American decline has become basic to the debate about international relations. It is and will become a ubiquitous claim as the federal government moves toward the “fiscal cliff” soon after the 113th Congress is sworn in. Declinism is increasingly central to American self-perceptions and how scholars, here and abroad, study the Republic. Some expect, others hope for, decline. Let me suggest ten reasons why the United States, whether you favoured Obama or Romney on November 6, may have much further to run.

1. The United States is a nation. We know it was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people…

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Barack Obama ended his victory speech in Chicago last night with the words: “And together, with your help and God’s grace, we will continue our journey forward and remind the world why it is that we live in the greatest nation on earth". These words will ring hollow unless American politicians can work out how a Democratic President can negotiate lasting deals with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

In the short term, the opportunity for compromise is better on economic matters than it has been for years. At the end of this year, the George W Bush tax cuts will expire. Obama will not wish to see this happen, as they contain…

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Now that even Karl Rove has accepted the result, some early thoughts are in order. The numbers will be picked over in the next weeks, but exit polls paint a clear picture. And the long-term news for Republicans is bad. They look to be miles from building a majority coalition in the new America.

Some sobering points for Republicans: Among Hispanics, Obama had a 40 point margin. Among women, the margin was 12 points: what happened to those Gallup polls a few weeks ago which showed the gender gap had virtually disappeared? Among young voters, Obama got 60% of those aged 18-24.

Romney won senior citizens…

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Barack Obama has now won, apparently losing only conservative Indiana and North Carolina from his 2008 list of states (Virginia and Florida not called yet, but Obama is up and it’s his friendly precincts left to be counted).

Meanwhile Senate Democrats, with the help of two rape-ambivalent Tea Party candidates will see a gain of 0-2 seats (depending on the western states of North Dakota, Montana, and Nevada) rather than the loss of majority widely predicted for them.

Strangely, the House of Representatives looks like it will be virtually unchanged. The only real changes so far have been through redistricting…

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Moments after its polls closed, networks called Michigan for President Obama. That’s important for two reasons.

First, it shows that in the auto-industry states of the Rust Belt, Obama has closed the deal. Michigan may be more Democratic than the all-important swing state of Ohio, but it’s a good sign for Obama that the race there wasn’t close. The auto bailout may have saved not just the industry but the president’s re-election chances.

Second, it indicates that political journalists fell for some sleight-of-hand from the Romney campaign. A few feints from Romney toward the state and suddenly everyone was talking about how Michigan…

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It is really upon us. Polls have closed in the first states, Indiana and Kentucky. Those are conservative states, Romney wins. Tiny liberal Vermont is already being projected for Obama. No surprises.

The real news is that Indiana Senate Republican nominee Richard Mourdock is far underperforming Romney in key Republican counties, while the minor Libertarian party candidate is posting unusually strong numbers. The Tea Party candidate, who knocked off the most senior Republican and possibly the Senate’s top foreign policy expert in the primary, is apparently a goner because of his rape pregnancies are a “gift from God” comment.

Democratic…

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American politics is nothing if not quirky. We let corn growers and maple-syrup farmers set the course for the presidential primaries. Our federal elections are a byzantine maze of local and state voting rules, with results filtered through an electoral college before a victor can be declared. And every four years, a tiny town in New Hampshire opens its polls at midnight and closes them a few minutes later.

It doesn’t take long to tally the votes. There are, after all, only ten residents of Dixville Notch, NH, participating in this year’s election. The media dutifully cover the results…

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One of the intriguing questions in this race is if the Democrats can hold onto the Senate. At the outset of the campaign, this looked a long shot. Of the 33 seats up for election this time, 23 are held by Democrats. Many looked vulnerable. Republicans need only four pick ups to get a majority, or three if Romney were to win the Presidency, and a GOP vice-President would have the casting vote.

