Romney’s bought the latest gadget, but he’s forgotten to read the manual.When Obama stormed to the Presidency he did so in glorious Technicolor while his opponent was still campaigning in black and white (or at least fifty shades of grey). In contrast, Obama campaigned with panache and proved what can be achieved by harnessing the power of social media.
His victory, for me, was a Kennedy/Nixon moment – one campaign looked modern and dynamic, the other looked tired, sweaty and frankly a bit outdated. The result was rather predictable in the end. Obama triumph. Slam dunk.
Last week, Paddy Ashdown came to the Edinburgh Book Festival. He filled the main theatre twice over with two very different talks.
The first, Why the world will never be the same again, was chaired by the Today Programme’s James Naughtie.
“I wouldn’t trust the UN to run a Liberal Democrat jumble sale”
Speaking without notes and with compelling candour, Paddy told us that we were condemned to living in one of those turbulent times when the balance of power in the world shifts. He saw two such major shifts. The first was a vertical one. Individual nation states could not alone regulate …
This week the New York Times ran a fascinating, detailed study of the drone war being fought by Barack Obama as he decides which alleged terrorists will be targeted by the American military:
When I first became aware of politics the world was looking towards Obama as a beacon of hope and change. As an 18 year old it was inspiring enough to want to change the world and campaign against inequality. However since I have gained further exposure, it has become apparent that politics attracts a disproportionate amount of young, careerist men. I refer to the likes of David Miliband, brought up in Hampstead yet representing the safe Labour seat of South Shields (which has a child poverty rate of 28%). When people say they don’t see a difference between the …
It’s been a tumultuous week in the political world. So let’s have a look at how the three main party leaders led from the front in statesmanlike fashion…
There’s no prize at stake – just the opportunity to prove you’re wittier than any other LDV reader…
Here’s the popular leader of a leading nation whose economy is on the road to recovery on a Boy’s Night Out with David Cameron. What do you think might be being said or thought by or about them?
Obama the Lib Dem. It’s striking how similar Obama’s tax priorities are to those of the Liberal Democrats, even though the specifics differ either side of the Atlantic. Obama wants to extend the payroll tax cut for ‘160 million hardworking Americans’, which he says is worth ‘about $40 in every paycheck’ for ‘the typical family earning $50,000 a year’. The Lib Dems have been pushing to raise the
The 2012 US Presidential race is certainly going to be interesting. That’s for sure. There is no end of permutations, twists and turns ahead which will make very entertaining viewing for us over this side of the pond.
Every time you make a statement about the election, there are caveats and “but ifs” which follow.
It’s tempting to say that Obama is sunk because of the US economy. However, there are strong signs now of a solid recovery. Last week’s job news was very positive and polls are showing a thawing of anti-Obama feeling.
Today’s the day we launch our search for the Liberal Voice of 2011 to find the individual or group which has had the biggest impact on liberalism in the past 12 months. This is the fifth annual award, and as is our tradition, we’re looking beyond the ranks of the Lib Dems to find the greatest liberal who’s not a member of our party.
The list of nine nominees appears below. These were sought from Lib Dem members via our most recent survey; 233 nominations were submitted, and each of those short-listed needed to clear a threshold of five.
By Jake Holland
| Wed 16th November 2011 - 3:25 pm
All Liberal Democrat campaigners will agree that there’s no worse feeling at the end of a hard-fought election campaign than losing by a handful of votes.
In the 2010 General Election, we were less than 1000 votes away from winning in 10 constituencies. Analysing these results, it was clear that our campaign technology had fallen behind the other two main parties. Tasks that our opponents took for granted, such as linking a campaign system directly to a website, or organising a nationwide volunteer phone bank, were beyond our capabilities.
Connect is the cutting edge in campaign technology that will put us …
Here’s your starter for ten in our weekend slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…
Over the last three years Obama has had to concede much of his programme to Republicans in Congress. His healthcare reforms had to be significantly watered down even before Republicans won back the House of Representatives in 2010. And the reforms themselves have since acted as a lightning rod for criticism of the President.
