The Debatable Land

Back on the "Special Relationship" Merry-go-round

Sure as eggs is eggs, the arrival of a new American president heralds fresh fretting in the British press over the precise state of the so-called "Special Relationship". Today's text comes courtesy of Rachel Sylvester, writing in the Times. It's worth considering in some detail:

The inauguration of a president who is adored by the British public could ironically spell the end of the special relationship between the UK and the US. Just as the voters in this country decide that it is time to get up close and personal with America, so the Yanks are losing their passion for the Brits. Just as the Prime Minister decides it is time to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US president, so he may find the cold shoulder turned on him.

This is partly but not entirely about Mr Obama. Certainly, the President-elect will be the least Anglophile American leader in living memory. Unlike Bill Clinton, who was educated at Oxford, or George Bush, who kept a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office, Mr Obama has no innate affection for this country - in fact, his grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by British colonialists in Kenya.

This isn't quite true. Or rather, it's a rewriting of history. Clinton may have been a Rhodes Scholar but he didn't hugely enjoy his time in Oxford. More to the point, when he came to power there was much talk in Washington about Germany replacing Britain as Washington's Best Pal in Europe. (The fact that the Major government had, foolishly, acceded to the Bush campaign's request for any dirt from Bill's time in Oxford didn't help.) More pertinently, with the exception of Kennedy (who got on well with Macmillan) Democratic presidents have tended, initially at least, to be less enamoured of the specialness of the "Special Relationship" than have Republicans (Nixon excepted).

Indeed, if memory serves, there's a passage in George Stephanopoulus's memoir of the Clinton White House when, prior to Clinton's first meeting with Major, his aides reminded him of the importance (to the British) of mentioning the magic phrase. "Ah yes" Clinton chuckled, "the Special Relationship". Well, he said the right words and everyone went home happy.

“The UK is part of the Bush baggage because of Iraq,” says a senior Foreign Office source. “Obama is not going to be emotional about the transatlantic alliance. He's a free-thinking politician, driven by science and facts. The UK and Europe look less significant than Asia and Latin America and even over here Europe seems a better focus than the UK.”

Well, yes. The post-Cold War era necessarily brings with it a decline in the central importance of the Atlantic Alliance. Equally, Obama doubtless appreciates that there's a limit to how much more Britain can do in, say, Afghanistan. No wonder he may ask for more from other European countries. Still, we swam in these waters in 1992 too and, as Macmillan put it, "events, dear boy, events" helped ensure matters turned out rather differently.

The British position has not been helped by Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the Ambassador to Washington, a career diplomat educated at Oxford, whose pin-striped demeanour does not fit easily with the open-necked attitude of the Obama camp. A memo, leaked last year, in which our man in DC described the President-elect as “aloof”, “insensitive” and lacking a track record did not go down well with a politician who already suspected the British of having a superiority complex.

Is this true? The memo was as controversial as a Financial Times profile. That is to say, it was not at all controversial and could have been written by any half-decent UK correspondent in DC. More to the point, in terms of future policy, the British do often seem to have a "superiority complex". We keep banging on - in the press at least - about how much smarter and more sophisticated our approach in Iraq and Afghanistan is than that favoured by those drop-a-cluster-bomb-first-ask-questions-later heavy-handed Yankee cowboys. This rather flatters us and, I suspect, often falsely so. The days of pretending to play Athens to Washington's Rome should be over.

Equally, Gordon Brown's claims to have "saved the world" in the current economic crisis have not been endorsed by actual events and, quite reasonably, have irritated everyone else who might reasonably ask why they should take lectures from the man responsible for leaving Britain less well-placed than any other major power to deal with these frigid economic conditions.

Perhaps most important of all, the military alliance between Britain and America - which has cemented the political alliance since the First World War - is beginning to crack. I am told that a report circulating at the highest level in the Ministry of Defence concludes that there are now serious doubts in Washington about the effectiveness of the British Armed Forces. Senior military figures are said to have been surprised, and shocked, by feedback that arrived in Whitehall last month. Described as “highly sensitive”, it raised questions about the worth of the UK contribution to US-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It showed that the Americans don't value us much,” one source told me. “Britain's military ability is no longer rated as highly as we thought it was.”

“The US generals think the Brits need to be taken down a peg or two - that we have not performed well in Basra and Helmand province - and that has trickled up to the Pentagon,” says a Foreign Office insider. “It's not terminal but it's an important warning to us that if we are going to trade on our military partnership we are going to have to raise our game.”