But it hasn’t played out that way – the Democrats might actually pick up seats. A few key races to watch:

Massachusetts. Democrats are desperate to win back Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat, won by Republican…

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I began this campaign tipping Rick Perry – so the following should be treated with a large pinch of salt. I just have an inkling, a very politically unscientific sense, that Romney is not out of this one. Okay, he’s behind in at least 8 of the 11 swing states (and he’ll probably need at least six of them – i.e. about twice what polls suggest he has now). His path to 270 electoral college (EC) votes is much harder than Obama’s. Bookies give the incumbent an over 80 per cent chance of re-election. And yet …

If Romney does win (either popular to EC vote or both) this will be why:

1. The economy. No president since FDR in 1936 has got back…

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The 2016 presidential race has already begun, as evidenced by politicians such as the mayor of Los Angeles dropping by to visit the luncheon of the Iowa contingent at the Democratic National Convention. (Iowa is the state with the first votes for president in the primary calendar.)

Anyone seriously interested in running four years from now is already considering how to build the organization and fortune necessary to do so. Remember, each side spent $1 billion trying to win this year.

We don’t know what will happen in the US or internationally over the next four years, and another economic…

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I do not want to drive down readership, and the polls could always be wrong, but you can put a fork in the presidential race: it’s done.

Romney surrogates are already publicly making excuses for losing (Hurricane Sandy, the difficulty of unseating an incumbent) of the kind that a competitive campaign would never allow itself to do. Telling supporters that you are going to lose depresses turnout, as Democrats discovered when President Carter gave an early evening concession speech in 1980 that was blamed for costing the party additional House seats in the Pacific time zone.

Meanwhile, Democrats are touting a YouTube video…

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I recommend David Malet’s excellent breakdown of what to expect on Tuesday (either side of noon on Wednesday, Australian time). I agree that it looks like Obama. He has more routes to the 270 electoral college votes than does Romney. “Mittmentum” slowed after the presidential debates. His performance in the first one remade the Governor’s campaign but did not decisively shift the maths in his direction. President Obama has an 83 per cent chance of winning, Romney only 16. These numbers have never been less than 60:40. Those holding a candle for a Romney have a very small, flickering flame.

On…

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We all know the polls are even, but here are three reasons to bet on Obama.

1. Just like Bush in 2004

RealClear politics has been running some interesting polls comparing Obama in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2004. The percentage of those polled who approve of Obama’s performance as President is 49.9%. Not great? Maybe good enough. Bush was on 49.5 at this point in 2004. He got 286 votes in the electoral college.

The right direction/wrong direction poll is just as similar. No less than 55% of Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction. Again, not great for Obama. But guess what Bush had in 2004. Exactly 55…

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Yes, I am going to tell who is going to win and by how much. But first, in honour of both the devastating weather and crushing polling uncertainty that America has been suffering, I am going to announce that my forecast for the remaining days of the campaign is a 100% chance of “Purple Haze”.

I don’t mean the Hendrix song or any type of cannabis associated with it, but that:

1. Hurricane Sandy has clouded the picture both literally and politically (although not as much you might think);

2. The aggregate of public polling paints a very hazy picture of a tight race – but that is only when you do not take into account that progressive…

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Since Katrina in 2005, hurricanes have become political events in America. This has occurred in part because Katrina proved so damaging to the Republican Party, and in part because the storms keep making landfall during the parties’ national conventions. In the wake of the storm surge, each side rushes forward to seize control of the narrative: who’s at fault for whatever failures pundits perceive.

Normally the politicisation waits until the clouds clear, but Hurricane Sandy is sweeping toward the East Coast at a particularly political time. Eight days until the election, partisans are attempting to score…

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It’s nine days before Election Day in the U.S., and here in Florida, the polls already boast long lines. This weekend over half-a-million Floridians will cast their ballots, some queuing up for nearly five hours in order to vote.

