Martti Ahtisaari - respected but would he take the job?

But would Blair be good for Europe? If you want someone strong who will unite the gerrymandering and squabbling bloc of 27 nations he does not seem the obvious choice. His unwavering support for the Iraq war and strong trans-Atlantic ties bitters his appeal in many European capitals and amongst their citizens.

The ideal candidate, in my view, would be former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari. Last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner – won for his role in brokering international peace – is notorious on the international stage albeit with less bling than Blair, he would stop traffic as well, but does not carry any baggage like Britain’s charismatic statesman.

Ahtisaari was a pinnacle broker for peace during the Balkans wars and the dissolve of Yugoslavia, something that severely divided the EU. Ahtisaari helped persuade then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept Nato’s terms for ending the war in Kosovo and subsequently resolved Kosovo’s independence last year as the UN representative. Beyond Europe, he played broker to the peace accord between the Indonesian government and the Aceh rebels in 2005.

He ticks the box for international notoriety, he meets German and other nations desires of having a candidate from a “small” country and he sends a very European message to Beijing and DC: that Europeans are for peace and dialogue. A Nobel peace prize winner as President who has helped the region to peace opposite Hu Jintao and his regime’s poor human rights instead of greeting Blair – someone who divided many Europeans, arguably eroded British civil liberties and undermined the English notion of Habeas Corpus and has achieved nothing of note as Middle East envoy.

The choice unfortunately is not ours nor our European cousins and friends. That is the saddest part: for all the moans of a democratic deficit in Europe, we the people can still not have say over who is our President and Foreign Affairs representative.

Oh dear, I seem to have been unduly influenced by the BNP after their BBC platform and have descended into their derogatory style of language and using it against others to whom I disagree. How could the bastion of British journalism have been so prattish and not realised that we would be taken in so easily? Good lord if only that were true.

By the end of Question Time I was laughing, I’m afraid to say. Laughing at how nearly a million people could have voted for them earlier this year. What is no joke though, and what is satisfying about last night’s show is how reason won.

Anybody other than a diehard BNP supporter or outright bigot cannot have watched that debate without thinking: Griffen’s points just don’t add up. He had no answer for the fact that everybody every manifestation of what you could possibly claim as being “English” descends originally from Africa. He made no mention of what the Romans did Britain (though as I mentioned last week, his party’s website praises the Norse, Angles and Saxon people who came to these shores – all after the Romans). He had no answer to any of these fantastically delivered points from a composed Bonnie Greer, who only seemed rattled only when he talked of sharing a platform with a non-violent member of the KKK – non-violent in what way is what I would like to know.

The only pratt in all this is Peter Hain who’s outcry over their participation created more publicity for the BNP before they were faced down by the mainstream of society. Until Thursday the British public had never seen, on such a platform, someone squirm their way out of holocaust denying. I changed my minds with recent facts Griffen said. Auschwitz, as Jack Straw stated, is obviously no recent fact.

From a political point of view, Griffen missed out on his one opportunity to embarrass the mainstream and push his “not so far right as you would think” discourse to win-round those disaffected voters. When Dimbleby asked Straw and Warsi if their parties’ immigration policies had boosted the BNP the talk came to quotas. This was the opportunity. If he was smart and quick witted enough, he could have deflected some of the Nazi comments on to the mainstream. He could have argued that state selection of people based on the positive social merits and characteristics devised by politicians is a form of Nazism as it is an artificial version of social-Darwinism. The BNP would not discriminate against migrants per se because there simply would not be any. But who I am kidding, he never would have thought of that and it would be defeated with the BNP’s repatriation policy.

This was the one area Griffen was really let off the hook. The audience member who asked where will you send me back to? To which his response was: you are welcome to stay here, goes against the entire foundation of his party: keeping Britain for the indigenous population with a high implication that those indigenous people are white.
What was a shame is that more of the audience’s questions were not asked. The one about trade with Europe was a good one and Dimbleby never came back to it.

