Clive Crook

May I digress? Yesterday, as I jogged along on the treadmill, I listened to Lou Dobbs (he helps the adrenaline, I find). He used the word "coronate"--as in, McCain wants the Republican party to coronate him. Whatever next, I thought? So now the great bloviator is making up his own words. Or perhaps it was a slip of the tongue. Anyway, I laughed and moved on--or not, you understand, since I was on a treadmill. Just now I was reading Margaret Carlson on… More »

To judge by his victory speech after the Potomac primaries, John McCain expects to be fighting Obama in November.Hope, my friends, is a powerful thing. I can attest to that better than many, for I have seen men's hopes tested in hard and cruel ways that few will ever experience. And I stood astonished at the resilience of their hope in the darkest of hours because it did not reside in an exaggerated belief in their individual strength, but in the support of their… More »

Obama's impressive sweep of the latest primaries and caucuses renews and strengthens the momentum he had in the days before Super Tuesday. His support seems to be be deepening and broadening; and Hillary's lead among women and lower-income households (two of her three most loyal constituencies: the third is Hispanics) seems to be wavering. But in case you're thinking that Hillary is finished--as I am inclined to--see this interesting corrective from Jay Cost at… More »

I dare say my preference for Obama over Hillary has been pretty obvious in a lot of my posts and articles, but I have tried up to now to maintain a disinterested altitude. Enough of that. In this new column for the Financial Times I come right out and say what I think of the choice that faces the Democrats. The US is tired and discouraged these days. The country is right to seek a little inspiration, a lifting of the spirits, a sense of renewal. Mrs Clinton is the… More »

Surging expectations made Obama's results on Super Tuesday seem a little disappointing, which is a measure of how far he's come. I'd be concerned about lost momentum--except for the money. My take from this morning's FT:As recently as the morning after his big win in the South Carolina primary of January 26, if you had offered Barack Obama the slew of victories he achieved on Super Tuesday he would surely have been delighted to accept. From that distance, winning… More »

John McCain has scored impressive early successes, and is piling on the votes that matter with actual or projected wins in delegate-heavy New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Arizona, Oklahoma, Delaware and Connecticut. Mike Huckabee has done pretty well too, for somebody thought to be about to withdraw; he has wins in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia and West Virginia (this last a clear case of tactical voting by McCain supporters). Partly because Huckabee has not collapsed,… More »

John McCain is hoping to sew the nomination up, and seems increasingly likely to do it. The Republicans rely on "winner takes all" for translating primary votes into delegates. This ought to speed the process. The polls show no sign yet of a Romney recovery. The Democratic race is different, of course. It looks extremely close, and the party's rules apportion delegates using a formula that rewards votes cast, district by district, regardless of who wins… More »

In a new column for the Financial Times, I look at what the presidential race on the eve of Super Tuesday tells us about what the parties' respective primary electorates appear to want--and, fortunately, it is not what they are usually said to want. At first sight, the two races seem utterly unalike. The Democrats started with a clear front-runner who was challenged by an inspiring outsider and it became a close fight. The Republicans never had a front-runner - a… More »

The country may be ready for a woman or a black man as president--but can it deal with something more radical? I mean cooperation between Republicans and Democrats. The reception of last week's fiscal stimulus agreement between the Bush administration and the House leadership makes you wonder whether America is ready for bipartisanship. Everybody says they want it. Finally we get some, and everybody hates it. Harvard professor and economics blogger Greg Mankiw… More »

John McCain’s recovery is astonishing in so many ways it is hard to know where to begin. He was written off by everybody just months ago, a staff meltdown on his hands and no money to buy his way back up the polls. Money is everything in American politics, right? Romney had it all and McCain was flat broke. He was no textbook conservative, and the Republicans were obviously going to insist on that. He had little or no appeal to the evangelicals, either, yet… More »

Conditions are less than ideal, let us say, for President George W. Bush’s last state of the union speech, to be delivered today. This is an administration that had precious little to boast about even before the economy began to nose-dive – a calamity that may not yet be plain in the figures but was certified by the Federal Reserve’s dramatic interest rate cut last week. One wonders, how much worse can things get for this White House? For months, the… More »

I find the idea that the Clintons have “played the race card”—which is now established as one of the stylised facts of this election—hard to understand. It is never defended in detail. The case is advanced as a matter of deduction rather than fact. The logic seems to be that race has become a big issue in the Democratic primaries, and that this will mainly help the Clintons in future primaries; therefore, it is all a Clinton plot. I have no instinctive… More »

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece by Bruce Bartlett arguing that a fiscal stimulus in the form of a tax rebate is no use, because people will save rather than spend the windfall.It's an insult to Keynes even to call a tax rebate Keynesian economics. It should be called "feel good economics" because its only real effect is to make politicians feel good about themselves and buy re-election with the public purse.People probably do expect too much… More »

Most people I have spoken to, and I think most commentators, found John Edwards to be much the most impressive candidate at last night’s Democratic debate in South Carolina. He at least conveyed a sense of urgent interest in the issues, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did not. Hillary was too busy attacking Obama, and Obama was too busy responding to her charges. Their squabbling was a depressing thing to watch. As in previous debates, Hillary mostly… More »

Like almost everybody else, I was surprised that the Fed cut rates by 75 basis points rather than 50, and I am still wondering why. Even 50, ahead of FOMC schedule, would have been regarded as strong medicine. And it was a great pity, I think, that the trigger for the move was the equity-market crash, rather than (as far as we know) a sudden surge of worse-than-expected real-economy data. It is bad practice for the Fed to be perceived as responding with greatest… More »

I spent the first part of January in Tanzania, visiting among other places Mahale, on Lake Tanganyika. For those who expressed an interest, here is one of the residents. (My wife Lori took the picture.) More »

A new column for the Financial Times: In a sudden and doubtless temporary outbreak of willingness to co-operate, the White House and Congress, cheered on by the Federal Reserve, are working on a plan for fiscal stimulus. The effort is welcome – but the package likely to emerge will make less of a difference than the energy suddenly devoted to the topic would suggest. A consensus has formed around the need for a temporary fiscal boost of between $50bn and… More »

I am going to Tanzania to meet some chimpanzees. No Iowa, no New Hampshire; I imagine they will get along without me. See you on or around January 18th. Have a good Christmas. More »

"Outsourced" is a low-budget no-stars romantic comedy about globalisation, improbable as that might seem. A young American executive is sent to India to run the company's call-centre. The clash of cultures--and the downright strangeness of India as seen through American eyes--provides the jokes. But there is no condescension, nor any fatuous admiration of the foreign for its own sake, which would have been equally annoying. Our hero struggles until he… More »

A new column for the Financial Times: Checks and balances are all very well, but sometimes you have to wonder. The first session of the 110th Congress came to a close last week in a disorderly crush of half-baked legislation. It was the end of a year that gave the new Democratic leadership little to boast about. Seizing control of House and Senate in the 2006 elections, the Democrats had big ideas about holding the Bush administration to account, forcing a prompt… More »