Profiting from gridlock

MY TAKE on whether Washington, DC's immense wealth (cf my colleague) makes it the decadent capital of a declining empire (cf Matthew Yglesias) is that Washington has never been anywhere near decadent enough. In the wealthy, mainly white part we're discussing, it's a pleasant but highly conformist city where people dress terribly and expend much of their cultural energy in a strange quest to seem like "regular Americans", whatever those are. Even the city's most celebrated contribution to global culture, the emocore punk-rock tradition it launched in the 1980s, was animated by a very non-decadent spirit of straight-edge monasticism. Which is great; but the point is that nothing that happens in Washington bears much resemblance to the freaky high-culture divergence of a Rome, a Versailles, or the fictional Capitol of "The Hunger Games". That's Los Angeles.

On the more substantive question of why Washington has become the richest metropolitan area in the country, Dylan Matthews has just written the definitive blog post. In 1969, the first year for which the Bureau of Economic Advisers has records (and also coincidentally the year my parents moved to Washington), wages were 12% above the national average; in 2010 they were 36% higher. Mr Matthews checks out a series of possible explanations. The federal regulatory burden, measured by the number of regulators employed, hasn't gone up much, and has actually fallen since 1980. The total amount of government spending is about the same. You might think privatisation of government functions could drive up wage premiums, but contrary to received wisdom, the share of federal spending going to private contractors has actually fallen substantially since 1980. The level of education relative to the rest of the country isn't changing much. The one factor that does look like it tracks the rise in Washington's wage premium is the amount spent on lobbying by businesses:

Each million dollars spent on lobbying is associated with a $3.70 increase in the D.C. wage premium. Correlation isn’t causation, obviously, but it seems improbable that the $1.7 billion increase in lobbying between 1998 and 2010 wouldn’t increase wages in the D.C. area.

But if the regulatory burden doesn't seem to have increased, what are those corporate lobbyists getting? A deadlocked arms race with rival corporations, Mr Matthews argues. He cites the work of Frank Baumgartner, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, and colleagues (Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why ), who find that lobbying generally leads to a very expensive standoff between, say, credit-card companies and retailers, and no substantive change.

I don't much like the whole "maker/taker" model; it sounds rather communist to me. One of the weak points of old-fashioned communist thinking was a failure to recognise that lots of people who are not involved in the design or production of physical objects, notably merchants, salespeople, bankers, lawyers, advertising executives and clergy, are nonetheless doing work that's crucial to the functioning of the economy and society. The maker/taker distinction seems to me to partake of the same essentialist mysticism. But it is certainly true that you can end up with too many lawyers or lobbyists, and they can be a net drag on the economy. Mr Matthews' post mostly reinforces my colleague's conclusion that "the taker economy has less to do with citizens receiving transfer payments and rather more to do with crony capitalism."

But it also gives a somewhat different colour to the "crony capitalism" we're talking about. If Mr Matthews is right, Washington isn't getting richer because (as Tim Carney has it) "when government controls more money, those with the best lobbyists pocket most of it." The government isn't spending more money now than it was 40 years ago, as a percentage of the economy, so that doesn't explain why Washington is richer than other American cities. Rather, Washington is getting richer because the intensity of the struggle for influence at the centre of power has a natural tendency to keep spiraling upwards, and influence groups have to spend more on their struggles in the capital just to stand still. This isn't a conspiracy by a unified ruling class of takers against the far-flung makers, as in the Capitol of "The Hunger Games". It's an unavoidable, never-ending political battle between powerful clans to protect their interests at court, as in King's Landing in "Game of Thrones" (pictured above). Gridlock between powerful vested interests can be very profitable for experienced, well-connected court players who can promise to preserve the gridlock.

So what's the solution? One strategy for escaping this dynamic that has traditionally been employed by national rulers is to move the capital to a new location, usually one built from scratch. That seems implausible and expensive in the modern economy, but maybe we could try putting Congress on the road and just sending them to a new convention centre in a different state every two years, on sort of a Mongol Golden Horde or Dothraki model. It might not actually decrease the amount corporations spend on lobbying; the lobbyists would probably just follow them around. But it might be easier for less wealthy businesses and civil-society groups to rent office space in Boise than in Washington, and could help keep property values reasonable in the Washington metropolitan area, if that's the problem we're trying to solve here.

