Corruption in America

The Chicago way

ROD BLAGOJEVICH has the hair of a Kennedy and the tongue of a crook. When he first arrived on the political scene in Illinois, many thought he was a rising star. Some even murmured that the Democrat might climb as high as the White House. Mr Blagojevich, young and handsome, was elected as a congressman in 1996 and then as governor in 2002. He took office vowing to bring ethics reform to Illinois.
How things have changed. “Fire those fuckers”, said the governor about his critics at the Chicago Tribune. “If they don’t perform, fuck ‘em”, he said of an effort to squeeze contributions from a state contractor. Barack Obama’s Senate seat, Mr Blagojevich explained, “is a fucking valuable thing, you don’t just give it away for nothing.” These were some of the pearls of eloquence included in a 76-page complaint against Mr Blagojevich. At about 6am on Tuesday December 9th an FBI agent telephoned the governor at his home in Chicago to say that he was about to be arrested. Mr Blagojevich asked if the call was a joke. He denies any wrongdoing.

The arrest may have been a surprise to the governor, but many others were expecting it. Investigations of his administration’s hiring, contracting and fundraising stretch back to 2003. (His re-election in 2006 had much to do with the ineptitude of state Republicans.) Thirteen people had been indicted or convicted in the debacle, among them Tony Rezko, a developer and fundraiser who was once a friend of Mr Obama. Patrick Fitzgerald, the tireless prosecutor for Illinois’s northern district, shows no signs of slowing down.
Few, however, expected the prosecutor to present such a feast of bad behaviour. The most stunning charge is that Mr Blagojevich, who has the power to appoint Mr Obama’s successor in the Senate, wanted to sell the seat to the highest bidder. But almost equally shocking are the alleged efforts to fire his critics at the Tribune and to withhold money from a children’s hospital unless its executive contributed to his campaign. If convicted of wrongdoing in these and other schemes, Mr Blagojevich would have the honour of being the most despicable politician in Illinois’s recent history. This is no small feat in a state where three of the past seven governors have gone to jail. Though he may have been ambitious, however, he was not particularly clever. His conversations about Mr Obama’s seat, for example, came at a time when everyone knew federal investigators were watching him closely.
It is unclear whether or when Mr Blagojevich will resign. The leaders of the state Senate and House say that they will vote next week to strip the governor of his appointment powers, and that a special election should be held to fill the Senate seat. Mr Obama himself should be anxious that the mess will become, at the least, a distraction. David Axelrod, his chief campaign strategist who will be a close presidential adviser, has reversed a statement made in November suggesting that Mr Obama had spoken to the Illinois governor about the Senate vacancy.
Illinoisans, meanwhile, have been jerked from the hazy bliss that blanketed the state since Mr Obama’s election. They have long suffered from the state’s penchant for corruption. Mr Fitzgerald, one indictment at a time, has been pushing Illinois in the right direction, but his exposure of Mr Blagojevich represents a new low.
Beyond Illinois, too, Democrats have reason to be worried. William Jefferson, an indicted Louisiana congressman, lost a special election on Sunday—he is best known for stashing $90,000 in his freezer. And in New York Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, continues to be accused of scandal. The most recent matter involves suggestions that a bill was dropped in exchange for a donation to a pet project. Democrats have seized power from the Republicans. They are in danger of seizing the mantle of corruption too.

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Barack Obama's Economic Team

Off to work they go

Barack Obama has stacked his cabinet with clever economists, but can they work
together? And what will they do?

WHEN The Economist asked academic economists in September which presidential candidate would pick the better economic team, a huge majority said Barack Obama. He has not disappointed them. The team he unveiled this past week is studded with stars of the profession.
Mr Obama’s policies may not be any more successful at combating the financial crisis and recession than those of George Bush. But it does seem safe to say that economics will play a bigger part in the formation of those policies. Three of the first four members of the team to be named are well-regarded PhD-holding economists and the fourth, Tim Geithner, the new treasury secretary, is a respected central banker (he heads the Federal Reserve Bank of New York). Only one of the four people they will replace shares a comparable background (see chart).

They are not just any economists but among the best. “Their IQs are off the chart,” gushes a former colleague of some of them. Henry Kissinger supposedly once said every president should give Larry Summers an office in the White House. On November 24th Mr Obama did. As director of his National Economic Council (NEC), Mr Summers “will be by my side, playing the critical role of co-ordinating my administration’s economic policy”.
It is a striking contrast with the outgoing administration, in which economists never had much clout. Consider the Office of Management and Budget director, who as overseer of $3 trillion in federal spending plays a pivotal role in setting economic priorities. Mr Bush has had four: one was a pharmaceuticals executive, one did government relations for an investment bank, and two were congressmen. All four trained as lawyers. Mr Obama’s nominee, Peter Orszag, the outgoing director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, is a professional economist known for such page-turners as “Saving Social Security”, a 300-page tome boasting 37 pages of footnotes and eight appendices. Whether Mr Orszag will be tough enough with the red pencil, however, is something that his track-record does not tell us.