Obama is struggling to get the economy going again amid continued turbulence in the global economy and unemployment is staying stubbornly high despite the massive £800 billion stimulus package. …
News from Lib Dem HQ of the Liberal Democrats’ new campaign software:
Campaigning across the party is set to get a major boost when Connect comes online later this year. Connect is the UK version of the world’s leading campaign software that’s being built for the party by Voter Activation Network (VAN).
It is based on the tried and tested technology successfully used by Barack Obama and the Democrats in the US and in several other countries around the world. Connect combines high level security and stability, powerful campaigning tools …
The crisis in the US Congress has finally come to an end and President Obama was able to raise the country’s debt ceiling without invoking the 14th Amendment. It has been a weekend of worry and apprehension as to how far extremist factions such as the Republican Tea Party were willing to go and whether they were prepared to bring the country to the lowly depths of economic default.
Neither major party had seemed prepared to give up what means most to them; the preservation of continued support for Medicare and Social Security (Democrats) or the need for heavy fiscal cuts …
So the press have dug around into Louise Mensch MP’s past and discovered, shock horror, that she ‘probably’ took some drugs at a nightclub when she was in her twenties. Why this is news is frankly beyond me but why this has come out now, is not. The press are doing their thing, taking on someone that has taken them on. The ‘probably’ is a bit of a give away. There are lots of ‘probablys’ floating around the News of the World scandal. True or not, a ‘probably’ can hurt.
Liberal Democrats have long known that grassroots campaigns can win a ward, a council or a constituency – but they don’t win national election campaigns. It’s the knowledge that you need both the grassroots campaign and an effective national media and/or advertising campaign that explains why when Chris Rennard was the party’s Chief Executive not only did the Campaigns Department grow hugely in size – but so too did the national press team.
Yet at the heart of the Yes campaign in last week’s AV referendum seems to have been a big mistake: trying to run a grassroots campaign to win …
Here we go again. As Barack Obama hits the online campaign trail for his 2012 re-election campaign, expect a trickle, then a steady flow and finally a flood of posts about how Obama’s online campaigning should be copied by everyone from your pet cat to your grandparents.
On past form, many will gloss over the big differences between US and UK politics and the differences between a campaign headed up by the first non-white President and one aiming to make people buy your brand of shirts.
But as the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones, one of the more perceptive commentators on Obama online first …
Shortly after the Conservative Party won its fourth general election in a row in 1992, a symposium met to consider the question of whether Britain – formerly a country with regularly rotating government between the two main parties – was turning into a political version of Japan, where the same party had been in power for nearly forty years.
Even between the event occurring and the publication of a book based on it, Turning Japanese? Britain with a Permanent Party of Government (eds. Helen Margretts and Gareth Smyth), political events in both countries had taken a dramatic turn. In Japan the LDP lost power, starting a period of much greater political fluidity with even subsequent LDP Prime Ministers struggling to restore their party’s previous dominance. Meanwhile in Britain the collapse of the Conservative Party’s economic policies following Britain’s enforced exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) quickly made the government appear very vulnerable, even if debates in Labour continued on whether, as John Smith preferred, one more heave was all that was needed or whether, as Tony Blair insisted on after John Smith’s death, a more radical reshaping of the party was required to win the next election.
A Republican urging Barack Obama to be more like Nick Clegg is not a combination often seen, but that is what Michael Gerson argues in his Washington Post column, in a trans-Atlantic continuation of the debate over what counts as economic fairness:
Addressing the actual causes of inequality should be common ground for the center-left and center-right – and politically appealing to American voters, who are generally more concerned about opportunity than income equality. A mobility agenda might include measures to discourage teen pregnancy; increase the rewards for work; encourage wealth-building and entrepreneurship; reform preschool programs; improve infant and child health;
I’ve heard a few Liberal Democrats express concern about the mid-term election results. The fear, as it has been expressed to me, is that Cleggmania had a lot of superficial similarities to Obamamania – it was a campaign based on hope, by a progressive liberal who offered something new, and it led to the formation of a government. Seeing Obamamania apparently swept away in a surge of vehemently conservative tea-partyers, several Lib Dems fear that the same fate could befall them at the next election.