(Photo credit: HBO)

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/wealth-washington-dc?fsrc=gn_ep

Universal declaration of jerks' rights

BARACK OBAMA gave a pretty clear defence of the universal human right to be an obnoxious, blasphemy-spewing jerk at the United Nations today. One of the interesting parts of watching the speech (video here, full text here), for me, was trying to figure out which audiences different parts of the speech were addressed to, or how the same sections might play to different audiences. On the one hand, you had the actual people physically present in the hall, who are probably the oddest, toughest, and at the same time probably the least significant audience for the speech. These are, after all, diplomats; they aren't really supposed to have opinions or sentiments that can be moved by an address. Gatherings of international diplomats and functionaries like the UN General Assembly are by their nature very strange crowds, highly conservative, and in general only responsive to organisationally approved platitudes which they know they can applaud because they've already been voted for repeatedly in universal declarations or in a goals document named for a summit in some equatorial capital two decades ago.

I thought I detected a nod to this crowd when Mr Obama quoted Mahatma Gandhi: "Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit." The correct move here was to couch the American defence of the right to blasphemy in the words of a hero of the non-aligned movement whom even the Egyptians might have to applaud, lest they piss off the Indians. Nobody can be against Gandhi! So it's a safe applause line, for anybody except a funky postmodern anti-anti-colonialist like Dinesh D'Souza; but I doubt he was in the audience. And I thought something similar was going on with this sequence:

The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt – it must be claimed by those in Tahrir Square who chanted “Muslims, Christians, we are one.” The future must not belong to those who bully women – it must be shaped by girls who go to school, and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons.

It's not always a safe applause line to bring up girls' educational rights as part of a discussion of religious tolerance and civil rights in the Muslim world. Except, that is, at the United Nations, where every country present has explicitly ratified girls' educational rights in various universal declarations and the goals documents named for the summits in the equatorial capitals, which they signed in part because they didn't think they'd actually mean anything. It is the humanitarian politician's beautiful art to exploit such settings and carelessly made promises in order to needle these countries a few centimetres closer to actually educating their girls.

So much for the audience in the room. One reason such audiences of foreign diplomats and functionaries tend to be a little bored or abstracted at these gatherings, though, is that much of what speechifying national leaders say isn't actually addressed to them. It is addressed to constituents back in their own countries. In America right now, for reasons I can barely follow myself, Mr Obama's constituents are wrapped up in an argument over whether he spends too much time condemning people who insult the Prophet Muhammad, and not enough time condemning Muslim extremists for using such insults as a pretext to commit acts of political violence. So, much of Mr Obama's speech was devoted to checking boxes in the American political debate to certify that, yes, he defends freedom of expression, and, no he doesn't think it's ever justifiable to kill people or blow things up because somebody insulted your religion.

Writing this, I realise I'm saying something odd here: I'm assuming that when Mr Obama says,

[T]here is no speech that justifies mindless violence. There are no words that excuse the killing of innocents. There is no video that justifies an attack on an Embassy. There is no slander that provides an excuse for people to burn a restaurant in Lebanon, or destroy a school in Tunis, or cause death and destruction in Pakistan.

...he's not actually talking to violent Muslim protestors, or even to residents of Muslim countries who may sympathise with violent protestors but to Americans who are susceptible to accusations that Barack Obama has not sufficiently denounced violent Muslim protestors. And I may be wrong about that. To be clear, I found Mr Obama's speech cogent, right, sensitive, sophisticated and moving. it may be that he really is, at least in part, addressing the better-educated, higher-information citizens of the Arab world when he says (and I'm repeating some of the above lines so we can see them in context):

It is time to leave the call of violence and the politics of division behind. On so many issues, we face a choice between the promise of the future, or the prisons of the past. We cannot afford to get it wrong. We must seize this moment. And America stands ready to work with all who are willing to embrace a better future.