The team’s other striking feature is its centrism. Mr Summers is on the conservative wing of Democratic economists. As Mr Clinton’s treasury secretary he backed the law that in 1999 tore down barriers between commercial and investment banks and still backs it despite recent criticism. Christina Romer, an economic historian from Berkeley, has just published a paper with her husband David showing how raising taxes retards growth. Jason Furman, likely to be named as an aide to Mr Summers, outraged unions for his 2005 article, “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story”. One hedge-fund manager who, before the election, was terrified Mr Obama would usher in “confiscatory” tax policies breathed a sigh of relief. “No Robert Reichs,” he said, a reference to the leftish adviser who was Mr Clinton’s labour secretary. “There’s no radicals in the whole cabinet that anyone can find.”
Mr Obama’s backers, in fact, can with some justification feel betrayed by the presence of so many figures from the Clinton regime: Mr Summers and Mr Geithner served at the Treasury then, and Mr Orszag was on the NEC. Moreover, many of them are protégés of Mr Clinton’s second treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, whose star has dimmed considerably as Citigroup, where he has been a senior executive since 1999, has lurched from crisis to catastrophe.
Still, if Mr Obama is going to emulate the economic record of any predecessors, Mr Clinton is not a bad one to pick. Hiring Mr Clinton’s team won’t bring back that era’s steady growth and low unemployment, but it does bring valuable experience of fighting financial crises. Mr Summers and Mr Geithner were deeply involved in dealing with the disasters that befell Mexico, East Asia, Russia and Latin America during that time. Mr Geithner has spent the past 15 months battling the current crisis, though so far with little success.
Their influence helps explain why Mr Obama wants a hefty fiscal stimulus to keep the economy from “falling into a deflationary spiral”. Mr Summers had prominently called for “significant, speedy and sustained” fiscal stimulus. Mr Obama says he has asked his team to come up with a two-year plan to raise employment by 2.5m more than would otherwise be the case. Reports suggest a price tag of $500 billion-$700 billion over two years. The stimulus could include both aid to states, funding for public infrastructure and early implementation of Mr Obama’s promised $1,000-per-family tax-credit. It may also include health-care aid for the poor and uninsured—a down payment on one of Mr Obama’s more costly promises.
Mr Obama’s people will also be more willing to deploy the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme to prop up the financial system; they may even seek to enlarge it, and pursue some formal powers for taking over failing financial institutions. Other issues they will have to tackle quickly include whether formally to guarantee the debts of the mortgage agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures; reform of bankruptcy law to permit judges to rewrite mortgage contracts; and reforming the financial regulatory system.
Though impressive enough on paper, it’s less clear how well Mr Obama’s picks will function as a team. The NEC director is traditionally the honest broker of the economic team’s ideas. Given his reputation as an intellectual bully, many wonder whether Mr Summers can play that role. “Larry clearly can’t do that, and it’s a waste of his talents, quite frankly,” says a former colleague. But that may sell Mr Summers short. More than anything else, he relishes a spirited debate with worthy adversaries. One of those is Mr Geithner, who first came to Mr Rubin’s attention by contradicting Mr Summers in a staff meeting. Mr Geithner once described the Rubin Treasury as “an open competition of ideas.” And Mr Summers will have no trouble standing up to Mr Obama’s skull-cracking chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
That said, too much competition of ideas can breed chaos, and Mr Obama may have increased the risk by creating yet another body. On November 26th he said Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, would head his new Economic Recovery Advisory Board and Austan Goolsbee, his longest-serving economic adviser, would be its staff director. The board seems to overlap with the three-member Council of Economic Advisers, which vets policy proposals for economic idiocy: Mr Goolsbee will also serve on that council. Might too many economists spoil the recovery?

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The EU and China

The Summit of Discourtesy

Crisis or no crisis, China’s diplomatic priorities
prevail

SUMMITS are a dime a dozen these days. So it is tempting to shrug off the announcement on November 26th that China pulled out of an EU-China summit, at less than a week’s notice. But China’s high-profile snub—aimed at President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who was to be the host on the European Union side—cannot be dismissed so easily.
Cancelling a meeting at such a high level is a rare breach of diplomatic manners. Mr Sarkozy has irked China by proposing to meet the Dalai Lama at a party in Poland for former winners of the Nobel peace prize on December 6th. Before then, he was due to play host to the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in the French city of Lyon, in his capacity as holder of the rotating presidency of the EU. Some of the EU’s regular summits with China are very dull. This one had important things to discuss, such as joint action on tackling the global financial crisis. An official EU statement regretted the summit’s postponement, “particularly” at a time when the world situation calls for “very close co-operation”.

Mr Sarkozy seems singled out for special punishment. Both Angela Merkel of Germany and Gordon Brown of Britain have met the Dalai Lama in the recent past, without triggering such diplomatic fireworks. Mr Sarkozy, a mercurial chap, may not have prepared the ground with Beijing for his meeting with the Dalai Lama quite as diligently as did Ms Merkel and Mr Brown, diplomats suggest. Also, France and China have had some bruising spats this year: Mr Sarkozy criticised China’s handling of unrest in Tibet; the Olympic-torch relay was disrupted by protests in Paris (as in London); Mr Sarkozy hinted he might stay away from the opening of the Beijing Olympics unless China started talks with the Dalai Lama. Reprisals followed, notably an apparently temporary tourism boycott of France by China.
But other things are in motion. Recently the French, who will surrender the EU presidency at the end of December, unexpectedly put out feelers to see if other EU countries wanted to move ahead with a long-delayed EU code of conduct on arms sales to China. That code of conduct has long been presented by the French as the key to a much bigger prize for China: the scrapping of an EU embargo on arms sales to China, dating back to the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. The French, it is said, found little enthusiasm for movement on the arms-for-China dossier. America dislikes any idea of EU arms helping China modernise its army, since American troops might one day be on the wrong end of such lethal toys, in a fight over Taiwan. European leaders are not about to annoy the new President Obama, just to please China.

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Californias Budget

No Money to pay Bills

The state’s finances are worsening by the day

TWO weeks ago Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s governor, signed a state budget that was a record 85 days late. Much cajoling and bullying was required to get it to his desk. At one point the governor threatened to pay state bureaucrats the minimum wage; at another he promised to veto every bill he saw. Few like the end result, which involves spending cuts and a good deal of what John Chiang, the state controller, described as “Enron-style accounting tricks”. And yet it became clear this week that the budget is hopelessly optimistic and will almost certainly have to be renegotiated.
The world’s eighth biggest economy has two problems, both stemming from the economic downturn. First, it is finding it hard to raise enough money to pay the bills. Under normal circumstances the state would sell $7 billion in bonds to tide it through until April, when income taxes flood in. Thanks in part to the delayed budget, the state has been forced to go to the bond markets at a time when investors are wary of everything but Treasury notes.