Today (a Sunday) lines will be even longer as the state’s black churches launch their “Souls to the Polls” drive. The Sunday before Election Day historically sees high turnout for black voters. Local churches arrange car pools to neighbourhood polling venues following Sunday services. Typically next Sunday would be an even more important date, but the Republican legislature here has cancelled voting on…

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I find Joe Biden very annoying. He induces groans from me for his overconfidence in his own ability and knowledge and overexcited speeches personified by his Democratic Party Convention performance in 2012.

However, of all of the political moments of 2012 his Vice Presidential debate performance was just the ticket for American politics.

The media frames the Presidential and VP debates as competing sets of ideas, with the general assumption that the ideas from both sides connect to reality (more or less), and that some of these ideas will work out in practice. This is a flawed approach in 2012 as…

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With Mitt Romney’s (inaccurate) assertion that he requested “binders full of women” to find female appointees to state offices when he was the incoming governor of Massachusetts, so-called “women’s issues” have once again taken center stage in the American elections.

Earlier this summer, one Republican nominee for Senate caused his party headaches just before their national convention by asserting that abortion services were unnecessary for rape victims because, in the event of a “legitimate rape…the female body has ways to shut that things down". Liberal bloggers have declared the existence of a “War on Women…

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Halfway through the debates this election season, it is clear that it pays to be aggressive in 2012. Forceful, even domineering, performances by Governor Romney and Vice President Biden in their respective showcases earned them more plaudits than the substance of their proposals (although the listless turn by President Obama was the defining counterpoint).

But it has not always been this way. Just ask Al Gore, who was branded as rude for interjecting and sighing when George W. Bush introduced questionable points in the first debate in 2000, or Bob Dole, who was deemed a “hatchet man” for suggesting that Democratic…

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With Mitt Romney rebounding in the polls after his performance in the first presidential debate, there’s clearly a sense of optimism in the Republican camp.

But a recent study by the Pew Forum suggests how much hard work Romney still has to do.

The Forum’s “Trends in American Values” series has been polling Americans on a range of questions since 1987. The 2012 report has some mixed news for Republicans.

First, the good news. 36% of Americans describe themselves as politically conservative, a lot more than the 21% who call themselves liberals. These results haven’t shifted much since the last survey.

But this conservative…

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With all eyes on the ever-tightening presidential race, state and local races have begun to fade into the background. But a handful of congressional contests will determine the fate of an important faction within one party: the Blue Dog Democrats.

The Blue Dogs are the conservative coalition within the Democratic Party. (There is no real corollary for Republicans, who have a nearly-decimated moderate wing but no liberal wing to speak of.) Providing a bridge between the two parties, they have traditionally played a key role in brokering bipartisan deals. But the days of bipartisanship are…

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There are some important topics that are likely to be ignored in the series of three presidential debates this month, but that do deserve attention:

American drone attacks: “Democrats spent several days at their convention two weeks ago wildly cheering and chanting whenever President Obama’s use of violence and force was heralded. They’re celebrating a leader who is terrorizing several parts of the Muslim world, repeatedly killing children, targeting rescuers and mourners, and entrenching the authority to exert the most extreme powers in full secrecy and without any accountability – all while…

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Romney won the first presidential debate (on a 12-round boxing score card I scored it 115 to 105). He did so, in part, because he was so good, in part, because Obama was so poor. Most incumbents perform poorly in the first debate – see Reagan in 1984 (and he then won in a landslide – so Obama can clearly make up the ground he seemed so willing to cede in Denver).

How do we account for the surprising distance between both men on Wednesday evening?

1. Match fitness. Romney has been debating some very able opponents for the last 18 months; Obama has not. Romney dispatched Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry…

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Mitt Romney has a percentage problem. And it’s not the 47%.

Well, it’s not only the 47%. Responding to those now-infamous fundraiser comments, Romney trotted out another percent that reveals much more about his worldview, and his campaign problems: 50.1%.