This too seems fair enough. Given the appallingly under-funded, under-equipped nature of the UK armed forces it's entirely reasonable for the Americans to wonder if the advantages of the political cover Britain provides are beginning to be outwieghed by the shortfall in British military capability. Having spent a decade refusing to fund the armed forces properly, this is a situation for which Brown is largely responsible himself.

Then again, to be fair to the former Chancellor, he was only adhering to the long-standing British tradition of trying to do too much with too few resources. Even in times of Great National Effort we have routinely sent the boys into battle with lousy equipment. This is not a new phenomenon: in the Napoleonic Wars many, perhaps even most, of the Royal Navy's best ships were captured French and, especially, Spanish vessels that were better-built than their British counterparts built shoddily and cheaply in dockyards (both Royal and private) in which penny-pinching and corruption were the norm not the exception. So not much has changed.

Mr Obama won power promising change. Mr Brown wants nothing more than to bask in the reflected glory of that. But it looks as if the Anglo-American alliance will be one of the first targets for change. One minister says the “specialness” in the special relationship will be diluted. It may not survive at all.

Well, maybe. I'm all for Obama sticking it to Brown, but it would be nice if the transatlantic relationship weren't quite so humiliating and that we learnt that there's a price to be paid for fealty to American leadership, one, moreover, that is not necessarily in Britain's own national interests. As against that, the nature of things is that, regardless of press speculation, London and Washington are likelier than not to remain closer than Washington and most other capitals around the world if for no other reason than the intelligence and military experience they share is likely to remain a valuable resource for both parties. Nonetheless, on balance, it's a good thing if there's also better relations between Washington and Paris (and Berlin). That necessarily undermines the primacy of the DC-London axis, but that may not be a Bad Thing either.

But Sometimes Change is Real

Matt Yglesias correctly suggests that these photos are the Obamas attempt to reduce the "National Cuteness Deficit." But there's something else too: besides being charming, it's striking how these photographs of Malia and Sasha preparing for their first day at a new school are both so very ordinary and yet also a reminder of howit really is momentous thing that this is the next First Family of the United States of America. The ordinary reveals and, in a sense, reinforces the extraordinary...

NB: Close examination reveals that the President-elect is not in fact making a somewhat dismissive gesture to his daughter. Three fingers, not two.

The Kennedy Interest

The conventional wisdom seems to be that Caroline Kennedy is, as Nick Confessore puts it, "too big to fail" in her quest to succeed Hillary Clinton as the junior Senator from New York. Perhaps so. There is, of course, one person who could decide that it's not in the public interest to bail-out the Kennedys. With just two phone calls - one to David Paterson, the other to Kennedy - Barack Obama could put an end to this and suggest that New York have, like, an election or something shocking like that...

But conventional wisdom also says Obama will do no such thing, not least, or perhaps largely, because he owes Clan Kennedy for Teddy's early and enthusiastic endorsement of the upstart challenger to Queen Hillary's throne. Maybe so, again. During the campaign Obama spent a lot of time lambasting the "special interests" that were, apparently, running and ruining Washington. This would Change when Hope returned to the Capitol.

Well, what are the Kennedys if not a Special Interest? Now, granted, Obama meant that he disapproved of special interests bar those goals he shares, but I can't help but feel that permitting Kennedy to glide into the Senate is not exactly the sort change We Can Believe In that we were promised.

Conversely, there might be a political upside to stiffing the Kennedys: it would send a message that even the new President's friends should not take his friendship for granted; nor should they presume to abuse it. The good old days of stitch-ups and back-scratching are, outwardly at least, gone... Or something of that sort.

And no, I don't really believe this will happen either.

The Media Campaign

Ouch!

The paradox of this scene was that the Obama campaign’s communications strategy was predicated in part on an aggressive indifference to this insider set. Staff members were encouraged to ignore new Web sites like The Page, written by Time’s Mark Halperin, and Politico, both of which had gained instant cachet among the Washington smarty-pants set. “If Politico and Halperin say we’re winning, we’re losing,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, would repeat mantralike around headquarters. He said his least favorite words in the English language were, “I saw someone on cable say this. . . .”

Actually, I think that's a little unfair on Politico, but there's something to this nonetheless. Politico and Halperin and plenty of others have every incentive in the world to come up with fresh, counter-intuitive, let's-throw-this-against-the-wall-and-see-what-happens analysis; hence a political campaign might best be advised to do everything it can to ignore all this froth and sound and hubbub.