How could Hain have seriously thought that the BNP would get an opportunity to air their views and encourage support? The irony is his moonlighting of the late night and twenty-four hour airwaves created a bigger hoo-ha than their appearance deserved. Instead of quelling the BNP he enticed undue interest and exposure before Question Time, in effect, gave them the rope to hang themselves as natural debate and discussion won the day. The BNP have been exposed as being unfit even as a protest party on a wide public national platform. I bet their number of votes will be down next year.

Thank god the bods at the BBC decided to invite Nick Griffen, the BNP leader on their iconic political panel show. Not least because dwindling audiences of news focused shows will tune out of the ITVs, E4s and Sky Travel to see if he has the X Factor up against the mainstream parties. The chance for him would be a fine thing, though it is preposterous to think he will do well. The coverage is likely to be disastrous for his party and here’s why.

Last night I had several pints with a friend at the pub where the Obama’s famously had their fish n’ chips in Mayfair earlier this year. My friend lamented the fact that a colleague at his work, a notorious British company (run, owned and headed incidentally by foreigners) was an ardent BNP supporter. He could not believe the rhetorically rubbish on their site. Looking at it with slightly more sober eyes today it’s still no better.

Beyond the obvious racist politics and talk of repatriating anyone of non-Anglo-Saxon, Celtic decent – presumably around 55 million of us must have to bug off from blighty as it must be impossible to tell who has and has not been tarnished by Normanic blood from 1066 onwards – none of what they say adds up.

After they get rid of all the mudbloods of Britain they then – this from their policies page on their website – want to purge Britain of foreign produce. Everything that can be produced and manufactured here will be, they declare, and they will boycott foreign goods – no more Samsung TVs, Armani suits, Bavarian beers for us – or rather who is left here. But two paragraphs above on their policy page they talk about trading and cooperating with Europe. What exactly can we import then? – The skills perhaps that we have banished from our land – sorry their land (my blood is far too murky I’d be the first on the boat). They call for Pensioners before asylum seekers, but presumably the latter wouldn’t be allowed here in the first place.

The fact is there is no true national in their political name, for they will never be able to get enough seats in Westminster to have any influence. They are never going to be able to defend these poorly thought out policies, certainly not with a London audience, and that’s if they get beyond defending their mission statement, which I just do not get. It talks paradoxically positively about European migration to begin with and then goes on to focus that Britain has benefited from the migrations of Europe “of the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Norse and closely related kindred peoples have been, over the past few thousands years, instrumental in defining the character of our family of nations.”

Well what about the Norman issue? How the hell do we track down those of Normanic descent, and where are the countless millions with small f French blood in their veins meant to go? The Camp Jungle recently purged of Somalis, Afghans and Iraqi would-be asylum seekers here by our friends the French authorities or some nice village in Brittany or Provence where around a million middle Englanders have already buggered off to.

If you are one who has dreamed of a place in your ancestral sun, why not vote for the BNP and tell them you originate from the coast line of Croatia and then apply for their “generous financial incentives” to be repatriated there. I don’t think we have much to worry about their TV appearance, it will show them up to be what they really are: ludicrous.

It could be seen as a ringing endorsement as well as a slip of the tongue. At last week’s Tory conference Nick Robinson the BBC’s bespeckled Political Editor accidentally referred to David Cameron as Prime Minister. ITN’s opposite number called George Osborne the Chancellor. A Freudian slip perhaps but it mimics the prevailing vi ew that the Conservatives are set to return to power after leading Labour in the polls for nearly two years for most of it with a double digit lead.

The sun shined on Brighton even if the paper clouded the mood. But it didn’t have to. The mood was bleak enough looking at the tired, irksome faces of the cabinet members who turned up at the Progress event on the Sunday – not to mention the spartan audience of party rank and file. Mandelson talked of the energy of the young guns like Miliband and Byrne and his renewal of his gym membership to keep up with them. What would be better is to run the party now as though it is the opposition and force Prime Minister Cameron to come clean on exactly what he would and not just espouse policy idea after idea.

Government is tiresome, opposition is fresh. Brown looks beat; Cameron has been flying in the ascendancy. If Cameron believes the government has now taken quantitative easing too far, the opposition-government should turn and ask what is the new conservative government going to do instead and what their forecasts are under their plans. The push has to be to reveal their hand.