I think this is simplistic.
After an extended election break, we’re reviving our Saturday slot posing a view for debate:
The election campaign of 2010 will, above all, be remembered for the transformative effect of the television debates, and the breakthrough of Nick Clegg. They were, in the main, substantive discussions in which real policies – and real political differences – were openly debated. But they also re-inforced the impression that British politics is, above all, about personality; and in particular, that the quality politicians need above all is empathy, an ability to connect with the voters they seek to represent.
Empathy is a vital quality of leadership. It is one which is perhaps tipping the balance of opinion in the Labour party against David Miliband, who comes across as less of a listener than his brother and rival, Ed.
But empathy can all too easily tip over into something else: an overly emotional reaction which blinds politicians to sound reason. The moment a politician loses his rag – however understandably, however provoked, however gloriously – is the moment I feel my respect draining away.
I do not want a politician who knows only how to emote. I want a politician with cool, clear, concise judgement. Our leaders are faced with umpteen improbably tricky decisions before breakfast: they cannot afford to waste their energies as the mood takes them.
Perhaps the ultimate exemplar of the non-emoting politician happens also to be the world’s most powerful leader, President Obama. Yet he has come in for criticism in recent days from the Washington media for failing to show sufficient anger at BP, forcing Obama to declare himself somewhat falsely ‘furious’ (while reasonably pointing out he wasn’t hired to yell at people):
For good or for ill, Clegg is certainly different. Part of his distinctiveness stems from his family background. His mother is Dutch, his father half-Russian, a combination that led the reliably right-wing Daily Mail to describe him as “by blood the least British leader of a British political party.” His paternal grandmother, an aristocrat, fled Russia at the time of the revolution.
Clegg speaks five languages and once worked for the European
Campaign ’08: A Turning Point For Digital Media is a slim volume by Kate Kaye, senior news editor at ClickZ, taking an in-depth look at the online advertising used in the 2008 Presidential contest for the primaries and then the general election.
Though the book touches on other aspects of internet campaigning, what makes it stand out from the crowd of competing volumes is its focus on advertising.
It starts with a reminder that there is only one John McCain: the McCain mocked in 2008 for not getting online campaigning is the same McCain who was feted in 2000 for getting online campaigning. Indeed, in many ways it was his 2000 campaign that put online political fundraising on the agenda in the US, just as Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign put online organising on the agenda.
A former US grassroots campaigner, now working in Manchester, has claimed that Labour is an alienating force in our big cities and Obama would never have made it in the Labour Party.
Welcome to Friday, and with another busy campaigning weekend ahead, political parties are counting down the days and counting up the cash:
2 Election War Chest Stories
Labour opts for bargain £4m campaign with no posters
For the first time in more than 60 years, Labour does not plan to use its scarce resources on high street posters, such as those that the big-spending Conservatives have already set up across Britain. Instead, officials say that Gordon Brown will make a virtue out of necessity with a campaign that will lean on the “word of mouth” community organising techniques that helped Barack Obama into the White House.
OK, if you’re going to really insist on thinking that Obama is the Holy Grail of Campaigning To Be Transplanted To The UK Because Our System Is Just Like Theirs, then here’s a useful statistic for you.
The Obama for President campaign raised around $500 million online.
Two-thirds of it came from people clicking a “donate now” link in an email.
The proportion of people giving and the sums people gave on average was low. But with an email list in the millions (10-13 million depending on whose figures you believe) and 1.3 billion email messages being sent out, that added up to …
Last night Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate for Massachusetts Senate, lost by 5 points a race that just weeks ago everyone was declaring hers by right. And even before the polls closed it seemed like everyone was playing the blame game.