This obstacle ought to be cleared by the end of the month, when the state would run out of money. Encouragingly, Massachusetts managed to sell $750m-worth of bonds on October 8th. California’s Treasury plans to go to market next week with a slimmed-down $4 billion bond sale. If the credit markets gum up even more than at present, the state may seek relief from the Federal Reserve or from its enormous public-employee pension funds. With the immediate problem out of the way, though, a bigger one will loom into view.
California’s revenues have already dropped below even the pessimistic estimates on which the budget was based. Mr Chiang announced this week that sales-tax receipts in the third quarter were 9% below the May estimate, whereas corporate taxes were 16% lower. The prognosis for income-tax receipts, which account for more than half of all revenue to the state Treasury, is scarcely better. California’s tax regime is highly progressive. The state depends heavily on the rich, particularly the stock-owning Silicon Valley rich. Unfortunately, shares in technology companies have tumbled along with others.
By the end of December, an estimated $3 billion must be found to plug the hole. Sacramento is the last place in America one would want to look for such a sum. Along with just two other states—Arkansas and Rhode Island—California requires a super-majority vote to pass a budget. Yet getting two-thirds of legislators to agree is exceptionally difficult. Thanks in part to ruthless gerrymandering, state politicians are sharply divided between tax-loathing Republicans and public services-loving Democrats.
The Republicans, who make up less than half but more than a third of both the Assembly and the Senate, resisted any tax raises this summer and will probably do so again. If anything, says Roger Niello, a Republican legislator who sits on the budget committee, opinions are hardening as the economy stumbles. Poor Mr Schwarzenegger. His last two years in office may be little happier than the twilight era of Gray Davis, whom he replaced in 2003.

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America's Presedential Race

The Palin Effect

John Mccain has wipe out Barrack Obama's lead in the poll

BOUNCES are, by definition, temporary. Nearly a fortnight has passed since the end of the Republican convention and it is clear that it, and the Democratic get-together beforehand, have produced more than just a bounce. The conventions, and especially John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, have changed the course of the presidential race. On Monday September 15th both candidates sought to make tough statements on the demise of Lehman Brothers and the turmoil on Wall Street. And both attempted to score points off the other over the strength of those responses.

Even battling for small victories is important at this stage of the race. Before the conventions, Barack Obama enjoyed modest, but enduring, poll leads for weeks on end. Just after, Mr McCain suddenly shot to big leads in many polls himself. Now, public opinion shows that the race is probably tied or that Mr McCain has a small lead. The electoral college is of course more important. But here, too, the dynamics seem to be changing.

A big reason for Mr McCain’s boost seems to be Mrs Palin. She is both a staunch Christian conservative and a western governor. This has helped Mr McCain in the territorial battle. When Mr Obama was riding high, he confidently put resources into states that Democrats had disdained, especially the interior West and the South. Polls provided him with good reason for doing so, showing a race that was surprisingly close in unlikely states such as Montana, North Dakota, North Carolina and Georgia. But Mrs Palin’s selection has brought the Christian wing of his party, formerly sceptical, not only into line but enthusiastically so. Mr Obama is scaling back some of his more ambitious efforts, including pulling money and staff from Georgia (to put them in North Carolina, where he has a slightly better chance).

Other aspects of public opinion have changed too. A post-convention poll shows the two candidates nearly tied in perceptions of who would change Washington. Independents are moving towards Mr McCain despite Mr Obama’s strong advocacy of “change” in his campaign. The “enthusiasm” gap is closing, too: before, many voters told pollsters that they would vote for Mr McCain, but not happily. Now, many more are pleased with their pick. Again, Mrs Palin's elevation has much to do with this. At the Republican convention in St Paul, she generated such enthusiasm that there was jocular talk of flipping the ticket to put her at the top and Mr McCain in the vice-presidential slot.

Mr McCain has not taken control of the race, by any means. But having solidified support in previously wobbly states, it means he can concentrate more closely on a handful of swing states that Mr Obama must win himself. Once again, Ohio is pivotal, along with Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Mr Obama also has a shot in Virginia and Colorado, traditional Republican territory. If he wins these states, he will probably win the election. If Mr McCain simply holds the states that George Bush won in 2004, naturally he wins. And Mr McCain thinks he also might snatch Michigan from the Democrats.

There is concern, but not panic, on the Democratic side. On Monday, both Mr Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, sharpened their attacks. And they had good news to back them up: in August, Mr Obama once again smashed the monthly fundraising record for a presidential candidate, hauling in $66m. His press team is responding quickly and furiously to attacks from Mr McCain. One last week was particularly scurrilous: a television advertisement saying Mr Obama wanted kindergartens to have sex education. In fact, Mr Obama supported a bill that would include teaching designed to prevent child sex abuse.

Mr McCain has also been caught telling some straightforward fibs, for example that Mrs Palin, as governor, had “never” sought federal earmark money for her state—her request per head for Alaska was the biggest in the country. He and Mrs Palin continue to insist that she killed an infamous “bridge to nowhere” project in Alaska, even though every journalist in America now knows she did so only after supporting it, and only after it became a political albatross. Mr McCain has good reason to worry about his reputation for straight-talk, the strongest part of his political brand.

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The Democratic National Convention

Ready on the Left

Tuesday

AMERICANS have a remarkable talent for creating transparently pointless political rituals. The most pointless of all is the “spin room”. The first thing that journalism’s finest do after every debate is rush off, notebooks in hand, to a special room where the candidate’s surrogates brief them about how well their man (or woman) did. Dennis Kucinich is building up unstoppable momentum! Tom Tancredo has the Republican nomination in the bag! The spinmeisters manage to impart all this nonsense not just with a straight face but with a look of complete sincerity.

The big question hanging over the next two weeks is whether the conventions are the most transparently pointless rituals of all. It has been decades since anything was actually decided at a convention. They have degenerated into little more than prolonged infomercials designed for prime-time television.

Every single one of the thousands of journalists here knows how the week will unfold already. Hillary Clinton will make a rousing speech about how wonderful Barack Obama is. Mr Obama will make a wonderful speech about how wonderful change and hope are. And the Democrats will pull ahead in the polls. Why endure the misery of a four-hour flight when you can just stay at home and watch the whole thing from the comfort of your La-Z-Boy recliner?