Of course Cameron and friends will be aware of this game. In 1992, Cameron was part of the Conservative Research Department team led by Andrew Lansley, now (Shadow) Health Secretary, who managed to overturn then Labour’s twenty point lead and win the election by acting as though the Conservatives where on the opposite benches. They pushed the publics trust in Labour forcing Shadow Chancellor John Smith to release a pre-election budget and then tore it apart. William Hague as leader made the mistake in 2001 in releasing too many details to his policies which were picked apart by Blair’s team.

The simple line of “we do not know what they will do”, “the devil is the Conservative lack of detail” could resonate with a public still, according to some polling, yet to fully make up their mind to put their cross in the Conservative box at some point between now and June.

Last night ahead of Susan Boyle’s address to the American nation, President Obama spelt out the need for health care reform highlighting that the US “spends more healthcare than any other nation but we are not any healthier for it”.

Whilst the US budget deficit deepens in recession, speaking at his White House news conference, Obama said his health measures will reduce the deficit and that he will not sign a health bill placed on his desk that deepens it. This though is not the crucible of the health problem in America. Instead it is this paradox: that the nation which develops more drugs and new ways of treating people than any other, has forty-seven million of its own citizens with no access to healthcare. A social deficit as deep as any financial one, but one that has lasted longer than any depression. Sixty years ago President Truman called vigorously for state supported health care, sixteen years ago the secretary of state was a central part of the failed attempt then.

Obama follows in the footsteps of failure but last night he put himself at the heart of the debate using his personal popularity to bring change to American healthcare, whilst stating personally he doesn’t need healthcare reform and neither do the members of Congress, but the masses of America do. But, instead of focusing on the benefits of getting access for 97% of Americans he focused primarily on the economic merits and how healthcare reform would shave off $2.2trn dollars from a projected deficit of $9trn. In other words support healthcare reform and it will save the US money.

How he envisages money will be saved is by cutting down on waste. He makes an excellent point that when a patient is being treated for problem if they are sent to a different consultant or hospital they redo all the diagnostic tests, duplicating them, with the multiple bills falling on the insurance companies tab and pushing up future premiums for the patients themselves. The government will save money according to Obama because the state already subsidises health policies through tax breaks. Controlling the costs of healthcare is controlling the deficit he reiterates.

On the one hand this seems like a clever focus as opposition from within his own party is due to projections of the trillion-dollar price tag and concerns about the tax burden. But he barely focused on the social need to cover more Americans only giving examples of the Coloradan woman who had to use her life savings because the cover she had would not protect her for her pre-existing conditions. This is the reality of why reform is so important.

This focus on money could backfire especially if the light is shone on what Americans must give up to reduce the costs. Answering this Obama used the analogy of a red pill and blue pill which do the same thing but the blue pill is cheaper why not take that? The problem for many middle Americans is that is, to pardon the pun, a bitter pill to swallow.

If you kid has a chronic condition and they are on the red pill, have been on for a while and their symptoms are under control are you going to put your child on a new medication for the sake of your premium and this new healthcare. Obama also highlights that those who are happy with their current policies need not change them, but how will this usher in the savings which he projects.

American healthcare does have waste and his ideas on cutting down numerous diagnostic tests and that Americans will have to “give up paying for things that don’t make them healthier” is a good idea. But really he should talk of the benefits of having a society where people do not worry as much about getting ill as they do in Europe. Healthcare costs, having a state-sponsored system costs, as the population ages the costs are likely to only get higher. But the social benefit of having more citizens healthy and a healthy workforce is surely worth it.

Crammed into the lobby yesterday, with the throng of people who had come to see a moment in history that occurs only every three hundred and fourteen years: the resignation of the Speaker. As soon as we managed to get into the public gallery and sat down the fireworks went off but within thirty-five seconds the moment had fizzled out. For there had been no cheering, no great statement, no statesman-like speech only a short brief and to the point address and for less than a minute Michael Martin had briefly restored some order.