Obama: Not a Danger!

Now that we're getting used to the idea of President Barack Hussein Obama, it's easy to forget just how quick he's risen to the summit of American politics. The other day I came across a pack of playing cards that I picked up at CPAC in 2006; produced by Human Events, it's titled "The 52 Most Dangerous Liberals in America" (the Aces are Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Chuck Schumer and George Soros) and features most of the usual suspects in Gore, Carter, Krugman, Dowd, Huffington, Pelosi, Reid, Waxman etc etc. The person missing? Yup, Barack Obama who, according to Human Events, was considered less of a threat to America's future than Alan Colmes...

Obama and Europe, Cont.

Dan Drezner politely suggests I'm talking (or writing, rather) through my hat in this gloomy assessment of the transformational potential of the Obama presidency. Dan prefers to see the potential rather than the pitfalls. And he may be correct. It would probably be better for all if he were.

As it happens, I do think he's right to argue that many european policy elites - and certainly much of the think tank world - do believe that Afghanistan must and can be saved. And it is certainly possible that withdrawing form Iraq (if that proves possible) could create the space and manpower needed to refocus on the "Good War". Nonetheless, I suspect european public opinion has soured on or, to be more generous, is simply confused by a conflict that drags on with little sign of progress, let alone an endgame. Now it's certainly possible that Obama can leverage his popularity and the idea of a fresh start and lead by example in Afghanistan. Jim Jones' experience with NATO and Europe Command should help - though of course Jones will be familiar with the limits of what NATO can realistically achieve, as well as its potential.

Iran seems more difficult, however. The proliferation consequences of an Iranian bomb are, to say the least, disconcerting but it's hard to imagine there being any european enthusiasm for a military strike against Tehran. And that, of course, remains the default, bottom-line US position. Let us hope it never comes to that.

What is also striking, however, is how, as Ben Macintyre writes in the Times today, Obama's relationship with europe is very different from that of most of his predecessors. It's not merely that he's a different generation, it's that his cultural background is Kenya, Kansas, Hawaii and Indonesia. He's one of the few Presidents of recent times who has not looked to europe and perhaps the first to see it as just another, if still important, place. Even Bill Clinton had been a Rhodes Scholar (though not a particularly happy one) while George W Bush had actually spent more time in Scotland than any other foreign country prior to becoming President. And of course, he was part of an Andover and the Ivy League elite, even if he had transferred his primary self-identity to Texas. His father, of course, like Reagan before him, was steeped in the transatlantic alliance.

So, even more than Clinton and Dubya, Obama's Presidency marks a break with the established conventions of the transatlantic alliance. An alliance built, of course, on WW2 and the Cold War. His memoir, as Macintyre reminds us, finds Obama feeling “edgy, defensive, hesitant” while travelling in Europe. “It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful,” he writes. “It just wasn't mine.”

Perhaps this means Obama has the benefit of a fresh, less misty-eyed perspective, one that casts off the humbug of the "Special Relationship" and enduring ties with the "old continent". But it may also mean - time will tell! - that he's less instinctively attuned to european sensibilities and interests. His enthusiasm for Georgian and Ukrainian NATO membership could be taken to suggest that, for instance.

On the flip side, Obama's break with history may mean that he will be less likely to take the Bushian attitude that "you guys owe us". A partnership needs to be just that and it's not a partnership if one side isn't on occasion permitted to say "No". Still, so far Obama seems to have been suggesting a recalibration of the essential Washington worldview, rather than any fundamental change to it. Nonetheless, as I say, it would might well be best if Dan is right and I am, er, not.

The Continued Absence of a Golden Age

Commenting on the future of transatlantic relations, Anthony writes:

The plain fact of the matter is that there are structural issues at play that will ensure tensions remain. One of the great pieces of historical revisionism spurred by the Bush 43 tenure is the conviction that has emerged that under Clinton Euro-American relations were going well. They weren't. Most of the time it was poison. Even between Clinton and Blair things turned fairly sour...

We should hope for the best with the emergence of the Obama administration. And at the very least it'll give me an excuse to start having a go at the Continentals again. But managing expectations, so to speak, is undoubtedly the right way to go. There are plenty of issues that have the potential to cause ructions.

That's not to say, incidentally, that the problems are ALL structural. This is an argument generally employed by Bush 43 apologists to support the notion that it doesn't matter how undiplomatically the US government acts because the results will be the same and it should be resisted. But let's not get carried away.

