When Gerald Ford took the oath of office at the end of the Watergate affair, he declared: ”My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” Barack Obama did not use those words in Minnesota on Tuesday night, though plenty of his fellow Democrats would have found them apt.
In the wee small hours on Israeli television they show reruns of what was once a staple form of mass entertainment: kibbutz choirs — the men in pressed work shirts, the women in peasant skirts — singing Hebrew folk melodies exaltingĂ‚Â the Land of Israel, while a smiling audience joins in.
Well, that was the worst possible outcome for the Democrats — and for all those in the United States and beyond yearning for change after eight years of failed Republican rule. The results of last Tuesday’s contests in Ohio and Texas promise a slow disaster for the party for which 2008 should have been an easy and golden year.
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/ 26 January 2008
Sixteen years ago, South Carolina and the United States were wowed by a new candidate who seemed less politician than force of nature. He packed halls and school gyms till they were bursting, promising that a new day was coming. Aged just 46, his arrival seemed to presage a generational shift.
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/ 14 December 2007
Nineteen sixty-eight was a vintage year, as was 1992. And, I confidently predict, 2008 will be one too. I am not speaking of fine bottles of Chateau Lafite but rather United States presidential politics. The campaign that will culminate on November 4 is already shaping up as a classic, replete with the requisite elements of a cracking contest.
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/ 10 December 2007
Think about climate change long enough and you soon realise that it is more than our lightbulbs that we are going to have to change. Colleagues have argued, as delegates gather in Bali to hammer out a global accord to avert this catastrophe, that a more fundamental overhaul will be required. Madeleine Bunting suggested a return to wartime rationing, in order to curb a hyper-consumerism that is unsustainable.
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/ 29 October 2007
It takes a special kind of genius to unite the warring parties of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but George Bush may just have pulled it off. His proposal for what the United States administration calls a ”meeting”, rather than a peace conference, in Annapolis, Maryland, before the end of the year has elicited a unanimity unheard of in the Middle East.
As the good book says, God loves the sinner that repenteth even if he repenteth late — so George W Bush will probably win a smile from heaven for his belated call for a Middle East peace conference before the year is out. Sure, it’s a bit late now for the president to be scrabbling to make amends for six-and-a-half years of, at best, intermittent attention towards the Israel-Palestine conflict. But something is better than nothing.
They tussled with each other even to the end. Through the extraordinary unfolding hours of Wednesday’s handover, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seemed to be locked in the final spasm of their 13-year duel, each jockeying with the other for prominence. How would this day be cast — as Blair’s last, or Brown’s first?
Let’s hope Lords Hutton and Butler (authors of two United Kingdom reports into the circumstances surrounding the invasion of Iraq) were taking notes. An 81-year-old retired judge, Eliyahu Winograd, has just given a masterclass in how to conduct a genuine, fearless and plainspoken inquiry into a government failure.