The mood in the Commons defused. When he had finished the tension left along with most of the MPs who began to file out as foreign affairs questions began. The PM as he left went over and shook Michael Martin’s hand as he left through the members exit. He was followed by many labour backbenchers the likes of Martin Salter, Dianne Abbott and Stephen Pound speaking to him briefly and exchanging pats on the back and hand shakes.

With his announcement it was back to business in the Commons. With all the understandable furore of MPs expenses over the past fortnight it was gratifying to see some proper debate and discussion. Denis MacShane former European Mission talked of his recent visit to Georgia informing the house that he had seen Russian flags of Russian outposts inside Georgia not far from Gori well within Georgia’s sovereignty. The government reiterated its support for Georgia’s sovereignty as Sir Nicholas Winterton on the Tory benches who asked whether the government would work to improve relations with Russia and be careful not to back one side after the Caucasus was put on the map of international problems during last summer’s war. Refreshing to hear this view from the Tory benches especially after Sir Nick was one of the numerous backbenchers heckling and shaking their heads vehemently against the Lisbon treaty. The Tories are still ardently calling for a referendum, Cameron’s PPS Desmond Swayne yesterday called on the government to have one especially as it was in both main parties manifestos to have one over the Constitution. Caroline Flint reiterated as she has said before that the Lisbon Treaty is different and told the house of Commons that the cost of a referendum would be the same as the general election costing in the region of seventy to eighty million pounds.

Gaza Protesters

Just when you think all maybe quiet on the White City front, splashed across the print media is a flurry of critique of the beeb from the Mail to the Times. 

The BBC carries on into this year like a series of one of its hit tragic comedies and Television Centre risks becoming a Fawlty Tower in its own right.  You find yourself cringing as they painfully make a greater mess of what is a simple situation.  Like Basil Fawlty dealing with his german guests, if the BBC were more careful, tactful with their response this would not have got so out of hand.

This television appeal, which is still being edited today for tonight’s broadcast on ITV, C4 and Five, is partial: it is aimed at helping one-side of a war.  You may agree with me that Israel’s actions were absolutely abhorrent and you may like me be about to make a donation to the Red Cross to help the families of Gaza rebuild their shattered lives.  But why should an international news network, famed around the world for its impartiality take a public line and advertise an appeal for one side in an armed conflict?  Were we not aware of the suffering after weeks of coverage?  We are certainly aware of the DEC campaign now, more so than we would have been had the BBC agreed to air it.  In fact, paradoxically the BBC may have done the campaign a favour through this extra publicity and furore which may come at the expense of disgruntled viewers tuning elsewhere for a time.

This whole situation has been born out of the fervent anti-BBC movement amongst elements of the media and politicians who have been brandishing their teeth and led by the antithesis of impartiality The Daily Mail.  Why has Sky News not been criticised, they have not (at the time of writing 5am gmt) not even made up their minds on whether to show the footage or not.  Are they then not heartless for not even deciding on what 11,000 people, 50 MPs, and Britain’s religious leaders see as essential viewing and sitting on the fence? Have they no conscience no standards?  At least the BBC said no.  Why hasn’t CNN been asked to air this campaign, it broadcasts  in Britain and internationally.  Could it not use its airwaves to raise relief for Gazans?  What about Al Jazeera:  the voice of the voiceless, should they not be vocal for this appeal?

The answer as mean spirited as it may sound is no.  All these outlets are there to inform, not to push people so directly in coming down on oneside and by opening up their wallets at the end of news bulletin.  In the last week, the international media has been very good at showing the shear devastation after watching from the sidelines of the Gaza border since 27^th December (with the exception of Al Jazeera who were the only news network in Gaza during the Israeli onslaught). We as the viewer must then take that information and decide whether we let the news roll on to Eastenders or Fawlty Towers re-runs.  We must not have the news followed by an advert which compels to feel one way or another.  Aid agencies already indirectly advertise themselves in war zones by appearing on news programmes talking about the Congo, Darfur or Gaza and give their causes publicity and air time without the need of free airspace and a slanted ad.