This complaint is not without merit. I have already passed a lot of time with journalists that I regularly pass a lot of time with in Washington, DC. I am preparing to go to seminars on how Mr Obama will govern that will be presented by policy wonks from the Brookings Institution, which is a few hundred yards from my office. Washington has arrived in the Rockies and is doing what Washington does best—talk to itself.

Even so, there remains something exciting, at least for people in the commentary business, about the sight of thousands of people gathered together to participate in a political ritual, however hollow. You get to stay up late and drink too much while discussing the minutiae of electoral maths—and people actually seem to be listening. And when you wake up in the morning there is a huge package of convention bumph waiting outside your hotel door.

The ever-industrious National Journal not only provides a glossy magazine containing everything from a poll of insiders to no fewer than three articles by the brilliant Ron Brownstein; it also produces a daily newspaper analysing what has gone on. There is even a political crossword for hard-core obsessives. “No hiccups so far”, reads one headline, which is all to the good, since, at the time when the story was filed, the convention had not even got underway.

The convention also gives you a chance to meet real live Democrats en masse—people who live far beyond the Beltway but nevertheless care enough about politics to devote a chunk of their lives to getting their candidate elected. One Denver-bound Democrat I met at Dulles airport was wearing a T-shirt that read “Kill ‘em all—let God sort ‘em out”. (The TSA officials waved him through security without raising an eyebrow.) Denver has also witnessed a minor riot involving professional malcontents such as Ward Churchill and Cindy Sheehan.

But for the most part everybody seems disturbingly nice. Nobody complained about the 90 minutes it took for United to offload our baggage (they blamed lightning). Nobody seemed in the least put out that there were no taxis around for another half an hour. Everybody seemed to be delighted to be here—and delighted to be taking part in a history-making event. I overheard three young people discussing whether they should meet up at the black-Jewish mixer, the Hispanic-Jewish mixer or the black-Jewish-Hispanic mixer. They decided, in the spirit of black-Jewish-Hispanic unity, to go to all three.

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Wednesday

THE watchword of the Democratic National Convention is “unity”. National unity (“There is no red or blue America” etc). Family unity. And above all party unity.

But the atmosphere in the Pepsi Centre in Denver is rather like that at a dinner party thrown by a couple who have just had a plate-throwing row: the superficial bonhomie cannot conceal the rage that seethes just below the surface.

Button sellers are doing a brisk business in “Hillary supporters for Obama” badges. One former Hillary supporter in a striking wool pantsuit sported a badge reading “Old white women for Obama”. And the party is doing its utmost to rally the faithful. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, kicked off Monday evening with a veritable Niagara Falls of clichés about the American dream.

APAn intimate family moment

The party then played not just the Kennedy card, but the whole deck. Caroline Kennedy sang her uncle Ted’s praises. A slightly bizarre film showed Ted helping the poor and skippering his yacht. Then the man himself delivered a tub-thumping speech about Barack Obama. The crowd would have gone wild in any circumstances, but the fact that Mr Kennedy is suffering from serious health problems (and laboured over some of his words) added poignancy to the performance.

But even uncle Ted was outclassed by Michelle Obama. It’s not just that she is a poised and impressive woman and a fine speaker. She struck exactly the right notes to reach out to the “bitter” Hillary voters who have failed to warm to her husband.

She presented herself as the product not of the civil rights movement, but of the solid upwardly mobile working class. Her father worked for 30 years at a local plant before succumbing to multiple sclerosis. He raised his children to go to college and law school—but taught them never to forget their roots. This was a story that all Americans can embrace. It went down like a dream.

The Clintons will no doubt do everything that they need to do to boost Mr Obama. Mrs Clinton will urge “her” delegates to embrace her former rival. Her husband will rally the tribe for the struggle against the forces of evil. They will do it with the utmost sincerity.

But will anybody believe them? Everybody knows that we have just seen one of the most bitter quarrels in Democratic history. Everybody knows that Bill and Hill regard Mr Obama as an upstart who gamed the system and stole what rightly belonged to them. And everybody knows that Mrs Clinton would be, shall we say, ambivalent about a Democratic defeat in November: it would prove that she was right all along and hand control of the party back to her.

Many of her supporters on the floor are surprisingly open about all this. Chili Cilch, who was proudly wearing a “Hillary army” badge, told me that “With Hillary Clinton I was confident that she would do what was needed to be done. With Barack Obama I’m hopeful. I’d rather be confident”.

Other Hillary supporters were more combative. Many Hillary delegates sat on their hands and conspicuously failed to join in the general Obama-rama.

This is worrying news for the Democrats. The Obama team had assumed that Mrs Clinton’s supporters would return to the fold. How could they do anything but vote Democrat after eight years of George Bush? How could they continue to bear a grudge with the economy in the doldrums and house prices slumping? But so far the grudge remains tightly clenched.

Over the past two-and-a-half months Mr Obama’s support among Hillary voters has got worse rather than better, despite plenty of wooing. Roughly 30% of Clinton voters say that they will not vote for him. Since June Mr Obama has lost ten points among Clinton supporters and John McCain has picked up ten points. The presidential candidate for a party that has been out of the White House for eight years only enjoys the support of 80% of his party’s supporters.

This is partly because the Obama forces have been cack-handed in handling Mrs Clinton: they argued that they could not consider her for vice-president because she is a Washington insider who voted in favour of the Iraq War. Then they chose Joe Biden—a Washington insider who voted in favour of the Iraq War. But the deeper reasons are cultural: the white, working-class voters whom Hillary Clinton rallied are profoundly sceptical of Mr Obama’s coalition of black activists and liberal professionals.

The hosts at the Denver dinner party may be putting a brave face on it. But when the guests go home the seething family quarrel will burst back into life.

Thursday

ON MONDAY night I began to wonder if the convention was turning into a disaster. Many of the speeches were lacklustre. Wild rumours were circulating about the Hillary forces demanding a floor vote. The Democrats let the entire day pass without laying a glove on John McCain.

