Clive Crook

An item for those who believe that climate science is "settled". A new article in Nature reports that the post-war sea-surface temperature record is biased. See this report by the BBC. It is all to do with whether you take the temperature of water near ships' engine inlets or from buckets. Really technical stuff like that. Apparently, because the method changed, and the change was not properly taken account of, the sea surface did not cool as abruptly in the 1940s… More »

I learned from this piece by Philip Levy in the American (via Real Clear Politics) that May 18-24 was “World Trade Week”—“in case you missed it,” he says. I had, as a matter of fact. The celebrations, let us say, never looked like getting out of hand. In an excellent short column, Levy laments the failure of politicians to talk plainly about the benefits of liberal trade and the wavering commitment of the country's best economists to a cause they once… More »

“Recount”, the HBO movie about the Florida presidential election fiasco of 2000, was good television: well made, well cast, and well acted (with an especially vivid, albeit cruel, portrayal of Katherine Harris by Laura Dern). Highly watchable. Much as I enjoyed it, the predictable, inevitable, anti-Republican bias did become a little wearing. The movie encouraged you to think that for the Democrats it was all a matter of “counting every vote”—and who but… More »

Maybe not. From a new FT column: Two weeks ago in this space I expressed the naive hope that a US presidential contest between John McCain and Barack Obama might be a cut above ordinary politics. Neither man, to put it mildly, is the conventional type. Both are men of principle, with strong convictions – but with a pragmatic streak as well, open-minded, committed to bipartisan co-operation and running against business as usual. With luck, I said, they would… More »

I'm away for the next two weeks. Enjoy next Tuesday's tie-breakers, and the tie-breaker in the following week. I'll be back for all subsequent tie-breakers. More »

The New York Times reports that high gas prices are causing people to buy smaller cars. Soaring gas prices have turned the steady migration by Americans to smaller cars into a stampede. In what industry analysts are calling a first, about one in five vehicles sold in the United States was a compact or subcompact car during April, based on monthly sales data released Thursday. Almost a decade ago, when sport utility vehicles were at their peak of popularity, only… More »

At this, a twinge of homesickness. I never thought Boris would do it. More »

So, he has a killer instinct after all--or at least some limit to his forbearance. Obama's response yesterday to Jeremiah Wright's flurry of appearances, and especially to the pastor's speech at the National Press Club on Monday, was pretty steely. He called what Wright had to say "a bunch of rants". He said he was disgusted, and looked it. In contrast to his earlier and widely noted speech on race, in which he said he could never repudiate Wright the man, this… More »

Up to now I had taken it for granted that Jeremiah Wright wanted Obama to win the nomination and the presidency--and that was why he had not been seen or heard from since the controversy over his sermons first blew up. Obama's speech on race had seemed to repair much of the damage, and though his association with Wright remained a problem, things had moved on and it was not going to sink him. Now this: Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify… More »

Last week’s vote in Pennsylvania was an even worse result for the Democratic party than is widely supposed. Hillary Clinton’s impressive victory will sustain her campaign through all the remaining presidential primaries, even if Barack Obama bounces back on May 6 in Indiana and North Carolina. At the same time, though, Mr Obama’s campaign did not collapse. Far from it: he made big inroads into the lead that Mrs Clinton once had in the state. Therein lies the… More »

The contrasting characters (this is not just a matter of "style") of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been prominently on display since the Pennsylvania results came in. Her killer instinct is so much to the fore that it often seems to be her only instinct. It is both her greatest strength (she never quits) and her greatest weakness (she targets, rather than wishing to talk to, those she disagrees with). With Obama, the opposite seems true: his killer instinct… More »

You have to admire Hillary's determination. Being the underdog brings out the best in her--and it either neutralizes or makes forgivable the less appealing aspects of her campaign and character. She remains the underdog. Her victory in Pennsylvania was solid without being startling. The margin was exactly what was required to make it certain that she would stay in the race--yet without much altering the arithmetic that so strongly favors Obama. Her ten-point… More »

Tonight’s Democratic debate in Philadelphia was the worst I’ve watched, and that is saying something. The blogging consensus, not to mention the furious comments clogging up the ABC post-debate comment thread, has it right. The “moderators” were evidently bored by most of the policy issues at stake in this election—small matters such as comprehensive health care reform, the war in Iraq (eventually mentioned), the economy (mostly ignored). They preferred… More »

The polls suggest that Obama weathered the Jeremiah Wright affair with little or no damage. This new flap--arising from remarks to supporters that most members of the liberal intelligentsia would regard as stating the obvious--may hurt him more. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration,… More »

In a new column for the FT, I discuss the fiscal legacy of the Bush administration. After I filed it, I settled down to do my taxes. The sequencing was lucky. Had I endured the annual April ordeal first, I think I would have been too paralysed by gloom to discuss the subject. (Living in DC--local income-tax rate, 8.5 per cent--doesn't help. What do they do with it all? ) Competition for “most damaging legacy of the Bush administration” is lively. Iraq is the… More »

Here is a subject that preoccupies me at the moment. Europe continues, slowly and reluctantly, to deregulate its economies. In this it is following the US example. The American economy has some problems at the moment, but the EU's governments are ever mindful of, and oppressed by, the long-term success of the American model. What is interesting is that the United States has been moving the other way. If the Democrats control both the White House and Congress next… More »

Ken Rogoff asks, "Has the moment come to replace the dollar?" His answer is: "Maybe not quite yet....but soon." (His article, which I came across on Real Clear Markets, is for Project Syndicate, but it seems to have been posted in the The Daily Star of Lebanon, of all places, before it is available there.) At current market exchange rates, the European Union is now larger economically than the US. New central and eastern European members are bringing enormous… More »

In my Monday column for the FT I take issue with the view that what went wrong in financial markets had nothing to do with regulatory failure, and make the case for tightening some rules, and creating some new ones. When the crisis in US and global financial markets started to unfold, so began the incantation of two default opinions. One: regulation is the answer and we must have more. Two: regulation is the problem and more would be worse. With all that chanting… More »

Struck by the near unanimity of the view that the Paulson blueprint is beside the point--something that Paul Krugman and the Wall Street Journal, for heaven's sake, have been able to agree on--I attempt a limited defense in this column for National Journal (the link expires in a week). The document is not a waste of time, and I do not see it as a cynical political maneuver. Most of what the Treasury proposes actually makes sense, and it would be good to see the… More »

In 2005, my friend Moises Naim, the editor of Foreign Policy, published "Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy"--a unique and fascinating study of illicit trade in the new age of globalization. National Geographic has made a TV documentary based on the book, and on Tuesday night it showed a preview in Washington. The film has some gripping footage. It is well done and I recommend you watch it. But television has a… More »