“I want to get 50.1% or more,” he told a Fox News interviewer the day after the tape was released.

It’s a number he’s used before. When defending his alliance with Donald Trump, whose obsession with President Obama’s birth certificate shows little…

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Arizona sits in the southwestern corner of the United States. It is a desert region interspersed with mountain pine forests and impressive geological features such as, well, you know. Other than outlying Alaska and Hawaii, which didn’t become states until around 1960, Arizona was the very last territory in America to attain statehood, joining the Union just 100 years ago. Despite its relative youth, the Grand Canyon State has already produced two presidential nominees, Republicans Barry Goldwater (1964) and John McCain (2008).

But it is what Arizona has not thus far produced that makes…

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Analysis during campaign season centres on two things: what candidates say and how they’re performing in polls. We pay far less attention to the nuts-and-bolts of local organising. Yet the ground game matters, as we saw in this year’s Republican primaries. Though anti-Romney sentiment ran high, none of the anybody-but-Romney candidates could pull together a ground game to compete with his. Short of funds and unable to qualify for the ballot in key states, Romney’s competitors floundered through the primaries until it became clear only Romney could piece together enough delegates to secure the nomination.

In many ways, Romney has taken on their…

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The 2008 presidential election was freighted with a sense of history. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton faced off to be the first: the first black candidate or the first woman candidate to top a national ticket. The Republican side lacked that momentousness but would also have made history. John McCain, at 72, would have been the oldest person to assume the presidency, while Sarah Palin would have been the first woman to hold the vice-presidency.

2012 can’t compete with the last election’s epic scale. But the candidates are making history in their own ways, and in the process providing key insights to…

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There are many ways to follow these elections, but none more fun than reading Guy Rundle’s gonzo dispatches.

I have been fascinated by the attacks on Romney’s time as CEO of Bain Capital. Successful entrepreneurs are usually praised in America, no matter how they made their money, so these Republican and Democrat attack ads on Romney’s record at Bain are interesting.

This pro-Obama Super PAC is pretty questionable…

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Recently I watched a HBO movie called Game Change. It tells the story of the decision by the McCain campaign in 2008 to nominate Sarah Palin as vice president. A decision taken on the fly, with almost no vetting, and the predictable result: train wreck.

This made me think about the current Republican vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan.

Now, Ryan is a much more seasoned politician than Palin. Unlike her, he has the intellectual respect of his party. And he doesn’t come from Alaska.

But for all that, the choice of Ryan may come back to haunt the Romney campaign.

Here’s the problem. Ryan was…

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Last month, it seemed that justice would never be served for the acts of torture allegedly committed during the George W. Bush presidency. Despite Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to “immediately review” any suspected acts of terror, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closure of the only two cases under investigation without charges being laid.

However, with fresh claims of torture emerging, the debate regarding prosecutions for the perpetrators has reignited. In the video below, MSNBC political commentator Rachel Maddow discusses how new torture claims during the Bush…

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The recent murders of US diplomats in Libya – seemingly by Islamists liberated by them from Muammar Gaddafi last year – and protests in locations across the Middle East and North Africa and now Sydney, Australia, has invited speculation that foreign policy might now intrude into the presidential campaign. This is unlikely. Whilst both Obama and Romney have tried to use their respective responses to the attacks to show leadership (the incumbent coming out marginally ahead on this score), their actual foreign policies are remarkably similar. Since 9/11, national…

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“Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first, aim later.”

So declared President Obama in an interview this afternoon. And that’s the consensus developing not only in the media but among foreign policy experts in both parties.

Romney’s response to the embassy attacks in Egypt and Libya dominated political coverage in the U.S. today. The Republican nominee released the following late last night as events in North Africa were still unfolding:

“I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of…

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It is currently the 11th of September in America. As in 2001, it is a Tuesday. It coincidentally marks the start of a new round of a project related to terrorism response that I’m working on, and it occurred to me that I have not otherwise been hearing much political discourse about 9/11. I was sure that if I noticed this, a lot of other people would have too. But I did a quick check and, with the exception of a couple of pieces from the Associated Press by Julie Pace and Jennifer Peltz, and a Washington Post column by Dana Milbank, I found little remark about the anniversary of…

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Mitt Rommey has found a new point of attack on the Democrats. It’s not jobs, but God.