Tuesday put many of these fears to rest. The speakers did their jobs much better. The throngs in the Pepsi Centre responded with gusto. And the revolt of the Hillary-ites failed to materialise. It would be too much to claim that the Democrats are now united after the trauma of the primary season. But the leadership has done a good job of reminding the troops that the real enemy is Mr McCain and his plan for four more years of George Bush.

AFP

The roster of speakers was a vivid reminder of just how large a coalition the Democrats have managed to assemble. There were two governors from hard-core conservative states (Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and Brian Schweitzer of Montana). There were also leading politicians from three vital swing states: Ted Strickland, Ohio’s governor; Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s junior senator; and Mark Warner, a former governor of Virginia.

The speakers displayed the party’s ideological diversity as well as its geographical reach. Mark Warner is a multimillionaire who, as governor, went down well with both his state’s business elite and its rural voters. Bob Casey is an anti-abortion Catholic whose father was prevented from addressing the Democratic convention because of his anti-abortion views. Brian Schweitzer is a rancher who boasts about how many guns he owns. I’ve grown a little weary of Mr Schweitzer’s western shtick over the years. But he certainly delivered a rousing performance on Tuesday.

The speakers also provided plenty of what Monday night lacked: McCain bashing. Ms Sebelius joked that the Republican candidate believes that there is “no place like home...and home...and home”. Mr Schweitzer said that “even if you drilled in all of Mr McCain’s back yards” there would not be enough oil to satisfy America’s needs. Almost everybody argued that Mr McCain is a shill for oil companies and Washington lobbyists, and he represents nothing more than “four more years of George Bush”. The crowd loved it.

This was all, of course, a prolonged overture to the main event of the evening—Hillary Clinton’s speech—and she carried it off with aplomb. The crowd was as worked up as any I have seen at a Democratic convention. Many of the people on the floor had seen their dreams of electing America’s first female president dashed by “a handful of votes”.

But Mrs Clinton left no doubt that she wanted her supporters to back Mr Obama. In his convention speech in 1980 Ted Kennedy mentioned his victorious rival, Jimmy Carter, once. Mrs Clinton heaped praise on her former rival.

There were times when her speech sounded typically Clintonian—all about her. She talked about everything she had spent her 35 years in politics working for. She reminisced about the campaign that had consumed 19 months of her life. “You made me laugh and, yes, you even made me cry”.

But then she cleverly turned everything around. She told her supporters that they had not been campaigning for her. They had been campaigning for her causes. And the only way to get those causes honoured was to vote for Mr Obama. When she started speaking, the massed throngs had been waving “Hillary” banners. When she finished, many of them were holding signs that read “Obama” on one side and “unity” on the other.

The conventioneers poured out of the Pepsi Centre in a much better mood than on the previous evening. Even the protesters did their part. “No homo sin” read one banner. “Fox News is the only fair and balanced news” read another. The conventioneers were spoiling for a fight—but first there were parties to attend and bars to drink dry.

Friday

THE main business of political conventions is to introduce the candidate to the American public. All the rest of the hoopla—the funny hats, the late night parties, the tedious speeches by minor politicians—is merely incidental.

The Democratic convention in New York in 1992 was a success because it branded Bill Clinton the “Man from Hope”. Likewise, the Republican convention in Philadelphia in 2000 was a success because it presented George Bush as a new kind of conservative—the compassionate kind.

AFP

What has made the convention in Denver such a peculiar affair is that it has been about two things rather than one—persuading the party to get over the Clintons as well as introducing Barack Obama. So far the first has completely overshadowed the second.

The problem with persuading the party to get over the Clintons is that the only people who could do it were the Clintons. This meant that the former first couple dominated two nights of a four night convention.

Hillary Clinton stole the show on Tuesday with her tribute to her “army of the travelling pantsuits”. She then stole the show again on Wednesday when she interrupted one of America’s time-honoured political rituals—reading the roll call of how each state cast their votes—to move that Mr Obama be nominated unanimously. That was before her husband had even opened his mouth.

On Wednesday Bill Clinton delivered one of his best speeches in recent years. He strode onto the stage to the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”—his theme song from 1992 convention—and pledged his support to the Chicago wunderkid.

Mr Clinton said all the right things. But it was impossible not to fixate on the man from Hope rather than on the man he was praising—on his extraordinary personal magnetism and his rare gift for bumper-sticker phrases (“America must lead by the power of our example rather than the example of our power” was a particularly nice one).

The psychological focus did not really shift to Mr Obama until Joe Biden’s speech. Mr Biden did a good job of introducing himself—as the scrappy son of Scranton who has endured family tragedy and wants to help ordinary Americans who have fallen behind under the Bush administration. He also did a good job of reassuring voters about Mr Obama’s biggest potential weakness—his inexperience on foreign policy. On every decision that matters, he argued, Mr Obama’s judgment has been right and Mr McCain’s has been wrong. Mr Obama’s surprise appearance on the stage to embrace his running mate sent the hall into predictable paroxysms.

All good stuff. But Mr Biden also recycled two Democratic talking points that I am beginning to find extremely irritating. The first is that his running mate was a legislative powerhouse in the Senate. This is nonsense. New senators are never powerhouses in an institution based on seniority (the real powerhouses are mostly past retirement age). And Mr Obama was less of a powerhouse than most first-termers: he spent his time planning to run for president and then campaigning.

The second is that Mr Obama made great sacrifices in going into public life. “With all his talent he could have written his ticket on Wall Street”, Mr Biden argued. But instead he chose to become a lowly community organiser.

This not only suggests that the Democrats think that up-by-the-bootstraps types who go to Wall Street are greedy sell-outs; it is also absurd. Mr Obama has been well-rewarded for his bet on public life. And even if he he’d remained a lowly Chicago politician he would be doing very nicely, thank you. His wife earns more than $300,000 a year for running “community outreach” for the University of Chicago hospital.

Three days into the convention Mr Obama nevertheless remains as much as a mystery to me as ever. I have seen him speak dozens of times. I have read piles of material on him. But I still cannot figure out what makes him tick. How can a man who had such a difficult background be so preternaturally self-confident? And how can someone live at the heart of the political storm and yet remain so relentlessly cool? Bill is a much easier figure to understand than Barack.