Coakley’s team and the White House pointed the fingers at each other. Some are blaming the economy, the excellence of Republican candidate Scott Brown (our first centrefold Senator, history should note), or Coakleys repeated Red Sox related gaffs. There’s even a “Drunk Electorate” theory. All of these factors surely played some part.
Nominally an extremely safe seat for the Democrats, the Democratic candidate Martha Coakley should be a shoe-in.
And yet Republican former centrefold star Scott Brown, once voted by Cosmo as America’s Sexiest Man (the link is fairly safe for work, but does contain a tastefully cropped naked man) has been closing the gap in the polls, and in some cases even taken a lead.
Of key importance in this battle is the senatorial supermajority, which we have covered on The Voice in the past. In the US senate, a party with 60 of the 100 senators – or the votes of 60 senators – can move a vote of cloture which can end a filibuster. This removes from the minority party a powerful tool to veto legislation by talking it out. This has become all the more fraught recently since Obamacare, the extremely controversial healthcare legislation currently under consideration. If the Republicans win the Massachusetts, the Democrats lose their right of veto and they could lose Obamacare.
Here’s a video for each candidate to give you a flavour of the battle.
First, President Obama is staking his political reputation to support Martha Coakley and underlining the future of Obamacare:
In 2006 two filmmakers decided to document the first term of a little known US senator called Barack Obama. Within nine months their rookie was running for president.
The resulting two hour HBO documentary was shown on BBC Two last Saturday (9th Jan). If you didn’t see it, do all you can to track it down somewhere, somehow. It is clear that the film-makers formed a trusted relationship with Barack, Michelle and his team so the access to the deeds, the techniques, the emotions and the inspiration of the whole cast from candidate to ten year …
Good morning and happy Christmas, loyal LDV readers! I hope you’re in fine voice as there’s singing to be done. Join me in waking the neighbours, the kids or the lark with some a capella goodness.
But first – the history, blogs and news:
On this day in 1066 William the Conqueror was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey. On this day in 2003 British-built Mars probe Beagle was lost after failing to make contact with scientists.
Futility Monster takes a break from blogging this Christmas – unless any real news happens…
Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.
2 Big Stories
President Obama hails Senate health bill support
From the BBC:
US President Barack Obama has welcomed the passage of his healthcare bill through the Senate, saying it paves the way for “real” reform.
The bill, which passed with 60 to 39 votes, aims to cover 31 million uninsured Americans.
“This will be the most important piece of social legislation since Social Security passed in the 1930s,” he said.
It must still be reconciled with similar legislation passed by the House of Representatives.
Mr Obama said: “We are now finally poised to deliver on the promise of real, meaningful health insurance reform that will bring additional security and stability to the American people.”
Joseph Bourke Just being a Russian captain or having a fire break out is not a good basis for suspicion of foul play. However, the evidence of a violent campaign of sabotage ...
Stephen Nash Paranoia seems appropriate, at least until there are better explanations....
Margot Wilson Stroll round the Valley Gardens, where Harrogate's history as a spa began. The nearby Pump Room will give shelter and more history....
Suzanne Fletcher I have no views yet on F10, not having had time to read the motion or info from CEO and President. But at the end of the day the candidates we end up with in n...
Mick Taylor With the greatest respect to Baroness Thornhill, you argue for change yet nowhere do you explain why changing responsibility for candidates to a federal committ...
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Six council by-elections, spread over two days
Carers remain forgotten in government's welfare overhaul
Steffan Aquarone's Commons debate on coastal communities
Getting things done - Saggar Street - an update #dundeewestend
Loving our neighbours
Getting the basics right
Joseph Bourke 
Stephen Nash 
Margot Wilson 
Suzanne Fletcher 
Mick Taylor 