With Fred Thompson having dropped out of the race, it’s time to weigh up the alternatives for the Republican nomination, from my perch on the southern end of Africa. What matters to me in an American president is foreign policy, of course, and economic policy. Bonus points for not being a bigot, a prig, a whinger or a preacher, but as I’ve written before, whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried, is really up to them.

Mitt Romney looks like a conservative Bill Clinton. He’s trying to be all things to all people, and that’s going to make him the lowest-common-denominator in office. I don’t trust the fellow. Mike Huckabee is a social conservative, not an economic conservative, and I’m looking for the exact opposite. Besides, I can’t take someone endorsed by Chuck Norris seriously.

John McCain is likeable enough, but neither his individual freedom record, nor his economic policy, appeal that much. He’s also lent his name to a heavy-handed and misguided campaign-finance law, and thinks government-enforced cap-and-trade schemes are just great. He’s great on foreign policy, perhaps, and might be able to appeal to the broad centre, but those are qualities that aren’t unique to him, and the rest of his positions are not what a classical liberal would want.

Which leaves Rudy Giuliani. He’s worked successfully with Democrats. He cleaned up New York, which used to be a poster city for crime, decadence and decay. He impressed on 9/11. He’s not going to surrender the free world to radicals and extremists and terrorists and fascists. And he doesn’t whine all the time about attacks from the vicious and vast left-wing wopist conspiracy.

But the clincher, for me, is set out in an excellent article on his tax plan by Steve Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine and one-time candidate for president famous for his radical flat-tax proposals. Read it, and then tell me why Giuliani shouldn’t be the GOP nominee.

On one level, I love the American election process. It’s long. It’s ruthless. It exposes every potential flaw in every candidate, be it character or policy, present or past. It forces them to take or explain positions on issues that matter to voters.

On another, I abhor the shallowness of much of the what we see. With “we”, I mean those of us who are separated from America by an ocean or more, away from the barrage of posters everywhere, town hall meetings every day and television adverts every hour. Where we should, in theory, be able to watch with some detachment, some time for analysis, some depth of coverage.

It may be true that when voters care more about superficial style and sound-bite glibness, this suggests their real-life concerns can’t be all that grave. After all, who in Africa really believes that Americans have the faintest idea what poverty or hunger is? What political violence does to people and families? The shallowness of their electoral rhetoric is a measure of their contentment. I don’t mean to condescend; I salute them for that achievement. I don’t mean to oversimplify; there are substantial issues in play, but they don’t always resonate deeply with the figurative man on the street.

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This story is laugh-out-loud funny, if you don’t buy the deception that the Democrats have gotten fiscal religion and are now more pious than a congregation of Republican pigs at the trough.

In November, I wrote:

It is true that the Republicans, in the US, haven’t had a stellar record on government spending since 2000. It has a high standard to meet, if it is to match its own rhetoric. It has been vulnerable to attack over profligacy, and in particular over Bush’s refusal to veto fat-laden bills. (Or rather, his inability to do so in practice because he has no line-item veto.)

It’s got so bad, I’m told, that the Democrats are now the party of fiscal responsibility, and if I’m a small-government libertarian, I should prefer to see Democrats in charge in the US.

As it turns out, the voting on specific anti-spending measures reveals the Dems to be consistently in favour of spending.

But it’s getting worse. Lacking a disaster in Iraq to pound the Republicans with, the Democratic candidates have turned their rhetoric to the economy. This means they get to bid each other into the stratosphere with spending proposals.

Everyone whose vote they can possibly buy is being offered large wads of tax money. Par for the course, you may think. After all, they’re big-government spendthrifts, and even self-proclaimed economic conservatives find it hard to resist the temptation to promise princely payouts to political plebs.

But won’t spending billions make the deficit worse? That’s what the Democrats have been saying for ages now, hasn’t it? For what it was worth, their complaint was partially valid, even though it was motivated more by opposition than by principle. The US can easily afford modest deficits when necessary, and there’s no real link between deficits and economic performance (or, for that matter, between the “twin” deficits of budget and trade). However, a profligate government can’t be in the interest of taxpaying citizens. Whenever possible, individuals, not the state, are in a better position to determine how their own money is best used. Anyway, the biggest deficit culprits besides war spending are the bloated and bankrupt entitlement programmes the Democrats keep threatening to expand.