The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt – it must be claimed by those in Tahrir Square who chanted “Muslims, Christians, we are one.” The future must not belong to those who bully women – it must be shaped by girls who go to school, and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons. The future must not belong to those corrupt few who steal a country’s resources – it must be won by the students and entrepreneurs; workers and business owners who seek a broader prosperity for all people. Those are the men and women that America stands with; theirs is the vision we will support.

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims. It is time to heed the words of Gandhi: “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.” Together, we must work towards a world where we are strengthened by our differences, and not defined by them. That is what America embodies, and that is the vision we will support.

These words could, I suppose, actually be addressed to Arab citizens. But even if they are, I don't think they'll be widely heard. Certain well-educated segments of Arab elites may watch the speech, it may be picked up to some extent in the Arab press, and that could be part of a useful conversation, I suppose, within a narrow circle. But the people who rioted over "The Innocence of Muslims", obviously, are vanishingly unlikely to hear anything Mr Obama said today. if they do, it will be in the form of a sentence or two that can be plucked out of context in order to create offence for the purpose of mobilisation, much as they used the film trailer itself. And that's what I've found so misguided about criticisms of Mr Obama (such as this post by Doug Mataconis) on the grounds that he failed to sufficiently defend freedom of speech or condemn the use of violence in response to blasphemy over the past week. Who was he supposed to be talking to? It seems to me that this is a call for Mr Obama to say something in a conversation that does not exist.

But hey, maybe I'm wrong, and there is a real politically active Arab citizenry that will see Mr Obama's speech today and engage with it in some way. I hope so!

(Photo credit: AFP)

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/barack-obama-united-nations?fsrc=gn_ep

Two kinds of two-step

EZRA KLEIN ably deconstructs the "very clever policy two-step" involved in the meme that the 47% of Americans who currently pay no income taxes are "takers" (as Paul Ryan puts it) who refuse to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives" (as Mitt Romney puts it in the video above). As he says, what's happened here is basically that Republicans have cut income taxes, that resulted in many working-class people no longer having to pay income tax, and now Republicans are arguing that therefore the working class (but not the rich) should have their taxes raised or their benefits revoked. But there's also a second two-step involved, and it has to do with the way Republicans sometimes emphasise and sometimes elide distinctions between income taxes and other kinds of taxes.

The way the first two-step works is pretty clear. The reason many lower-income working Americans aren't paying income tax these days, while they continue to pay other taxes, is largely that Republicans have repeatedly cut income taxes, and if you cut income taxes for rich and poor alike then the poor tend to fall off the scale.

[W]hen you look at graphs of the percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, you see huge jumps after Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform and George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. So whenever you hear that half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, remember: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush helped build that...

But now that those tax cuts have passed and many fewer Americans are paying federal income taxes and the rich are paying a much higher percentage of federal income taxes, Republicans are arguing that these Americans they have helped free from income taxes have become a dependent and destabilizing “taker” class who want to hike taxes on the rich in order to purchase more social services for themselves.

...So notice what happened here: Republicans have become outraged over the predictable effect of tax cuts they passed and are using that outrage as the justification for an agenda that further cuts taxes on the rich and pays for it by cutting social services for the non-rich.

But this is where we get to the second two-step: the linguistic elision Mr Romney indulges in when he says that "people who pay no income taxes" are people "who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it." In this case Mr Romney is using "income tax" as if it meant the same thing as "tax", a meme that has surfaced all across the political right over the past few years. This, obviously, is factually inaccurate: Of the 47% of Americans who paid no income tax last year, more than half (28% of all taxpayers) have jobs and pay payroll taxes. (As for the rest, 10% are elderly, and 7% earn less than $20,000 a year.)

The interesting point here is that while Mr Romney uses "income tax" as if it meant the same thing as "tax" when talking about the taxes lower-income Americans pay, Republicans are simultaneously trying to reduce the percentage of total taxes that consists of income tax. For years, it's been a fixture of the laisser-faire right that the federal tax burden should be shifted away from income taxes, which on balance discourage people from working (especially at the lower end of the income scale), and towards consumption and other taxes, which on balance encourage people to work harder and save more. The Republican Party platform this year actually includes a plank calling for a federal value-added tax, on the (exceedingly unlikely) condition that Congress first repeals the 16th amendment to the constitution, which authorises the direct income tax.