This is entirely true. We forget too often how much the Balkan wars strained the transatlantic alliance and how close NATO came to breaking up over Kosovo. That wasn't the only issue, of course, but it was probably the biggest, most complicated one. You'll recall how Blair and Clinton were reduced to shouting matches over Kosovo and, previously, how Clinton and John Major had rowed over Bosnia and Northern Ireland. Now in the end most (or at least many) of these differences were resolved, but they were, in some ways, easier than many of those which face the west today.

Obama's European Gambit

Matt Yglesias wrote a column last week in which he disputed what he termed the "counterintuitive" view that President Obama's relations with Europe will not necessarily improve as much or as swiftly as is commonly imagine. On the contray, he suggested, simpley a) not being George W Bush and b) not going out of his way to insult or alienate Europeans would indeed go a long way towards reviving a spirit of transatlantic comity. Robert Kaplan made some similar points in the Atlantic: Obama enters the market at a time when US foreign policy stock is so depressed, the only way is up.

Now clearly there's something to this. European public opinion is likely to be vastly more receptive to President Obama than it has been to President Bush and it's true that this may create some room for European governments to hop on board and enjoy the ride alongside the new American president. But at the risk of seeming a terrible spoilsport, might I suggest that  friendly and polite attitude may not be enough?

This week, for instance, NATO meets in Brussels and, for some reason, the idea of Georgia and the Ukraine joining the alliance is back on the agenda. Perhaps the new President will be able to persuade us that this is a fine and sensible idea, but it's not clear what arguments he can deploy that are not already in the field. And if he wants a favour on this then it's reasonable to suppose that there'll be a price to be paid elsewhere.

Then there's Iran. It's no secret that Obama's proposals for engagement with Tehran have worried some in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London. Now it may well be that Obama's ideas are good ones, but he hasn't yet (obviously) persuaded Europe that they are. Indeed, the Bush administration has pursued a kind of quasi-realist, multilateral approach in its second term that could itself be taken as a refutation of its more ill-tempered approach in its first four years. And yet despite this mollification and prudence, significant differences remain between the Atlantic allies.

No surprise there, perhaps. And the US cannot have it both ways: it cannot reasonably ask Europe to do more and then complain if Europe declines to fall into line behind US proposals. Doing more requires a greater degree of independence from Washington.

And so to Afghanistan. Obama, like Bush and SecDef Gates before him, is likely to ask Europe to pour more troops into Afghanistan and to loosen rules of engagement once the boys are in theatre. As Matt puts it, there's no guarantee that Obama can achieve this:

But what improved U.S. standing in Europe will do is transform the politics of the situation. At the moment, even those European political leaders who agree on the merits of the American perspective are terrified to say so. The combination of Bush's toxic unpopularity and the sense that help given to the U.S. in Afghanistan would, in effect, be assistance for what's widely viewed as a criminal enterprise in Iraq makes it a nonstarter. A new administration and a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq would clear the air. And steps to show that Europe's high hopes for Obama in terms of basic human rights, diplomatic courtesy, and engagement with issues like climate change would allow Obama to make his case to Europe's people and turn public opinion around. At a time when the United States is militarily and financially exhausted, but also desperate for a renewed approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan, that's change we need.

Perhaps Obama really can persuade European public opinion. But since, as matters stand, no-one thinks there's a military solution to the Afghan problem I'm not quite sure what Obama can offer to make the mission any more appealling. Put yourself in Danish or Portuguese or Italian shoes: what's in it for you? Why would you join a mission no-one thinks is winnable? (Maybe a new strategy can change that, but that too is something that remains to be seen.) It isn't simply Iraq; it's the growing perception that many people feel they have little to know idea why, nearly seven years later, we're still in Afghanistan. What are we actually doing there? What can we actually realistically hope to achieve?

And I'm afraid that closing Guantanamo and (officially at least) putting an end to torture are necessary first steps, not an end in themselves. That's the bare minimum required and no-one should think Washington will get credit for this. It's like asking to be applauded for ceasing to beat your wife. Sure it's better than continuining to beat her but just stopping doesn't change the fact that she's a bloody mess. 

It would be lovely to think that Obama can bring a new period of transatlantic harmony. But it just isn't the case that American interests are necessarily the same as European interests. The Security Card trumped everything during the Cold War but these are changed times. And there were, in any case, always more differences than seemed the case then too, these days they're much clearer to see. A new President may find it difficult to change that. Or, to put it another way, he may need to give something up himself to advance American interests in other areas.