“Stimulus shouldn’t be paid for,” said Hillary Clinton now. Eh? That sounds nice. Can I have me some stimulus that doesn’t need to be paid for too? With this sort of conjuring, she’s going to make people think she’s a witch, and it’s only a tap of the heels from there to “wicked”.

The entire piece is instructive, but this is worth quoting:

But wait, what about those evil Bush deficits? Only weeks ago, Democrats claimed those were the road to perdition, even if the deficit had shrunk to 1.2% of GDP last year thanks to booming revenue growth. […] Yes, many will fret that these tax cuts would only increase the deficit. But now we have even Robert Rubin and Hillary Clinton instructing us that deficits don’t matter. Somewhere, Dick Cheney is smiling.

Ouch!

This item, from James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, is one of the funnier contributions I’ve read:

How Clemenceau Crippled Clinton

A Los Angeles Times editorial ponders the difficulties of the onetime Democratic front-runner and blames them on … President Bush! Seriously:

For Clinton, the trouble is not emotion but, perversely, President Bush. So badly has this president performed that he has discredited not just his own administration but the very idea of Washington knowledge. Voters frustrated by the war in Iraq and anxious about the economy have turned on the man who brought us those troubles and on experience itself — and thus on Clinton.

But this is much too simplistic. After all, it’s not as if George W. Bush just sprang forth out of nothing. And if you look at history, it’s clear that the real culprit — perversely! — is Georges Clemenceau.

Clemenceau was the French prime minister in 1919 who at the Versailles conference pushed for the imposition of harsh peace terms on Germany, the loser in World War I. The hardships imposed by the Versailles treaty contributed to Hitler’s rise to power, leading to World War II.

World War II made a hero of Dwight Eisenhower (no wonder Mrs. Clinton can’t stand him), thereby making possible his election as president in 1952. This made it possible, 16 years later, for Ike’s vice president, Richard Nixon, to ascend to the White House.

If Nixon hadn’t been president, he would not have resigned, and Gerald Ford would not have entered the White House in 1974, which means he would not have been an ex-president in 1980, when Ronald Reagan invited Ford to be his running mate. Surely under such circumstances Ford would have accepted the offer rather than hold out for some ridiculous “co-presidency.”

If Ford had become vice president in 1980, George H.W. Bush would not have. It’s hard to see how George W. Bush could have ascended to the White House on the strength of daddy’s legacy if daddy were a mere former U.N. ambassador.

So you see, Clemenceau, with a little help from Hitler and every Republican president since World War II, caused George W. Bush to become president, thereby discrediting the very idea of experience. And to think, when Mrs. Clinton spoke of the vast right-wing conspiracy, people scoffed.

It’s also an excellent excuse to highlight the paper’s new online design, and the fact that the editorial page on free markets and free people is now, well, free. After all that ribbing about the New York Times’s failed TimesSelect subscription experiment, it’s about time the Wall Street Journal capitulated too.

I’ve been watching the last few days of US election fever with some bemusement. There are several candidates who are sufficiently candid on economic or foreign policy points to earn a failing grade without much further ado. It’s harder to be clear about the remainder, however.

The news coverage focuses heavily on who is polling how high, where and among whom, and how much of a surprise this is. (It can’t not be a surprise, otherwise it wouldn’t be a news story. Surely?) When it does touch on policy issues, the questions are simplistic, and the responses are predictable rote, with wording carefully scripted by public relations experts to sound just so, given this advert yesterday and that faux pas last week. (I say “predictable”, but it can’t be, otherwise it wouldn’t be news. Surely?)

The “debates” have, with occasional exceptions, been shallow and inane, and have been prominently sponsored by new media champions of mediocrity, such as YouTube and Facebook. Soundbites are sweepingly simplistic and vaguely general, instead of specific, thoughtful, detailed and occasionally profound. (One can dream, can one not?) The result is that especially from far away, most candidates, red and blue, display little more behind their hairsprayed coiffs and Colgate smiles than a bewildering mix of sanity and idiocy, realism and idealism, charm and dogmatic zeal, wit and viciousness.