You can see this effect in Mr Romney's tax proposals, as well. Mr Romney hasn't promised to cut payroll taxes; he's promised to cut income taxes by a fifth, across the board. On its own, this shift means low-income workers pay the same share of the income-tax burden, while paying a larger share of the overall tax burden. Yet Mr Romney can continue to imply that low-income workers are freeloaders because they don't pay income tax. Then, Mr Romney promises to keep the tax cuts revenue-neutral by ending deductions, which he pledges to restrict to those earning $200,000 a year and up; this isn't mathematically possible, but if it were, it would mean the income-tax burden would shift even more heavily towards high earners, again perpetuating the line that the poor are freeloading. And then there's the consumption-tax option beloved of many conservative economists. If the tax burden shifts towards flat consumption taxes and away from progressive income taxes, it will fall more heavily on the poor. But if people like Mr Romney and Mr Ryan insist on equating "income taxes" with "taxes", they will continue to be able to claim that the poor are "takers" who are "dependent on government" because they "aren't paying any income tax", even while they increase the share of the tax burden that falls on the poor.

There's actually a third aspect of the two-step as well, but I'm not sure it qualifies as an entire two-step of its own. Let's call it two-step two, chutzpah style. Here's the thing: the effects of income tax in discouraging work are far stronger at the low end of the income spectrum than at the high end. The logic behind the flat personal exemptions in the tax code, and behind the earned-income tax credit, is that you end up with huge numbers of otherwise-dependent poor people entering the labour force and working productively if you tip the scales in their benefit. That's why the Clinton administration expanded the EITC, and it's been very successful. But the genius of the "they-don't-pay-income-taxes" complaint is that it takes the tax cuts that were implemented in order to get poor people off of welfare and encourage them to work, and uses them to accuse poor people of being shiftless and dependent on government. This creates a sort of permanent resentment machine, a renewable fuel source for class warfare of the rich against the poor.

And so we switch smoothly from one tax two-step to another. Do-si-do your partner and sashay down.

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/mitt-romney-and-taxes?fsrc=gn_ep

The conventions end and the election campaign at last gets going for real

Barack Obama got a bounce from his party convention. Mitt Romney didn’t. But now the hard work really begins. The candidates have eight weeks to sell their messages to the public

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/america%E2%80%99s-presidential-race?fsrc=gn_ep

Restricting the franchise

POLITICO led this morning with a piece arguing that Mitt Romney's clay feet on the subject of national security threaten to turn him into John Kerry. I don't quite buy the comparison, however Kerry-like Mr Romney may be in his stiffness and aloofness; Mr Romney never claimed national security as a core competency, as Mr Kerry did. Yet this is part of an ongoing narrative that says this election is like 2004, in which a relatively unpopular and vulnerable incumbent lost because the out-party overestimated voters' distaste for the incumbent and nominated a dreadful candidate. The bases of both parties were gripped by a visceral disdain for the president that voters at large simply did not share.Both Mr Kerry and Mr Romney had fairly easy rides to the nomination: for all the ginned-up primary drama this year, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich stood no better chance of becoming president than did Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich.

But if the campaign looks like 2004, Ethan Bronner makes a far more persuasive case that its aftermath may more closely resemble 2000. The thicket of new voting laws enacted over the past four years—mostly by Republicans, and most of them with the effect, if not the intent, of making it harder for voters who belong to Democratic-leaning blocs to cast their ballots—will likely provoke a flurry of court challenges if the election is as close as it looks as though it might be. Those challenges have already begun. Florida lost in its effort to restrict early voting, as did Ohio. A federal court ruled that Texas's voter-ID fell afoul of the Voting Rights Act for imposing "strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor, and racial minorities in Texas are disproportionately likely to live in poverty." Pennsylvania's voter-ID law, on the other hand, was upheld (the state supreme court will hear appeals on Thursday).