Best, Brightest, Fabbest Cabinet, like, Evah

I'd been meaning to write something about how all the cheering at the supposed brilliance of Obama's cabinet picks was reminiscent of the huzzahs that greeted George W Bush's peronnel choices. But Ezra Klein has beaten me to it:

"Isn’t it amazing," asks Krugman, "just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the Obama administration seem? Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they’re doing. For a bunch of people who were written off as a permanent minority four years ago, the Democrats look remarkably like the natural governing party these days, with a deep bench of talent." That certainly feels true. But the Bush administration started out with a fairly deep bench. Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Paul O'Neill --a former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and a past chairman of the RAND Corporation -- as Secretary of the Treasury. Columbia's Glenn Hubbard as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice providing foreign policy expertise. Indeed, the Bush team was lauded for being such a natural entity of governance: These were figures from the Nixon and Ford and Bush administrations, and they were backed by graybeards like Baker and Scowcroft and Greenspan. What could go wrong?

Now of course this doesn't mean that the Obama administration is going to go down the tubes like the Bush one did. But it ought to remind everyone - including those who should not need reminding - that there's no sure thing in these matters and that at least some of Obama's appointees are likely to prove disappointing. That's just the way it is. One trusts, however, that their disappointments will be less grievous and less damaging than those of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell et al.

UPDATE: Megan argues, however, that Obama's economic team is much more impressive than Bush's first-term appointments. Which is just as well since they've got a heck of a job to do.

Hillary Accepts

Well, one assumes the dear old New York Times wouldn't run a story saying she's accepted the offer to be Secretary of State unless it was pretty well certain that she will.

That sound you hear is foreign editors tearing up their pages right now. The groaning comes from Sunday newspaper hacks who now need to recast their focus pieces.

What does it all mean? Well, like I say, it suggests Obama's not going to break with the Washington consensus on foreign policy. But perhaps we will all be surprised. Alas, this also means the already tiresome "Team of Rivals" meme will run and run...

Meet the New Boss, Not So Different From the Old Boss?

Sure, last month Barack Obama was an un-American, terrorist-coddling, muslim threat to every American Ideal every true-blooded, stout-hearted, tub-thumping patriot held dear. Now, however, things are a little different. We can seem more clearly these days, now the nonsense has receded. Ross Douthat offers a prediction:

Among right-wing hawks, there will be strange-new-respectful talk about Obama's centrist instincts, his Scoop Jackson-ish tendencies, his Reaganesque blend of idealism, pragmatism and strength. Meanwhile, the rest of the right-wing coalition will be getting steamrolled.

Quite so. Viewed from outside the United States, the foreign policy "debate" in Washington is a curiously curtailed affair. It concentrates on means, not ends and this rather tends to obscure the fact that, on many and perhaps even most issues, there's less between the parties than might be thought.

Take Iran, for instance: as the world knows, Obama has talked a good deal about talking with Tehran. (Ignoring, conveniently, that there's already a good deal of "dialogue" between Iran and the West). This is all very well and good. It would be a fine thing if Iran were persuaded to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Perhaps it can be. But what if it can't? Obama has repeatedly said that a nuclear Iran is "unacceptable". That means military action remains an option. It is still - as you may say it must be - on the table. Which is to say that the goal of American policy has not changed, only the emphasis placed, perhaps, on the various possible ways of reaching that goal.

Similarly, in Afghanistan, the goal of American policy remains just what it would have been had John McCain somehow won the election. Again, I make no judgment (now) on whether American policy is sensible or realistic, I merely suggest that either candidate would have found themselves retooling and, indeed, tooling up in the Hindu Kush. The difference, to the extent there was one, lay in Obama's greater willingness to openly support incursions into Pakistan. Again, this may or may not be a Good Thing but it's hardly the sort of policy likely to endear him to his own party's left-wing is it?

Ditto in Latin America. Obama has, to my knowledge, shown few if any signs of breaking with Washington orthodoxy on issues such as Plan Colombia or the wider drug war. And anyone hoping that relations with Cuba might be normalised is likely, I'd hazard, to be disappointed.

So too in Europe. Obama may well be in a better position to demand more from europe in, say Afghanistan, but that too, generally speaking, represents an intensification of existing US policy, not a break from it. And recall, also, that the new President also supports, like McCain, NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine. Maybe that won't happen, of course, but right now you'd be hard pressed to make the case that Obama's foreign policy thinking marks any substantial break from the general Washington consensus.