Lawrence B. Lindsey, writing in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, offers an interesting test against which to judge prospective candidates:

First, has the candidate faced a crisis or overcome a major setback in his or her life? A president’s first crisis will teach two important lessons. The first is that bad things happen, in fact they happen on a regular basis. The second is that the real power of the office to affect, let alone control, events is far less than imagined. If the occupant of the Oval Office has faced this double whammy–encountering a tragedy involving events over which he or she has had little control, yet finding a way to persevere–the new president is far more likely to succeed. […]

Second, has the candidate had a variety of life experiences? The presidency is a job for a generalist. You never know what direction a crisis will come from: foreign threats, economic calamity, civil unrest. […]

Third, can the candidate tell the difference between a foreign enemy and a political opponent? A certain degree of ruthlessness is a necessary attribute for any successful CEO or president. But our liberty, which is ultimately our nation’s greatest resource, requires that a president restrain this trait when acting domestically.

We should seek an individual who is ruthless about protecting us against others, but acts with charity toward all and malice toward none at home: a tall order. But this trait comes out on the campaign trail, and in the past job performances of the candidates. We should opt for candidates who are ruthless in debating real public policy issues but steer away from attacking the personal traits of their opponents. […]

Lindsey himself prefers Fred Thompson, and the more I see of Thompson, the more I like him. He strikes me as a tough, honest, common-sense fellow, who doesn’t like politics and doesn’t trust a government that tries to be (and do) all things to all people.

But either way, these tests of character, as opposed to policy, serve a useful purpose both in adding a few names to the elimination list, and qualifying those who might not share your own political and economic views. That alone makes Lindsey’s article a valuable read.

Since the pre-9/11 threat of American isolationism and its reversal on that fateful day, American politics has been a bit of a preoccupation in my thinking. In this election cycle, however, I find myself far from sure whom I’d prefer to see stand for election less than a year from now. Seems I’m not alone. Tyler Cowen, over at Marginal Revolution, has the same problem, as he muses in this interesting take on Ron Paul’s candidacy.

It’s true I’m broadly speaking libertarian, and Ron Paul in many ways approximates libertarian positions, but there’s a lot about him that I find discomfiting. Not least among them are his unrealistic stance on the Iraq war (principled though it is), the nationalistic undertone in his talk, and the odds against his winning even a primary, which raises the spectre of splitting votes away from another putative small-government individual-liberty candidate.

It’s true, however, that his Austrian views, and particularly his classical libertarian view on central banking and sound money make him a very interesting candidate to watch. He was on CNN yesterday, talking to Wolf Blitzer, who (some would say appropriately) got to stand in for the faux-news show hosted by starving-and-striking Jon Stewart. It’s not often you hear someone trying to explain sound money versus inflationary currency on CNN.

The conservative Media Research Council has announced the Best Notable Quotables of 2007. The winner is truly funny, and most are very instructive. However, another entry from the MRC, which arrived in my inbox a week later, caught my attention.

It appears sexism against Hillary Clinton has to become a big issue. Whether it’s idiots falling for deliberate trolling, or defenders who need foils for attacks they can’t handle, accusations of prejudice become the last refuge of political hacks.

The original of a curiously sanitised piece by Jonathan Tilove in the Seattle Times of 29 November was a little different from what’s posted there now. The original was published in an MRC email on 26 December, but has not yet made it to its rather primitive-looking website. The MRC says that in excerpt, it reads as follows:

Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing an onslaught of open misogynistic expression. Step lightly through that thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Hillaryland and you are soon knee-deep in ‘bitch,’ ’slut,’ ’skank,’ ‘whore’ and, ultimately, what may be the most toxic four-letter word in the English language….Thanks to several thousand years of phallocentric history, there is no comparable vocabulary of degradation for men, no equivalently rich trove of synonyms for a sexually sullied male. As for the word beginning with C? No single term for a man reduces him to his genitals to such devastating effect.

I say bollocks. What a prick. For start, this schmuck surely knows that the C word is commonly applied to men, without reference to either women or their degree of sexual sulliedness? And what tosser removes offensive language from an article after it’s been published? I’d also challenge this dickhead to search the “thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Bushland”, and analyse the epithets found there. Hint: they’re not “clear-eyed” and “rosy-cheeked”. Not even with witty sarcasm. In fact, I’d wager he’d find a fair few of a character that would offend his delicate sensibilities.

Besides, how anti-feminist of Tilove to think that Mrs Clinton is too fragile as a woman to tolerate the sort of ribald political rough-riding that typifies the more puerile corners of the interwebs.

2007 turned out to be a pretty good year for George W. Bush.

Late last year, voters turfed Republicans out of Congress over either lack of spending restraint or dissatisfaction with progress in Iraq or both, depending who you ask. (Robert Novak: war; Alan Greenspan: spending; Rush Limbaugh: both, and liberals suck; Reason magazine: both, and government sucks.)