Before the fights after the vote, however, come the Election Day challenges. Demos and Common Cause, two left-leaning think tanks, released a report yesterday looking at the rights afforded voters in ten states (some swing, such as Florida, North Carolina and Virginia; others, such as Texas, are simply big) when their eligibility is challenged. For anyone who believes that democracy is at its best when as many citizens as possible participate, the report makes for depressing reading. The national elections coordinator of True the Vote, for instance, a Texas-based group that wants to train 1m observers to fan out around the country as a guard against voter fraud (an exceedingly rare phenomenon) has said that he wants to make voters feel that they are "driving and seeing the police follow" them. Its parent group, the King Street Patriots, was accused of intimidating voters in predominantly minority districts in Houston. The president of Judicial Watch, another conservative group raising alarms about voter fraud, says Barack Obama wants "to register the food-stamp army to vote for him" (if an army, as is often said, marches on its stomach, the food-stamp army should inspire little fear).

Beyond this unpleasant rhetoric lie some real dangers for voting rights. In 2010 poll-watchers in Harris County, home of True the Vote, were accused of "hovering over" voters and "disrupting lines of voters who were waiting to cast their ballots" (no charges were filed).Voters in Florida can have their eligibility challenged for any reason, and challenged voters must vote provisionally and then must present proof of eligibility to have her vote counted. Voters in Missouri can be challenged at any time. Anyone can challenge a Pennsyvlania voter's eligibility, and while the challenger must provide a reason for the challenge, he does not have to provide evidence supporting that reason. Eligibility challenges are often based on residence—that is, a voter does not live at the address given on the voter rolls, and groups have often used "caging"—in which mass mailings are sent out and returned mail used to challenge a voter's eligibility—to purge voter rolls. This is of particular concern in states such as Florida and Arizona, which have high rates of foreclosure. Federal legislation creating uniform standards for challenging voters' eligibility, making registration easier and outlawing caging has been introduced. It stands about as much chance of becoming law as I do of starting for the Atlanta Hawks (I'm 5'7", 37 years old and have the speed and vertical leap of an armoire).

Of course, both parties play the turnout game. Democrats would prefer hordes of voters on college campuses and in inner cities; Republicans would prefer the opposite; both sides do what they can to get as many of "their" voters to the polls as possible. And of course, But when tactics turn from encouraging one's own voters to vote and setting up legal barriers to prevent the other side from doing so, that is something much nastier—particularly when those most directly impacted by these legal barriers were similarly barred from voting by "legal" barriers for most of this country's history. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, demography will make this sort of strategy unworkable for electoral reasons. Until then, we ought to recognise it for what it is: deliberate voter suppression, and a betrayal of democracy.

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/voter-fraud-and-its-discontents?fsrc=gn_ep

Rather uninspiring

ON THE last day of the Democratic convention, Barack Obama warns of the perils of a Romney presidency, but does not lay out a specific plan for the next four years

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/democratic-convention-day-three?fsrc=gn_ep

A prime-time performance

ON THE second day of the Democratic convention, Bill Clinton delivers a barnstorming speech in defence of Barack Obama's presidential record

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/democratic-convention-day-two?fsrc=gn_ep

Meandering and fluffy

ON THE first day of the Democratic convention, Michelle Obama is credible but overdoes the rhetoric while the other speakers focus on appealing to women and minority groups

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/democratic-convention-day-one?fsrc=gn_ep

A failure to communicate

THIS morning at Bloomberg's complex (a temporarily converted Gold's Gym) Valerie Jarrett was the featured speaker. Ms Jarrett's title is senior advisor to the president, but in reality she is much more than that; she is the White House gatekeeper, the point of contact between the president and the business world in particular, and according to most knowledgeable folk the most powerful person in the building not named Obama. She has seen off three chiefs of staff already. She also very rarely talks to the press.

I found her impressive but also rather alarming, answering questions at remarkable speed, but without ever smiling or indeed engaging with anyone in the room. And because she was so relentlessly on message, the session was entirely predictable and not very illuminating. Except when she was asked what mistakes the Obama administration has made, always a very thorny question for a politician. If you say none, you look absurd. If you admit to error, the press jump all over you, as I am about to do.