What's more likely, I think, is a reordering of priorities and shifts in emphasis but little alteration to long-standing US goals. Perhaps, as Steve Clemons suggests, Hillary will play "bad cop" to Obama's "good cop" in a renewed push for a solution to the Israeli-Palestine problem. That would not be a bad thing, though I confess I've little idea how it can happen, absent a renewed willingness to talk on the part of the warring parties themselves.

But what about Iraq? True, Obama has talked about bringing the boys home by the summer of 2010. And that may yet happen (though don't be surprised if there's slippage on the timetable). That is a difference from McCain, but either man would have been charged with managing and making the best of a mess.

Still, at the most basic level, the new President whistles the same old tune. His job is to maintain, preserve and protect american hegemony. Like his predecessors, Obama is of the view that the United States has the right to intervene in any part of the planet it sees fit. This may (Pakistan) be in the pursuit of the national interest or, more nebulously, on humanitarian grounds (the Sudan) if Obama, as seems perfectly possible, picks up the Albright-Clinton baton and runs with it.

I don't say that any, let alone all, of these are necessarily illegitimate ambitions, merely that, when you get down to the bottom of it, Obama hasn't yet given much indication that he either wants to, let alone will, break from the broad thrust of the Washington foreign policy consensus. That being so, why should hawks on either side of the aisle have anything to fear from him? Means matter, of course, but so do ends.

The Roman Obama?

Mary Beard, in good form today:

I’m surprised that no-one seems to have spotted an obvious Roman parallel for the success of Barack Obama. Or have I missed it? In the second century AD, Lucius Septimius Severus became the first ‘African-Roman’ emperor of Rome. Like Obama he was of mixed race -- his father from Libya, his mother of European descent. He too had an outspoken and determined wife, from Syria. And his first task on coming to the throne in 193 AD was to deal with a military disaster in Iraq (‘Parthia’ as it was then known).

Of course, I'm sceptical that there are often actually any (truly useful) lessons to be learnt from Rome but that doesn't mean one can't have some fun digging up comparisons from the ancient world.

She's Back! (Maybe)

I don't know. You go away for an internet-free weekend and everything seems more or less normal. You return and discover that there's much talk that Hillary Clinton could be the next US Secretary of State. Blimey! Andrew is, I think, depressed by this but concludes that shoving Hillary over to Foggy Bottom means she can't damage Obama without also, presumably, damaging her own chances of succeeding him. Perhaps! On the other hand, Mike Crowley says:

A stint at State, incidentally, would set Hillary up pretty nicely for 2016, if she's interested. (She'll be 69 years old on Election Day of that year.) No longer would people doubt the validity of her "experience."

I'm not sure this is entirely accurate. On the one hand, she'd have the "experience" card (presuming she didn't have to resign in disgrace) but Foggy Bottom hasn't sent anyone to the White House since James Buchanan (The other five Secretaries of State to have become President? Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, JQ Adams and van Buren.) Perhaps that's just a coincidence, but maybe it's not! 

There is also the problem that the Democratic party will face: it's tough for either party to win three presidential elections in a row. Its only happened once since Truman was President. That doesn't rule Hillary out, even aged 69, but it does suggest that her life will be more difficult. And by 2016 Hillary will have been in the public eye for more than a quarter of a century; too long for her to win, I think. Remember the Rauch Rule? LBJ is the only President since Teddy Roosevelt who took more than 14 years from their first significant election victory to become either President or Veep. And of course he needed Lee Harvey Oswald to get him the top job too.

Now maybe Rauch's Rule is a fluke too, but combine it with the State Department's status as a final destination, not a springboard to higher office and, well, the stars might not be so very well aligned for Hillary after all.

That still doesn't explain why Obama would consider giving her the top job in the cabinet. If she wants out of the Senate - and is there any indication this is so? - then a place on the Supreme Court would seem a safer, more logical (and, granted, more powerful) position. This is supposed to be Obama's Presidency: why give your most high-profile cabinet slot to someone whose mere presence cannot help but challenge and, potentially, undermine the central thrust of your administration: how is Hillary "Change we can believe in"? Well, she ain't. So I can't quite believe this will happen...

Also: what about Bill's relationships with dodgy oligarchs around the world? Much embarassment lies ahead there. 

Still, this is fun, isn't it? Obama hasn't even been sworn in and we're already moving on to speculate on the 2016 election (presuming, I guess, that he'll be pretty easily re-elected in 2012...) At this rate the betting markets will open for 2020 business by the end of the month...

