first wife - who had waited for him while he was a POW in Vietnam. She alluded to his affairs by saying - “John turned 40 and wanted to be 25 again.” Perhaps as he approached 70, he decided to be 30 again?

But - salacious details aside - the interesting question is does it matter? Would America have any right to be “disappointed” or to think less of McCain as a candidate, if he had committed adultery? (more…)

With his latest batch of primary victories, Obama is looking increasingly unstoppable. This is faintly embarrassing for me, since in my last pronouncement on the US election I suggested that the racial polarisation of the electorate in South Carolina looked bad for him. Obviously - like many a pundit during this election - I spoke too soon.

But - to misquote John Kerry - I was right before I was wrong. The proof of this is sitting in a desk draw in my office. I put £10 on Obama to win the presidency at 7-1 last December. Not a bad bet, since he is now odds-on to be president with Ladbrokes.

What I failed to realise was that while voters in the South are dividing on racial lines, this is not true of the country as a whole. Chrystia Freeland offered an interesting explanation for why this might be in her FT column on Saturday, citing research that showed that Americans who live in largely white areas are likely to be more liberal on racial issues than people who live in mixed areas. Make of that what you will.

Even so, the trend could still be dangerous for Obama in a general election. A racially-divided southern electorate can carry him to victories in Democratic primaries, but might mean defeat all across the South in November - which would give John McCain quite a head start in the electoral college. On the other hand, the latest batch of primaries seem to show that he is beginning to pick up votes among groups that were formally fairly solid for Hillary - in particular, women and Hispanics. Maybe Obama really is unstoppable.

I realise that is hard to argue that a big victory in the South Carolina primary was bad news for Barack Obama. But once you examine the details of the vote, that’s the way it looks to me.

From the very beginning, the Obama campaign has been at pains not to play the race card. The idea is that he is a candidate who is black, not a black candidate. But in South Carolina, the Democratic electorate split clearly on racial lines. As Ed Luce points out in today’s Financial Times - "Only one in four whites who voted opted for Mr Obama, against eight out of 10 blacks." A racially polarised electorate can sweep Obama to victory in South Carolina. It would mean certain defeat on national level.

It is open to debate whether the Clinton campaign has deliberately injected race into the campaign, as some Obama supporters allege. But Bill Clinton’s comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson in the wake of the South Carolina primary was certainly none too subtle. The irony is that Obama has actually striven to be very different from Jackson, who won several primaries in 1988. He has even been rebuked by Jackson for neglecting black and civil-rights issues.

A friend of mine met Jackson in Chicago recently and asked him if he had been surprised by the turn the campaign had taken. His reply was  - "Not at all. This is the Clintons you are dealing with."

I am always on the look-out for boring headlines - and I found a good one lying around on a desk at the FT today. It is in a newsletter from Moody’s, the ratings agency - "Belgian political uncertainty no threat to ongoing fiscal consolidation".

The whole question of what makes for interesting reading is the subject of this post - which is provoked not by Moody’s, but rather by an outburst from Steve Walt, a Harvard professor. Walt - who has become famous (or infamous) - as the co-author of a critical book on "The Israel Lobby", has written a piece bemoaning the appointment of William Kristol, a prominent neo-con, as a columnist for the "New York Times".

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All the mainstream pundits agree. Mike Huckabee is a crack-pot. The first piece of evidence is that he is a creationist. But the second point is that Huckabee wants to abolish income tax.

As far as many of my colleagues are concerned this is breathtakingly unsophisticated - the economic equivalent of creationism. However, when I heard Huckabee explain his plan recently in a burger joint in New Hampshire, it sounded pretty good to me. Huckabee - who is one of three front-runners for the Republican Party nomination - advanced several plausible sounding arguments. First - simplicity. He would replace the entire income tax code, with a simple sales tax set at a flat rate of - say - 23%. No more form-filling. In fact the Huckster would abolish the IRS (America’s much-hated Internal Revenue Service). Second, his plan would ease the burden on honest tax-payers. At present drug-dealers and other nefarious types avoid all income tax. But they have to spend - so they would be caught by a consumption tax, just like the rest of us. Also he reckons that his flat consumption tax would encourage saving - because you are taxed when you spend, not when you earn. And the whole thing is designed to be "revenue neutral"; ie if the calculations worked out, it wouldn’t cause a massive whole in the federal budget.

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Western politicians routinely say that they are motivated by a “desire to serve” and they are routinely disbelieved. With her near-tears in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton briefly managed to puncture that scepticism – and, perhaps, to swing the US presidential election back in her direction.

Her performance raised a fundamental question about politics. What motivates people to seek power?

Mrs Clinton said that she was upset because: “I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don’t want to see us fall backwards.” In other words, she was weeping not for herself but for America.

Continue reading this column here. Please post comments below.

As journalists thrash around to make sense of the American election, the latest theory is that John McCain is the favourite. The US may not be ready to elect a black (Obama) or a woman (Clinton) - so it could opt for the Republicans’ current front-runner, the reassuringly white and male Mr McCain.

But there is one factor that few people are considering yet, which I think the Republicans would do well to think about - the baldness factor. In a fascinating recent blog entry, Dan Hannan - a Conservative Euro-MP - points out that if an election comes down to a contest between a baldie and a man with a full head of hair, the bald man always loses. Hannan had to go back to 1880 to find a presidential election where the bald candidate won. (It’s true that Eisenhower was bald, but he was running against Adlai Stevenson, who was also follically-challenged).

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As I was saying, Hillary Clinton is doomed - or possibly Barack Obama is. After Hillary’s victory in last night’s primary in New Hampshire, I think I may give up making predictions about American politics for 24 hours.

To be fair to the pundits and the pollsters, it wasn’t just journalists who were confidently predicting an Obama victory. Even people in the Hillary camp were talking about trying to keep the margin of their defeat in New Hampshire down to below double digits. When, on Monday, Hillary broke down and cried - or rather "choked up", it looked like she had accepted that defeat was inevitable.

New Hampshire lore is also that crying in public is very bad news for a candidate. It is what is deemed to have finished off Edmund Muskie in 1972. However, one of the Obama people did, presciently, say to me - "Hillary crying is bad news for us. It humanises her. It’s easier to run against a robot." Today’s conventional wisdom is that Hillary’s display of emotion did indeed help her, particularly among women voters.

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