Today is all about Mr Obama. Tonight more than 75,000 people will cram into Invesco Stadium to hear him speak. Mr Obama will undoubtedly give another stunning performance—and everyone will thrill to the fact that America’s first black presidential candidate is speaking on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s great “I Have a Dream” speech. But whether we will end the evening with a deeper understanding of the man who is causing all this excitement I very much doubt.

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The Republican National Convention

Ready on the Right

Daily dispatches from St. Paul

Monday

THE most important feature of this year’s Republican convention is not its location, purpose or personalities. It is timing: for the first time in decades, the two parties convene in successive weeks. While most people celebrate the Labour Day holiday at home, the journalist class will arrive in St. Paul barely having recovered from Denver: the heat, the death-march-length walk from the security perimeter to the Pepsi Centre, the lack of seats, the alcohol.

If it’s September 11th, or it’s election night and they’ve just un-called Florida for Gore, urgency makes your exhaustion irrelevant. You don’t notice you’re tired until you climb into bed, and then you’re asleep in seven seconds. Conventions are exhausting precisely because they are extended infomercials, utterly devoid of urgency.

AP

Last week’s pressing questions: Can Barack Obama meet the huge expectations for his speech? Would he and Hillary Clinton reconcile? Can Joe Biden be an attack dog while folksily charming Reagan Democrats back into the fold? Could we have answered all these questions from New York and Washington? The answers were as predictable as the slogans in the hall: Yes we can. (Can I get into the Vanity Fair party? No, I can’t.)

But in contrast with Denver, there were, and remain, real unknowns going into St Paul. What would John McCain seek in a running-mate? A jolt of attention and energy from an unorthodox choice? A safe choice? A former rival? Joe Lieberman, Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney all fell at some unseen hurdle. (The hurdles were more visible for Mr Lieberman; apparently, a host of Republican grandees urged Mr McCain at the last minute: no way, no how, no Joe.)

Sarah Palin slapped journalists awake on Friday morning. She was almost completely unknown until rumours began to fly early that day. Democratic delegates and the press trudged to the airport on Friday muttering “really pro-life”, “super-conservative” and “weird” (the last referring to the pick, not the woman herself).

Mark Green, a New York politician turned liberal radio-pundit, was on my flight; he admitted knowing next to nothing about her. When I mentioned that she is 44-years old, he merely said, “Makes Obama look old.”

All of this means Democrats can define her just as easily as Republicans can. Television commentators have not even settled on whether her name is pronounced Pale-in or Pal-in. The Obama campaign quickly sent journalists an e-mail saying, “Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign-policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.” Mr Obama and Mr Biden themselves put out a kinder personal statement, congratulating her.

I’ll confess: I thought it was going to be Tim Pawlenty, for do-no-harm reasons. I then expected the Republicans next week to gird their loins, hoist shield and spear, and head frenzied into a conventional conservative attack, with Barack Obama’s name being mentioned far more often than John McCain’s in Denver. I expected a grimly determined, disciplined convention. To give up a journalist’s dirty secret, I had begun writing parts of this entry before Ms Palin was announced, for deadline reasons.

Suddenly, I had to dump a lot of copy, exactly as Mr McCain wanted. He snatched attention from Mr Obama’s triumphant speech. I now have no idea what to expect in St Paul. Can national-greatness conservatives, who love Mr McCain so much for his heroism in Vietnam and his steadfastness on Iraq, swallow a vice-president with less than two years’ experience running a state with fewer people in it than Delaware? Somehow I doubt their nerves will be calmed because, as Fox News just reported, she has dealt with Russia on fishing issues.

It seems from early reactions that her staunch social conservatism will rally the religious base. Reporters were suckered into playing up largely personal Clinton-Obama tensions. They have spent less time on the deep divisions between Mr McCain and much of his base. Mr McCain’s newfound orthodoxy on key issues may have helped him a bit, and Ms Palin may help much more. But will it play outside of St Paul?

Little matter for now. I head back into a cocoon, having just left one. It’s going to be a fascinating week. To my surprise, I find myself looking forward to it.

Tuesday

I had been expecting a predictable week. The Democrats had theirs in Denver, for the most part a successful one, which laid the ghost of bitterness between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to rest. The days were long and the nights longer, and by the end of the week in Denver, I was secretly dreading ploughing my way, exhausted, on to St Paul.

Sarah Palin was the first surprise. Over the weekend, especially on the venerable Sunday morning political chat shows, both parties struggled mightily to define the blank-slate candidate. Spin like this is common, but it was unusually polarised, even in this era.

EPA

For Republicans she was a brilliant pick, fresh and far from Washington, but experienced, tough and savvy, and a compelling face to boot. The religious right is genuinely ecstatic: she opposes abortion even in the case of rape or incest, and thinks sex education should be replaced with abstinence-only teaching.

Democrats quickly sought to paint her both as dreadfully inexperienced (two years ago, she was running a town of 7,000) and a pander to the base by the former maverick John McCain. Blackberries between Denver and St. Paul began to hum with rival press releases, and I began to develop in my head the story of a newly energised party, improbably welded together by a John McCain who had managed both to thrill the base and dust off his maverick image.

When I arrived in St. Paul late Sunday night, though, the script began to change again: Hurricane Sarah had given way to a non-metaphorical hurricane, Gustav, bearing down on the Gulf coast. George Bush and Dick Cheney had announced they would stay in Washington to oversee relief efforts (their party breathed a sigh of relief) By the time I landed and checked the news, all of Monday’s events, except some mandatory legal business, had been binned or postponed.

After the usual bewildering search for press credentials and the press-filing center on Monday morning, I sat down to catch up on hurricane news, in order to give my editors a view of what there might be, if anything, to write about in St. Paul.

No one knew what Gustav would do. I chat with an editor in London about whether to write about the politicising of the storm. (John McCain talked up his trip to the coast; Barack Obama said he would stay away so as not to tax resources of the emergency personnel; each side is accusing the other of grandstanding.)