In his last few stump speeches, Romney has hammered home a simple message. God will be welcome in his White House. In Ohio on Monday, Romney pledged that, as President, “I will not take God out of my heart, I will not take God out of the public square and I will not take it out of the platform of my party.”

He has followed this up with further promises to not take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance (“One Nation under God”), or off the nation’s coins (“In God we Trust”).

<movie src=‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd6Y8oy0jAM…

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Having just moved to Australia from the U.S., I find myself in an unfamiliar position for the election season. For most of the past twenty years I was involved to one degree or another in Federal or local campaigns as a participant, but I now find myself watching the game from the bleachers.

My direct work in politics began in 1994, when I was vice president of the Boston University chapter of Students for Kennedy in the heavily Republican year in which the senior senator from Massachusetts spent most of the election behind Mitt Romney in the polls before a late surge. While I did get to hang out with a couple of Kennedys at campaign parties, most…

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For Team Obama, change is in the air.

Not the hope-and-change fever of 2008. That, it’s safe to say, won’t be returning any time soon. But after a year in which Democrats could best be described as “grimly determined”, in recent days that grimness has given way to gaiety. Overflowing rallies, big-name surrogates, impromptu bear hugs – Barack Obama’s back, and so is his base.

Numbers help tell the story: though it’s still early, both Gallup and Rasmussen polling firms report a more sizable convention bounce for President Obama than for his competitor Mitt Romney.

But more importantly, the atmospherics are beginning to shift. Following…

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Now that the conventions are done, we can confidently draw a few conclusions about the race. One, we won’t be seeing much more of Clint Eastwood. Two, we’ll be seeing a lot more of Bill Clinton, who showed that he’s by far the best politician in America. His speech to the Democratic Convention was detailed without being boring and combative without being aggressive. He also gave Obama the best line that he has. Americans, please understand that the economic mess we inherited was so large that it’s going to take us eight years, not four, to clean it up.

What also seems clear is that this is not a race between Obama and…

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In an interview on ABC News24 following President Obama’s acceptance speech, I argued that neither he nor Romney got any sort of lift (or ‘bounce’) from their respective conventions. This was confirmed in initial polling; they remain in a dead heat (at about 47% each). All the hoopla made little impact. Both men were received with appropriate adulation from the hall – though Democratic fervor is surely as odd a phenomenon as Republican. (Some very strange people attend and enjoy conventions. Can’t the world be improved more immediately by spending time visiting the lonely old, the neglected young, a few…

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There are ten weeks until Americans vote for the next president. Polling averages suggest a very narrow victory for the incumbent, Barack Obama, but predictions fall within the margin of error. Most presidents are re-elected; this one may not be. Herewith, some thoughts on how and why Obama might win and lose and reasons to be optimistic either way.

Reasons Obama might win

1. He’s more FDR than Jimmy Carter. Franklin Roosevelt, the man every Democrat president seeks to emulate and rearticulate, created no serious opponent or coalition of opponents during his twelve years in office (1933-45). He was hated, certainly…

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Nine weeks out, we’re in the home stretch of a presidential election that has been going on for well over a year. (At this point in 2011, the Republicans had already held three of their twenty debates.) But with Barack Obama’s official nomination on Wednesday, the general election kicks off and the campaign heats up. The rallies will be bigger, the ads starker, the punches harder.

I’ll be following the action from the heart of it all: Florida. A key swing state, Florida sees it all. The candidates stump from town to town while their ads flood the airwaves. Last week the Republicans held their national convention in Tampa…

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