The Hillbilly Vote

The day after the Presidential election Matt Yglesias spotted this map that shows the counties across the country which swung towards John McCain this year. As you can see, there aren't that many of them. But what's interesting is where they are:

Matt quipped that, "You can see why John McCain’s principled stand against higher taxes on the wealthy would have a special resonance in this region. Liberals who thought race had something to do with those appeals should be ashamed of themselves."  Andrew Sullivan agreed with Matt: "Ah, yes, Appalachia and Arkansas. Obviously concerned about marginal tax rates for those earning over $250,000 a year, I suppose."

Now, clearly, it would be absurd to pretend - and I do not so pretend - that race had nothing to do with this. But I think this map rather more interesting than that. For that matter, I think the nature of the Appalachian and "Highland" vote is more interesting than this map might initially suggest. 

What the map shows is that McCain did better than Bush in south-western West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, northern Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas. (One ought to remember that the map is also distorting: some of these counties had only five or six thousand voters, so the number of people required to turn the map red is not always large.) Still, as I say, doubtless some of this is attributable to racial prejudice, but it seems a stretch and, indeed, a simplification to suppose that this is the only factor at play. That is, one ought to be wary of presuming that race is the only reason a county might buck the national trend and swing towards Obama. 

Ignorance is, I think, a more likely explanation. I think it's worth observing that Obama didn't really campaign in any of these areas.(Marc Ambinder had a useful chart revealing where each campaign was spending their money). As George Packer observes, Obama did as well as John Kerry had in culturally conservative, pretty rural south-eastern Ohio and in parts of rural Pennsylvania. These placesaren't exactly the same as Tennessee and Kentucky of course, but nor are they vastly different. What I'd suggest, however, is that just as Obama was able to overcome a considerable degree of scepticism in Appalachian PA and OH so he might have been able to in KY and TN had he needed to campaign fiercely in those states.

Packer cites a pair of articles written by the New York Times'  Michael Sokolove who returned to his home town of Levittown, PA to take the political temperature in a key swing state. In the second he observed that:

Early on Election Day morning in the Philadelphia suburb of Levittown, Pa., Joe Sinitski, 48, stood in a long line inside a school gymnasium, inching his way toward three blue-curtained voting machines. He wore jeans, a sweatshirt and aNational Rifle Association baseball cap. He said he would vote for Barack Obama, a choice that some months earlier he could not have imagined.

“I have to admit, his race made my decision harder,” he said. “I was brought up that way. And I don’t like his name. I’ll admit to that, too.”

...A lot of people in Levittown needed the five months between the primary election and Tuesday to get used to a new idea. After Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, followed by a financial crisis that shook Americans to the core, they came to terms. If Mr. Obama’s race had been a factor, they eventually had to weigh it against other concerns. “For a long time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was black, if you know what I mean,” Mr. Sinitski, the heating and air-conditioning technician, told me. “I’m not proud of that, but I was raised to think that there aren’t good black people out there. I could see that he was highly intelligent, and that matters to me, but my instinct was still to go with the white guy.”

Now perhaps white voters in Appalachia would have remained immune to Obama's charms had he campaigned in Kentucky and Tennessee and so on, but I can't help but feel that at least some of them might have reconsidered their votes had they had been barraged, as voters in PA and OH were, by pro-Obama messages. (This isn't a criticism of the Obama campaign since, rightly, it needed to devote its energies to winnable states.) 

Arkansas is, as ever, a slightly different case. The swing to McCain there may also include a Hillary factor. Indeed, according to exit polls nearly 30% of Democrats who voted for Hillary in the Arkansas primary voted for McCain in the general election. Racism? Who knows? Sour grapes? Almost certainly.

Furthermore, it's worth considering the possibility that some conservative voters were more enamoured of John McCain than they were of George W Bush. By that I mean only that some voters may have found McCain's personal story more persuasive, or even inspiring, than they did Bush's. That is to say, some voters may have been especially impressed by McCain's military service (and that of his forefathers) and that those voters may have been located, to a dispropotionate extent, in the south.

Though the percentage of Americans who are veterans is, broadly speaking, fairly consistent across the states, the south is, according census data from 2000, the only part of America in which the number of veterans as a percentage of the overall population is increasing. More importantly, I would suggest, some research suggests that as many as 75% of folk living in rural areas are likely to know someone who has served in Iraq - a figure that, if accurate, is, I warrant, rather higher than would be the case in urban areas. Equally, the Center for Rural Stregies estimates that the death-rate amongst military personnel is almost twice as high for those from counties of fewer than 50,000 people than it is from the most populous counties across America.

