Barack Obama’s current political woes are slightly overstated, the current Democrat slump has been worsened by a panic reaction to bad economic news, even although the economic evidence viewed overall points to a continuation of the slow recovery.
The election for Americans
Wrote below for US site The Monkey Cage:
Will the election campaign make any difference?
Election campaigns attract fascinated attention. In fact I doubt the election campaign will make much difference either way, before it started the likely outcome was a narrow Labor victory. The evidence is that American presidential election campaigns made little difference as Brendan Nyhan noted just after Obama’s victory:
Julia Gillard feels your pain?
Does political leadership make a difference? The rise of Julia Gillard and the downfall of Kevin Rudd remind me of the ongoing American debate. Here a variety of critics from left and right have argued that Barack Obama’s declining approval rating (and the closely related prospects of the Democrats in the upcoming Congressional elections) is […]
Labor goes back to 1997?
In many respects modern Labor has returned to the type of inward musing that it engaged in after 1996. Then there was an assortment of vaguely defined rhetoric about the party’s perceived excessive social liberalism, these critics however were very vague as to exactly what alternative policies they proposed, instead they preferred to focus on […]
Obama’s lost opportunity?
Has Obama’s presidency been a wasted opportunity for American liberalism? Was there ever a prospect of establishing a permanent Democratic majority? Via Mathew Yglesias an interesting analysis from an American dating site using membership data to track the relation between ideological identification and partisan allegiance.
Republicans resurgent?
Political surprises are usually not really surprises but are usually anticipated by disregarded observers. It is interesting that the suggestion that the Democrats could lose the 2010 Congressional elections is beginning to be cited as a possibility by Democratic commentators such as Ed Kilgore. I am inclined to agree with Brendan Nyhan that the negative […]