 That is the argument the BBC should be making and doing so as candidly as some of their reports from Gaza.  So when a BBC spokesperson is pressed on a radio debate about whether or not there is a “humanitarian crisis” and they try and squirm – like an interviewee on the Today Show – their way out of referring it as one, so as not to weaken their position further in the hostile public environment the beeb now has in the publics eyes.  They should instead stand firm and say: “there is a humanitarian crisis, and we have been reporting on it day in an day out, it is up to the viewers to decide how they react to our impartial reporting on the ground”.  That should be that and the BBC should not be expected spoon feed morals to the public.  If Douglas Alexander and the Archbishop of Canterbury want people to donate money to Gaza they can come and explain why on air or have a whip round the pulpits of Westminster, but not by way of an ad on our news programmes.

In the wee hours of the morning the debate in Nashville in the last ten minutes has become like the university lecture you loathe.  You look at the clock and know that within 30 minutes you’ll be back in bed and may watch daytime TV.

This debate has certainly been more lively than the one 11 days ago but most telling with four weeks until the yanks go to the polls and McCain who is trailing in two polls out on Tuesday by 8 points looked un-presidential.  He did not invoke the confidence he said we need in the economy and looked inexperienced and out of his depth on the issue that has dominated the headlines and this debate.

He tried “my friends” – consistently using that term to the audience – to show he was the more experienced of the two, referring to when he says he tried to tackle Freddie and Fannie – the two public/private or rather after the US government intervened public-owned mortgage lenders – and end the culture of greed two years ago.  If only  the BBC’s Question Time presenter David Dimbleby had been there: I could picture him looking up from his glasses and asking is that why you don’t know how many houses you have.  Needless to say he would have been rolling in his sheets over the way the debate was chaired:  in short it wasn’t.  Stick to a minute on discussion topics the anchor said.  Did they adhere to timings, what do you reckon?  Did he interrupt and intervene – no.

He may have been put off perhaps by McCain’s body language.  Bill Clinton said the best way to judge the candidates is to turn off the sound and watch there body language.  I needed the sound to stay awake but you didn’t need to mute the sound to see the unease of McCain.  It started badly.  The economy was his undoing his first answer on dealing with the global financial crisis was to talk about the need for energy dependency and security.  The last time I checked my economics book that’s not how you deal with a capital shortage in banks.  Nor did see anything about Hank Paulson or Alistair Darling or any other finance minister this side of the pound dealing with energy firms this week rather banks.  Oil has come down from $140 in August to around $90 per barrel at present.

Worst was that he could not answer a straight question.  Asked which order would he prioritise health, energy and entitlement benefits, he couldn’t.  He needed the list read out a second time and his answer would have been the same even if he hadn’t heard the list: they are all equally important, why can’t we sort them all out at the same time?  Obama put energy first, followed by health and then entitlement and explained simply why.

As time passed on McCain increasingly pace-maked around the stage, shuffling around on the floor and often that was just when Obama was talking.  When it was McCain’s turn to talk he sat on the chair looked at his opponent and listened with his legs slightly crossed.

The astonishing thing is watching these two men now Obama looks the older and wiser of the two.  Comfortable in himself and his role.  McCain looks edgy like a man trying to regain the initiative but has no answer, or rather often daring not to give answer for the risk of losing his ailing support.

In fairness McCain had some answers for the economic malaise.  He wants the government to buy bad mortgage debt to stabilise house prices.  “Will it be expensive,” he asked; “yes it will” he answered.  Does it matter I wonder well they’ve just allowed $700bn to be spent on bonds and derivatives that no one in the Fed knows exactly what these investments are.  What’s another few hundred billion eh.

Obama on the other hand reiterated very simply his plans to cut taxes for 95% of Americans.  He talked to the centre he talked to middle America whilst not losing the working class.  Talking of helping middle America he reminded working class voters that his plan is not to give tax cuts to well-off people like himself or Mr. McCain.   With a question referring to why have both parties failed in protecting the US from the crisis.  McCain blames Bush and Cheney trying to distance himself.  Obama says no one is innocent in this but that when Bush and the Republicans took office they had a surplus.  A message of humility but one which highlights the fiscal and monetary stability of the Democrat years.

