Clive Crook

She was at her best. It was a fine speech, an urgent call for unity, and the delivery was phenomenal: passionate, forceful, and not the least bit false. (There was humor too: the twin-cities joke was great, and will linger in people's minds next week.) From the various personalities she tried on during the campaign, she selected tough, resolute, never-give-up Hillary, and the tone did not deviate. This is much the best and most convincing of the Hillaries: one… More »

I ran into Massie Ritsch of the Center for Responsive Politics--a (truly) nonpartisan outfit that tracks money as it flows through the political system. Buying influence and access is not quite as straightforward as it used to be, he explains. You have to go to a bit more trouble over it. But the people in the skyboxes at this event (as for sure at the Republican convention next week) include many of the usual suspects. Barack Obama's 500-plus bundlers have raised… More »

Michelle Obama did her part and closed a somewhat purposeless first day of the Democratic convention on a positive note. She came over as strong and assured, yet approachable and not at all threatening or angry--those last two were the notes, of course, that the campaign was most anxious to avoid. Her story was touching, and their marriage reflects well on her husband. Yes, one thought, she is a remarkable woman and he did well. Also, she dealt deftly with a couple… More »

Daily Kos, the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, and ProgressNow have organized a week-long programme in the Big Tent, actually a medium-sized building near the convention centre. One panel including Arianna Huffington and Paul Krugman discussed the challenge of getting people to see what is obvious. "We must be willing to listen to people who disagree with us," suggested Mrs Huffington. A novel and valuable thought. Next, Anne-Marie Slaughter (describing herself… More »

The Democrats have an ill-advised fondness for celebrities, and the feeling is mutual. Stars of stage, screen and recording studio are everywhere to be seen in Denver. At a brunch co-hosted by the Service Employees International Union and the Creative Coalition--a "nonpartisan (what?) social and public policy advocacy organization"--Spike Lee, Ellen Burstyn, Matthew Modine, Alan Cumming, Barry Levinson, and a somewhat familiar-looking actress who plays a nurse on… More »

If your idea of fun is to spend five days standing in line with people who want to talk about nothing but politics, Denver is the place. A disinterested observer contemplating the vast steel cage that lines the convention perimeter might think, "There's a good idea; shove them all in and throw away the key." It's a plan, but the problem is getting people in to start with. There are perimeter credentials and "pre-credentials" (they might be the same thing), plus,… More »

The selection of Joe Biden, for all his merits, was something of an anticlimax, and the Obama campaign is mostly to blame. It overmanaged the announcement. The ponderous stagecraft of the delay in releasing the decision and all the teasing of the press (a good thing in its own right, by the way: we deserve to be teased) were intended to supply a burst of excitement as the convention began. Also, the promise to let campaign supporters who registered their cellphone… More »

Sometimes I wonder where I would be without Theodore Dalrymple, the retired prison doctor and pseudonymous essayist with a particular genius for dyspeptic commentary on the state of Britain. He most often appears in the excellent City Journal. I regard him as a public service. I can outsource (he would put that word in inverted commas) what would otherwise be an occasional outburst of dismay at the country's cultural decay, knowing that nobody could do it better.… More »

Valuable columns by Tom Friedman and David Ignatius. Friedman concentrates on the error of Nato expansion, and the consequent humiliation of Russia, which has now come back to bite us. [S]ince we had finally brought down Soviet communism and seen the birth of democracy in Russia the most important thing to do was to help Russian democracy take root and integrate Russia into Europe. Wasn't that why we fought the cold war -- to give young Russians the same chance at… More »

The conventions matter either a lot or not much, and it is difficult to say which, not just before the event but also after. Thank you to Larry Sabato for clearing that up. (Seriously, it's an interesting article: indispensable pre-convention prep.) Recent history suggests that there is a better than even chance we'll be misled by the post-convention bounces in 2008. Yet forests will be lost to produce the newsprint for the stories about the overarching… More »

An interesting piece by Kathleen Parker, who was deeply offended by the Saddleback "interrogation". (Thanks to Loretta, a recovering Catholic of this parish, for prodding me to blog about this.) At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong. It is also un-American. For the past several days, since mega-pastor Rick Warren… More »

Otherwise detained when it was first broadcast, I only got around to watching the Saddleback Church encounter (video; transcript) last night. Warren did a very nice job. I hope the network moderators were taking notes. No self-aggrandizement, no moronic gimmicks, no ceaseless quest for the gotcha moment. He asked good, searching questions in a spirit of urgent reflection, curiosity and goodwill. So it can be done. I agree with the take of most commentators: Obama… More »

Here is my column for Monday's FT:So far, reaction in the US to Russia's invasion of Georgia has been all Vladimir Putin could have wished. Exhausted in every way by its experience in Iraq (a failure not much mitigated by recent progress there), its authority and sense of purpose quite depleted, the US looked slower and less decisive than Europe in its initial response, and that is saying something.It took repeated prodding from presidential contender John McCain… More »

I am not devoting myself full-time to following the iterations of the candidates' tax plans--as you will soon see, that way lies insanity--but I was interested to see the article by Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee, Obama's top economists, in today's WSJ. It says, among other things, that "the top capital-gains rate for families making more than $250,000 would return to 20%" and that "the tax rate on dividends would also be 20% for families making more than… More »

I don't think so. Read this piece by Josh Green and the accompanying haul of documents from inside the Clinton campaign. This is the candidate who ran on management expertise--on "actions speak louder than words", on the ability to get things done. Hillary, it appears, is a pitiful manager. Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence--on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to "do the job from Day One." In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and… More »

Joe Klein accuses Robert Kagan of warmongering. When a column starts off like this: The details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama. The events of the past week will be remembered that way,… More »

The response in the US to startling new allegations that the White House directed the forgery of evidence to support its case for the war in Iraq has been surprisingly muted so far. The charges may be false, of course, but if they are seriously examined and turn out to be true, this is - or ought to be - a Watergate-sized scandal.Ron Suskind is a heavyweight: a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and the author of a well-regarded book on the administration's… More »

Having ignored the story for months, the press descends with barely contained glee on the John Edwards confession. Far be it from me to moralise (let him without sin...) but the episode surely takes a prominent place in the annals of male insanity. It's not the affair; it's not even the fact that his wife was ill. These aspects are unremarkable. It's the fact that he was running for president and his marriage was the larger part of his campaign. His rock-solid… More »

I've mentioned the Bill Gates/Mike Kinsley/Conor Clarke creative capitalism project before. A new highlight on the site is a piece by my esteemed colleague Martin Wolf. (This is what Martin does on his holidays.) I'm not entirely sure what Martin's note has to do with "creative capitalism"--the idea is mentioned and dismissed in the last paragraph--but he has written the best short essay on the political preconditions for capitalism I have ever read. Consider a… More »

A friend sends me this, which I urge you to read in full (the point of the story is in the details). Ex-UI researcher faces deportation. Katarzyna Dziewanowska grew up in the "gray communist life" of Poland. But it was in America where she found a truly nightmarish experience with a bureaucracy. After nearly 14 years as a researcher at the University of Idaho, Dziewanowska has been denied permanent residency by U.S. immigration officials, who say she worked… More »