That doesn't make small town and rural America any more "real" than big city America. All it suggests is that, given the nature of small towns, the impact of military casualties is more widely, and even keenly, felt in small towns than it is in big cities. The chances of either knowing or, for sure, knowing someone who knows the dead kid's family, are vastly greater. Two, or perhaps three, degrees of separation. In such circumstances I don't find it hard to imagine vters being swayed by McCain's military heroism even if, on the merits, some of those voters might find themselves more in line with Obama's policy positions. This is, of course, guesswork on my part and I may be entirely wrong. Nonetheless, the point is that communities that send a disproportionate number of their sons off to war ought not automatically to be considered racist if they buck the national trend and endorse the decorated war veteran. And that applies even if some of them are racist.

And that brings me to a second map. This one is taken from the most recent census and shows the concentration of folk who, when asked about their ethnicity, answered "American":

 

As you can see, there's a considerable overlap with the counties that defied the national swing and endorsed McCain more heavily than they had Bush. It's true that the "American-Americans" only represent about 7% of the total population, but clearly they're more numerous in WV, KY, TN and AL in particular (with significant pockets in SC, GA and elsewhere).  This is, as you'll recognise for sure, the heartland of the Scots and Scots-Irish immigration to the US. And all - or at least most - of that was a long time ago. Senator Jim Webb will tell you that these are the people who built America in its early days and that they've been overlooked ever since. That's bred, he would say, a distrust of government promises (indeed, rightly or not, a scepticism towards government full-stop) and in time, I would suggest, a grievance against those who would define themselves (or permit themselves to be defined) as hyphenated-Americans.

This is America, they may say, and we are Americans. No more, no less. We don't look back or east or south so why in hell's name should you? The attitude is, I think, that once you're a United States citizen you should drop you hyphen. That's to say, I think many of these voters would have been suspicious of JFK's catholicism or, had he ever run, Mario Cumo's Italianism. There can be, for sure, and perhaps always is a certain ugliness to this but I wonder if Barry O'Bama or Jose Obama might have had almost as tough a time in these districts as did Barack Hussein Obama. For sure - and perhaps all this undermines some of what I've written here - there's a degree of racial prejudice at work here, but I also wonder - and this, I admit is somewhat speculative - if there isn't also at least something of a backlash against the idea of identity and hyphenatated politics entirely. (Easier, of course, for white folk in rural areas to rail against all of that. I don't defend this attitude, I merely wonder about it's putative existence and how widespread it may be.)

Some of this is, I suspect, a feature of a certain white working-class sense of self-pity and victimhood. Perhaps that is an unjustified sense, but I suspect it exists and that rather than simply or only condemn it one might ask if everything is as simple as lines and squares and colours on a map might make on think. That's all.

And, yes, to reiterate, I do think there's a racial element at work. I just wonder if that's the only thing.

Choice is for me, not for thee

Gabriel Sherman's written a very entertaining piece on the furious competition between Washington's elite private schools to enroll the Obama daughters next term. Enjoyable as it is, you may find yourself wishing they could all lose. However, the piece reveals one of th egrubbier, more ghastly sides of the city.

Nonetheless, the issue of where the Obama girls go to school is interesting. Back in 1992 the Clintons toyed with the notion - perhaps even promising? - that Chelsea would attend a bog-standard public (ie, state) school. That didn't survive a recce of the DC public school system (though I suspect that the Secret Service had a say too) and I doubt many people really think the Obamas are going to put their kids into a public school. So Sidwell Friends (where Chelsea went) or Georgetwon Day seems most likely.

And that's fair enough. Here's the thing however: all year long Obama said that, with regard to healthcare, it was only fair that every American have access to the kind of privileged healthcare plan members of Congress have thoughtfully provided for themselves. Nothing wrong with that either. But sauce for healthcare is sauce for education: if everyone should be able to make the same choices as Congressmen and Senators in healthcare, why shouldn't ordinary voters have the same - or similar -  range of choices available to them as do the Wahsington elite when it comes to choosing what school they send their kids to?

I don't think Obama is being especially hypocritical in sending his own kids to the best school he can afford. I just wonder why he doesn't do more to help more families have some of the same choices he does?  What's the difference - apart from the teaching unions' contributions to Democratic politics - between healthcare and education? That is, what's the logic in supporting choice in healthcare but opposing it in education?