It wasn’t all bad for McCain.  On foreign affairs he was on form.  But with the penultimate question on whether the US would send a military response to protect Israel from an Iranian attack it was much of the same as the previous administration.  The great internationalist and the man respected in many countries said the US would not wait for a UN Security Council resolution to respond the US would retaliate.  He said America must “never allow a second hollacaust”.

Obama said that he would “never take military options off the table” but that it is important “to use all the tools that are at our disposal” calling for “direct talks not just with our friends but with our enemies”.

In the end the calm relaxed man one.  He looked presidential he sounded presidential and came across as the man best placed to blow wind in the face financial storm circling this election.  McCain needs to up his game he needs to improve grasp of the economy before he looks stupid on November fourth.

The grim reaper: former whip stabs blunt kife into Brown

The political climate is beginning to heat up as the autumn leaves begin to fall in Westminster.   Brown was, and no doubt still is hoping, that September would bring an Indian summer of shine on his tainted administration and that he may be able to portray a lighter shade of Brown.  Instead the colours got darker for him on Friday.  A figure dressed head to toe in designer black with a garish, dark and weighty chain around her neck walked on to Westminster’s college green surrounded by the press pack and eventually, she made to the towers of the media in Millbank. 

“Losing my job doesn’t matter Kirsty” she told the BBC Newsnight’s presenter, she was doing it for the good of the party and speaking up for those on the backbenchers who don’t dare strike the wounds of poor public appeal that Brown has seeping from every Yougov and Mori wound.

Siobhan McDonagh maybe small fry compared to Brutus or even the chief whip.  But a whip she is.  Charged to defend the Prime Minister and even literally whip dissenting back-benchers into shape, she decided to lead a charge on Number Ten with chalice in hand and dent the scaffolding that is at present quite literally holding Downing Street up.  Will it end in a landslide for Brown of the sort that Blair never experienced?

The news came as Labour HQ admitted that several MPs had asked why leadership nomination papers had not been handed out ahead of the Labour Party conference in a fortnight’s time.   This is standard for the party and even Blair ran the risk that 20% of the parliamentary party – some 70 MPs at present – may try and cast him aside through hands in the air at party conference.

So why did she do it: “because I believe the debate is being had” in government and that they are  “not allowing the wider population in on it”.  Calls again for general election no doubt beckon from Tories voices with words like these, hardly the stuff of loyal party members let alone whips.  The public are only too part of this debate and the disgusted, obtuse voices can be heard in Wetherspoons to wine bars of contempt the public holds for the man who has longed to put GB into Great Britain.

“I want to know what the programme is” she said but you’re a government minister part of his team surely you must know cried Kirsty Wark, well “we’re not in it for the money” she said and apparently leadership candidates themselves could “come up with different ideas”.  Why not wait two weeks and see what Brown, his cabinet and inner circle come up with for the autumn conference?  Her position though she assured wasn’t anything new: she felt the same way she said when Tony Blair stepped down and team GB moved from 11 Downing street into number 10.  So why not say something at the time and instead take up the position of defending what you see as the indefensible?

Who knows; I’m not sure Siobhan knows herself.  “But you’re a loyal member of government there to shore-up support” as Kirsty eloquently put the bleeding obvious to McDonagh.  “Yeah” she said with a slight pause before going on to highlight her record.

So is Big Ben about to chime the clucking bell for Brown.  Hardly, it seems.   He survived Charles Clarke’s comments he’ll survive this rather thin assault.  It exposes once again to the public that the government is divided, concerned and in a self-effacing mess.  Thorns may sprout from many a Labour rose in the coming weeks and days.  Emily Thornberry herself came out at dusk to brandish McDonagh as a nobody and herself as a loyalist, maybe as a hint to fill Siobhan’s shoes and protect her Islington seat which hangs by a knife edge majority in Labour’s hands.

Hewitt and friends who write in Progress magazine next week that Labour needs “a convincing new narrative” are stating the obvious and maybe more unsavoury words for Brown and friends.  The story of who the author of this new narrative should be continues. 

A week is a long time in politics, as is too frequently said, though it does feel like an eternity since Obama made his keynote speech in Denver after hurricane Palin blew on to the political scene. 