Monday afternoon, another storm breaks, this time of the metaphorical variety again. It is one of those that can either turn into a tropical depression and be forgotten, or gain hurricane strength and wreak damage. Rumours had swirled around far-left blogs that Sarah Palin had not actually been the mother of her fifth child; according to the gossip, she had covered for a pregnancy of her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol.

The rumours had not made it much past the blogs, but suddenly the Palins put out a press-release: we are very pleased to have five children, and also to tell the world that Bristol “came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned.” Indeed. Bristol is five months pregnant. She will marry the father and keep the child. Ms Palin’s opposition to sex-education seems suddenly relevant.

How will it play in the hall? I know it’s making reporters buzz. The secretary of commerce, briefing journalists as a courtesy, is asked about it. I hear another reporter quizzing a delegate about it. The Brazilian TV crew in the filing center are talking about it. Surely a frustration for Republicans, eager to get a different message out.

But for today, they have little control. The business in the hall is mostly routine; there are no rousing red-meat speeches. Laura Bush comes on, to hearty applause and cheers, at the end of the shortened day. She introduces videotaped messages from the (Republican) governors of the states hit by the hurricane. Cindy McCain, her would-be successor, joins her in appealing for donations to the gulf-state aid agencies. And then the benediction, at five o’clock, and the end of a very unusual day one.

Wednesday

WITH nothing much happening at the real convention yet, I decide to check in on the Ron Paul movement. I was surprised at the breadth and depth of his primary support. As depressed as the Republican party was, just about the only signs and bumper stickers I saw this winter (which I spent in Georgia) were for Mr Paul. But he mostly dropped off my radar after John McCain won, cropping up only late in the race, when an embarrassingly large number of people voted him after the race was effectively over.

On the first night of the convention, when nothing happened in St. Paul, I pile into a car and head up to a party supposedly held “10 miles” north of Minneapolis-St Paul. We drive far more than ten miles, finally reaching Blaine, Minnesota, where what looks like a high-school sports arena is filled to Friday-night football capacity for the party. Most of the partygoers are on the field, and mediocre country music wafts from a band onstage.

Bloomberg

The Paulites I meet seem more articulate and motivated than most of the delegates I’ve talked to at both major-party conventions. Each has a chief concern. Christe tells me she doesn’t know the first thing about Iraq, and neither does anyone she knows; why on earth are we invading it? Adam tells me that his big thing is civil liberties. Another one whose name I forget says that the metal in coins is worth more than the face-value of the coins these days; he wants the Federal Reserve abolished, and the current monetary system replaced by competing private currencies.

The Paul people are like that: over here, a view lots of people in both parties can agree with, like opposition to the war. And over there, a view so far out of the mainstream I sputter to rebut it politely. One woman dressed up as the Statue of Liberty has a sign mentioning Mr McCain and the letters CFR. She says that she is voting against Mr McCain because he’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The Council is an organisation so mainstream many consider its flagship publication, Foreign Affairs, a snoozer for its predictable ideas. But many of the Paul people think it’s a secret cabal, like the Freemasons or the Illuminati. (Disclosure: your correspondent is a junior member—of the CFR, not the Illuminati. Either it has no secret agenda for global mastery, or they haven’t yet decided I’m trustworthy enough. Let me in, would you?)

The feel at the huge Rally for the Republic, held the next day across the river in a basketball arena in Minneapolis, is similar. There are huge cheers for opposition to the Iraq war and the Patriot Act. But the biggest is inspired by Jesse Ventura, the former Reform Party governor of Minnesota.

The burly former professional wrestler says that the second amendment protecting gun ownership isn’t there to protect hunting and fishing. “The second amendment is there so that if our government gets out of control, we can rise up and change it.” The room is electrified: thousands of people are on their feet, screaming with glee at the notion of turning their firearms on the federal government.

I am reminded of a phrase popularised by Richard Hofstadter: “the paranoid style in American politics”. Mr Ventura raises the crowd to further hoots with a few musings about whether Osama bin Laden really committed the September 11th terror attacks. He’s not saying he didn’t, but why hasn’t the federal government officially indicted him? He’s just asking.

We queue with a gaggle of other journalists to interview Mr Paul. The interviews before us have run long; they’re way behind schedule, and everyone is starting to get a little cranky. I admit that I’m unamused when three young Paulites from Kansas, only one affiliated with any media outlet (her university newspaper), are moved ahead of us.

When we finally see him, he’s energetic and has a gleam in his eye, despite interview after interview. I try to suss out what he plans to do with his support. The Republicans will not let him speak at the convention, and will not let his duly elected delegates speak up, either. If they do, they will be thrown out.

Does he still consider himself a Republican? To my surprise, he does not hesitate in saying yes: “I’m an old Republican.” His confidence that his movement will conquer his party, and his unwillingness to endorse either Mr McCain, Mr Obama or a third-party candidate like the Libertarian, Bob Barr, confuses me. What exactly is Mr Paul after? I’m not as sure as he is that he will conquer the Republicans.

Back in the hall, I file this as a song, “Ron Paul, Ron Paul,” blares out the loudspeakers to the tune of “New York, New York.”

I want to wake up to a country that doesn’t sleep

to fight for our rights

and civil liberties…

These neocon blues

Are melting away

We’ll make a brand new start of it

Vote Ron Paul

And let’s show we care

And shout it everywhere

It’s up to us to vote Rooon PAAAAAAAAAAULLLLLLL

ROOOON PAAUUUUUL!

Thursday

IT IS the lull between the warm-up—the first two days of the convention, which have seen little action—and the main events of the second half. Fred Thompson, once John McCain’s rival, fired up the crowd last night by lionising the nominee and attacking the Democrats. The man who could barely be bothered to stay awake for his own failed campaign was masterful. He worked the crowd in his signature, gravelly baritone like the trained actor that he is. But Joe Lieberman generated far less enthusiasm. The Republicans’ impatience to get started for real is palpable. So far, an underwhelming convention.