This electoral loss, which meant Bush could no longer rely on a compliant Congress to send him only bills he likes, merely reinforced the view that Bush now is a lame duck, unable to govern effectively. (CNN: Is Bush already a lame duck?; Lou Dobbs: Beware the lame duck; The Guardian: ‘Lame duck’ Bush faces struggle to push through new agenda; The Telegraph: Allies desert ‘lame duck president’; Dan Froomkin: How lame a duck?)

A few voices ran against the media herd, but looked like wishful thinkers. (Christian Science Monitor: Bush’s lame-duck advantage.)

But on Friday, Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, and Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun-Times (apparently independently) noted that Bush hasn’t had a bad 2007 at all. Moore’s item is worth quoting in its entirety:

Bush on the Comeback Trail

Just as Newt Gingrich was the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton, so Nancy Pelosi has become a great political asset to George W. Bush. Mr. Bush is on a roll legislatively and even his poll numbers are inching up while Congress’s have sunk into the teens. There’s nothing like having a foil in Congress to rehabilitate a president. Just ask Harry Truman.

This time last year it would have been inconceivable that Mr. Bush would have a successful 2007, or that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress would have fewer than one-in-four voters approving their performance. I’ve made a list of Mr. Bush’s policy victories over the Democrats:

1. S-CHIP — Mr. Bush vetoed the Democrats’ bill expanding middle-class health care subsidies and Democrats were unable to override that veto.
2. Alternative Minimum Tax — Democrats passed AMT reform without the offsetting tax hikes they had threatened.
3. Energy bill — What was a monster at the beginning of the year is now just a fairly harmless CAFE standards bill. Environmentalists are fuming.
4. Hate Crimes Legislation — Mr. Bush blocked it. The Congressional Black Caucus is furious.
5. War funding — Mr. Bush prevailed without any pull-out date. At the start of the year this looked impossible.
6. The Budget — Mr. Bush mostly prevailed on domestic spending totals.
7. No new taxes — all of the Democratic tax proposals were killed, including tobacco taxes, hedge fund taxes and energy company taxes.

It pretty much looks like the White House ran the table. Merry Christmas, Madam Speaker.

As I’ve noted before, US economic and foreign policies matter most to me as a foreigner: whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried doesn’t keep me up at night.

During the 2004 presidential elections, I said to a friend that perhaps the US needs a presidential term under a Democrat, if only to remind the people in general (and Republican voters in particular) that the Democrats aren’t very good at low taxes, low spending, light-touch environmental regulation and effective foreign policy. Either a John Kerry in 2004, or a Hillary Clinton in 2008, would achieve this goal, and as a result, cement the longer-term rise of the GOP. It now appears that Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco leftist in charge of the ineffectual Democratic Congress, may have achievedachieve this in just two years. Especially if the Democrats nominate Clinton (admittedly, Dennis Kucinich would do too), my money’s on a Republican presidential election win just less than a year from now.

Update: Repaired a grammatic blunder in stating Nancy Pelosi’s term: either she “may have achieved it in just one year”, or she “may achieve it in just two years” — my phrasing was inconsistent, and the former may yet be undone by a sparkling Congressional performance in 2008 (when Martians may land and I may win the lottery).

I haven’t blogged much about the US presidential contenders, because in truth no candidate on either side of the aisle has really grabbed my attention to date. I’m lukewarm, at best, towards all of them. However, a WSJ survey of economists gives some useful pointers, and they point strongly in the direction of the GOP:

Asked which presidential candidate would be best for the economy, only half responded but most threw their support behind Republicans. Thirty-five percent said Rudolph Giuliani would be best, while 19% chose John McCain and 15% picked Mitt Romney. Hillary Clinton got the support of 8%, while John Edwards was the only other Democrat to register with 4% of the vote.

Whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried doesn’t much matter to me. Economic policy, on the other hand, does matter. A vote of confidence by people who’ve actually been to economics class — and who will therefore tend to disavow the populist economic fallacies that permeate so much public, academic and media opinion — matters.

(Via Greg Mankiw)

That’s it, then. Campaign 2008 is over, and Mike Huckabee has won.

You wouldn’t dare argue, would you?