The Republican two, but McCain should have looked leftwards for his running mate

Within a day the media was mopping up the news that Sarah Palin, the Alaskan governor who replaced her Republican predecessor who embroiled himself in a political corruption scandal in 2006, would be McCain’s running mate.  What happened to Romney?  What happened to Lieberman?  The keys to the white house would now be a breath away from a forty-four year-old hockey mum.  McCain lost the experience card on his ticket and has gambled on someone who can steal some of the youthful limelight and mantra of change that Obama holds.

This was a mistake.  Whilst Gustav did not rain on the Republicans parade and the party’s rank and file maybe re-galvanised for a pavement-pounding, cyberspace-surfing campaign; McCain has blown his chance card of change.

In her inaugural speech ten days ago Palin spoke of eighteen million voters putting cracks in the glass ceiling by voting for Hillary and tried to pick up the fallen baton of the female voter.  Yet women were hardly turned off by Obama – politically as much as anything else – and with the under-35s he had greater support.  The reinforced, double-glazed glass-ceiling that the Republicans actually have to smash is keeping the White House against the odds for a third term.  And even though her convention speech was arousing for the social conservatives and she touched many popular bases with the small town, blue-collared Americans; her views of anti-green, anti-abortion, pro-gun and a hardline on terror sound exactly the same as the policies the US has had for the past eight years.  Joe Biden can tap into blue collar America just as well.

As important as the VP maybe, even if Ms Palin herself was unaware of this just a month ago, it is still the Commander-in-Chief who most people will look to when they cast their vote on November 8.  McCain had rising popularity in the early days of the Primaries with his straight talking, centrist views which went against the grain of current Republican thinking.  He was critical of Guantanamo, recalling his own tortured past in Vietnam he called on the prison to be shut down.  On the economy, McCain was more liberal than Clinton and Obama who had supported more protectionist measures against free trade and NAFTA which has generated prosperity and growth for America, Mexico and Canada and has incredible potential.  His opponents attacked it (even though Bill Clinton signed the treaty) as though it was the gutter draining American jobs (this in fact is China which has also been draining Mexican jobs and finishing the Doha round of trade talks which have dragged for five years would go along way to improving the World’s economic climate).  On abortion he has been indifferent, once saying hypothetically that if his daughter wanted one it would be her decision (Palin said the same thing last week about her pregnant seventeen year-old by for other seventeen year-olds she would deny them the right to choose).  With foreign policy he has been much firmer and shown political courage supporting the surge in Iraq and immediately jumping to Georgia’s defence last month whilst Bush and Obama seemed at odds at what to say on the matter.

This is not to say that if I were able to vote across the pond I would mark a cross next to McCain.  The old McCain has gone and he has veered to the Republican right and pandered to the religious conservatives whom he once described as “agents of intolerance”.  This will be his undoing.  His party is unpopular.  Double digits separate them from the Democrats who are set for a landslide.  Yet before last weekend McCain led Obama in the polls and last week he had the chance to grab the party by their stensons and get them to take on his potentially winning mantle with the message “We need to change to win” and to have the audacity of hope by moving to the centre which is were he got his lead.  With former Democratic and now independent senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate he could have really made the point that he wants to work with democrats and independents and scoop up those wavering Democrats not sure what Obama stands for.  Lieberman would have strengthened McCain’s experienced hand with his economics knowledge as foreign policy and would not be seen as unfit for office even at the age of sixty-six.

But McCain did not do this.  His convention speech on Thursday night was bland even by his mediocre standards of public speaking compared to the Democrat’s two.  Instead he shamelessly tried to pin Obama as a tax increasing liberal and he the tax cutter ignoring completely the content of his opponent’s speech and going for the traditional Republican dig.  If Obama’s speech was thin on the specifics of his policy outlines at least he had outlines.  McCain offered little other than giving his biography and saying he would cut tax for corporations and the essentially the rich.  He has shunned the ideas and potential policies that would have turned on centrists and libertarians in the US and has started supporting the same old policies of Bush which he – like Obama – had once criticised.  McCain should have had resilience in the “real McCain” and stood for what he has believed in for more than a decade.  Now we wait to see what the polls show but this shift to the same old Republican core could be the beginning of his campaign folding.