In this lull, I plan to take in an event sponsored by the New America Foundation, the think-tank of choice for Washington’s clever young things, on the future of the Middle East. Their event in Denver was great, and I’m eager to watch. This week, it would be different; the host has called me the night before to say that there have been a few cancellations, and could I sit on the discussion panel myself.

AFPFred Thompson works the crowd

I agreed, and when I get to the room I see why I’ve been called up. The room is only half-full, whereas the host, Steve Clemons, had filled a far bigger room in Denver. Do Republicans not care about the future of the Middle East? Unlikely, but it’s not obvious why there are so many fewer people here. Despite the small crowd, I take the stage and enjoy the next two hours of lively discussion on energy, Israel, Palestine and Iran.

Tonight is Sarah Palin’s big night: I know because the television chyrons read “SARAH PALIN’S BIG NIGHT” and “MAKE OR BREAK”. I think the Democrats have let themselves get out-framed on this one. When Mrs Palin, who after all is a governor, gives even a medium-competent speech full of Republican applause lines, the party will rightly hail it as a triumph.

But that is hours off, so I meander around the floor, warming up for the day’s events. The stage managers seem to have ditched last night’s blue-sky background with a single, tasteful waving flag on a flagpole, in favour of a backdrop screen that is one enormous, animated waving flag. It’s the size of a house, and it’s about to give me a seizure. Will it play on television?

It can’t be worse than the odd choice of a pale-yellow and black background for Barack Obama in Denver, which looked like a Japanese paper house. But this flag scares me. Gone are the days of mere rows of normal-sized flags. Some things just shouldn’t be the subject of too much creativity.

John Rich, a country star, rehearses his song “Raising McCain”, which he will play tonight (not bad for a political song, I must admit). And am I imagining things, or have the added “PROSPERITY” to the lettering around the arena? Last night I remember seeing only “COUNTRY FIRST”. Maybe an implicit response to Mr Obama’s complaint today that the Republicans are not talking about issues at all, and especially ignoring the economy.

I’m a little bored of interviewing delegates, to be honest. Unlike the Ron Paul people, few at either convention have said anything surprising. But I stand on the floor, pretending to check my Blackberry, to overhear a television crew interviewing a Colorado delegate. I want to see how they do it; maybe they know something about getting a more newsworthy response.

Only the reporter, a medium-sized blonde woman whose back is to me, seems to be antagonising the tall, gangly Coloradan. I can barely hear her questions, but he repeatedly gets annoyed: “Can we have a real discussion about politics?” On Mrs Palin: “No, I had heard of her. No, I didn’t Google her. I mean, I did Google her, but months ago. You want to check my computer?” I think, crikey, this is what they mean by the agenda-bearing liberal media? What on earth is she asking him to annoy him so?

Finally, when she gets the Coloradan to say “yeah, OK. She’s attractive. There. You happy?” I get it. The interview breaks up, and everyone moves off, and I see the reporter: Samantha Bee, from “The Daily Show”, a comedy news programme. You win another one, fake news.

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Friday

AS THE room rattles around me, my phone buzzes in my pocket. Text messages from several friends. “What do you think?” “What’s it like in there?” What is it like in there, as Sarah Palin sinks her teeth into the Democrats and Barack Obama, exhilarating a packed house?

I am standing near the Texas delegation, overflow delegates on every side and behind me, every one in a cowboy hat. The distinguished-looking fellow on my left has stylish, wavy grey hair, a blue blazer with gold buttons, and a lapel pin of cross coloured red, white and blue. The man to my right wears a sticker on his cowboy hat reading “Drill here, drill now, pay less.” I am standing, for a moment, in the most Republican spot in the universe. What’s it like in there?

They hate me.

AFP

Oh, not me personally. In fact, no one has so much as frowned at me this week. But on Wednesday night, I have to duck to avoid the flying red meat aimed at the media. Mike Huckabee, mild-mannered as usual, saves one of his only barbed comments of the night for “the elite media...for doing something that, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure could be done, and that’s unifying the Republican Party and all of America in support of Senator McCain and Governor Palin.” (Really? All of America?)

Rudy Giuliani says, “We the people—the citizens of the United States—get to decide our next president...not the media, not Hollywood celebrities, not anyone else.” (Are not celebrities and reporters, at least, people, and often Americans? My passport is as blue as yours, Rudy.)

And the star of the week, Sarah Palin, says “Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion. I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.” I hadn’t realised the two were mutually exclusive, but the crowd goes wild, as I stand there with a big card reading “PRESS” dangling around my neck. I think I detect a theme.

In sport, you “work the ref”, complaining often and loudly, hoping that the referee will lean your way on the next call, to avoid hassle. Speaker after speaker has done that this week. Sometimes it works: reporters don’t want to be hated, and they might really feel like they got it wrong if a reaction is virulent enough.

After the 2004 election, in particular, I think members of the press felt a strong disconnect with much of America: on the second go round, surely nobody would vote for George Bush. And yet so many did that reporters, who after all are charged with knowing the world, felt like they may not really understand things as well as they thought. There’s been a renewed attempt to understand conservative middle America.

Now she has spoken for herself, far clearing the insanely low bar the Democrats set for her by acting as though she were an ignoramus. And in the lull before Mr McCain speaks (I am filing this before he takes the stage), there is a feeling of self-examination among the press. What’s off-limits and what isn’t? Ms Palin has featured her family prominently, but doesn’t want reporters covering her kids. Fair enough. Republicans have said that she is their kind of “feminist”, even if she isn’t to Democratic tastes. I can accept that.

But this week we have been abused again and again for asking basic political questions. Does she have ethical troubles back home? It’s not our fault that her mini-scandal involves her family. Is her support for abstinence-only sex-education particularly salient in light of her teenager’s pregnancy? Many people legitimately think so. It is wonderful that she had a Down syndrome child, but should that mean, as she thinks, a rape victim should not have access to abortion? The odd pick of Ms Palin has made the personal political and the political extremely, extremely personal. And we in the press have been made players in the story. The bad guys? Half the country seems to think so.

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