No wonder the issues in the US election campaign are turning towards economic concerns. Not only are there some (economic concerns, that is), but the core Bush-bashing issue of his presidency is starting to look rather limp. MoveOn.org had to turn to vicious slander in its effort to discredit the Congressional testimony of General Petreaus as propaganda for the White House. The media has, in general, been fairly reliably opposed to the Iraq war. Reporters have consistently hedged good news with bad, and are usually skeptical of any news of progress. Some outright suppress it, revelling in predictions of the inglorious defeat of the US-led coalition.

Yet the orthodox view of Iraq as a disaster is under threat. Even the BBC is pointing to statistics that — across the board, it says — show the situation in Iraq is improving:

Is Iraq getting better? The statistics say so, across the board.

Over the past three months, there has been a sharp and sustained drop in all forms of violence. The figures for dead and wounded, military and civilian, have also greatly improved.

All across Baghdad, which has seen the worst of the violence, streets are springing back to life. Shops and restaurants which closed down are back in business.

People walk in crowded streets in the evening, when just a few months ago they would have been huddled behind locked doors in their homes.

Everybody agrees that things are much better.

Except the BBC, of course:

But is the improvement only skin deep? And will it last once the American troops, whose “surge” has clearly made a difference, begin to scale down?

Several quotations in the article do support the view that security, progress and peace in Iraq remain dependent on coalition forces and reconstruction efforts. Which leads to only one conclusion: those calling for a rapid withdrawal (including presidential candidates that do) are willing to give up the gains made, condemn Iraq to rule by partisan or insurgent militias, and sacrifice the peace and prosperity of Iraqis on the altar of political expediency. Perversely, if that happens they’ll get to say, “I told you so,” instead of paying the price for their betrayal. I hope the American people won’t let that happen.

It is true that the Republicans, in the US, haven’t had a stellar record on government spending since 2000. It has a high standard to meet, if it is to match its own rhetoric. It has been vulnerable to attack over profligacy, and in particular over Bush’s refusal to veto fat-laden bills. (Or rather, his inability to do so in practice because he has no line-item veto.)

It’s got so bad, I’m told, that the Democrats are now the party of fiscal responsibility, and if I’m a small-government libertarian, I should prefer to see Democrats in charge in the US.

Luckily, some people keep track of these things. Witness the House and Senate “RePORK Cards”, published by the Club for Growth, for example. It ranks senators and members of Congress on their voting record against pork barrel spending. These votes all involve amendments to bills aimed at removing discretionary spending earmarks on totally unrelated items.

Some highlights from the Senate, where 15 anti-pork measures came to a vote:

• Only three senators received a perfect score of 100% (and were present for a majority of the votes). All three are Republicans. A fourth, John McCain (R-AZ), was only present for two votes.
• Thirty-six senators scored below 10%. Of those, two are independents, the other 34 are Democrats.
• Next lowest on the list, at 11%, is the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, who voted for one anti-pork amendments out of the nine for which she was present. Barack Obama scored 33%, or two out of six.
• Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) scored a 53%; Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) scored a 7%, voting for only one amendment.
• The average Republican score was 59%; the average Democratic score was 12%.
• Thanks to this dismal voting record, only two amendments were successful: one to cut funding for spinach growers from the Iraq Supplemental Bill, the other not to spend $1 million on a museum dedicated to the Woodstock Festival. Those that failed included funding a visitors’ center in Louisiana instead of providing shelter for victims of Hurricane Katrina (and they bash Bush over Katrina?), millions of dollars for bicycle paths instead of using the funds to improve bridge safety, and $100 million for the 2008 Republican and Democratic nominating conventions (go figure).

In Congress, where 50 anti-pork amendments were considered, these figures stood out:

• Sixteen members scored 100%. All of them are Republicans.
• The average Republican score was 43%. The average Democratic score was 2% — on average, Democrats voted for one anti-pork measure out of 50!
• The only Democrat to score over 20% was Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) who received an admirable 98% grade.
• 105 congressmen scored a round zero, voting against every single amendment. The “Pork Hall of Shame” includes 81 Democrats and 24 Republicans.
• The Democratic Freshmen — the new blood that was going to restore fiscal responsibility to Congress — scored an abysmal average of 2%. Their Republican counterparts scored 78% on average.

Let nobody ever again tell me (a) to support a Democrat for their spending restraint, and (b) to believe Democrats when they promise to clean up Congress. The only positive from this report is that Americans can hold their representatives accountable for their wasteful spending. Let’s hope they do so.