What she said was the mistake had come in not working harder to communicate to voters all the benefits that the administration's policies have brought. "If people voted their self-interest, they would vote for him", she said. It was only because of a weakness in communication that they might not.

Leave aside that Mr Obama was supposed to be a great communicator (I actually think he is a great orator, but not a very good communicator; the two skills are distinct). This, I think, goes to the heart of one of the Obama administration's weaknesses, one that certainly cost him the 2010 mid-terms and might cost him the presidency itself in two month's time. It is the idea that if only people were in full command of the facts, they would immediately see that the president was wise and right. It is arrogant, and, when you think about it, fundamentally anti-democratic. And it leads you to push policies that voters don't actually like.

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/valerie-jarrett?fsrc=gn_ep

Programming note

THE Democrats converge on Charlotte this week for the party's convention. We'll be covering the events much as we covered the Republican festivities, with blogging during the day, live-blogging from 8pm (ET) each night, and a video discussion of each day's events. So stay tuned to Democracy in America.

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/democratic-convention?fsrc=gn_ep

From ACDC to Zeppelin

Gone is the barbershop quartet, these days the Republicans prefer rock. Our cartoonist sketches the new political performers

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/09/kal-conventions?fsrc=gn_ep

Strong, but workman-like

ON THE last day of the Republican convention, Mitt Romney thrills the adoring crowd with his speech, but misses an opportunity to sell himself to America, say our correspondents

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/republican-convention-day-three?fsrc=gn_ep

Prose not poetry

MITT ROMNEY did not give the most compelling speech at the Republican National Convention, which ended in Tampa tonight. That honour goes to Marco Rubio, the fresh-faced young senator from Florida, who thrilled the crowd with a pitch-perfect tribute to his Cuban-American family, whose sacrifices and hard work had enabled him to live an “American miracle” of success. Mr Rubio—whose performance marks him out as a face to watch in a party desperate to increase its appeal among Hispanic Americans—carefully assured voters who backed Barack Obama in 2008 that they had not been fools four years ago, merely over-optimistic. “Our problem with President Obama isn’t that he’s a bad person,” Mr Rubio told the crowd, more in sorrow than in anger, before elegantly inserting the knife, adding: “By all accounts, he too is a good husband, and a good father, and thanks to lots of practice, a good golfer. Our problem is not that he’s a bad person. Our problem is he’s a bad president.”

The candidate’s wife, Ann, takes the prize of most touching speech by a member of the Romney family, with a lovingly-crafted address on the first full night of the convention in which she talked about the decency and generosity of the man who first wooed her at a high-school dance by making her laugh.

Mr Romney, who has in his day displayed a somewhat clunky, even alarming sense of humour, did not even give the oddest speech of the convention’s closing night. That palm was snatched in a rambling, ad-libbed surprise appearance by Clint Eastwood. The film director and actor at one point pretended to interview an invisible Mr Obama on stage, calling the unseen president “crazy” and mocking his record on national security, job creation and environmentalism. Mr Eastwood redeemed himself in the eyes of the crowd with a brutally effective dismissal, delivered deadpan: “When somebody does not do the job, you’ve got to let them go.”

Yet—to focus on what matters—Mr Romney did not need to set records for soaring oratory tonight. As Republicans at the convention argue, Americans have heard many fine words from Mr Obama over the past four years. Now they are ready for a little less poetry and a little more prose.

It is more important, Republicans argue, that voters head into the election season overwhelmingly convinced that the economy, and indeed their country, is headed in the wrong direction.

Mr Romney’s task was to persuade Americans, and indeed his own party, that he is just human enough to be trusted with fixing that mess while keeping in mind the problems and concerns of ordinary people. To achieve that, the presidential nominee had to overcome his natural reserve and explain who he is (and why his close allies insist he is a good and admirable man and inspirational leader). Before he could cross that threshold of likeability, Mr Romney had to rebut months of attacks from the Obama campaign about his lucrative career as a private-equity boss, which Democrats have portrayed as one long saga of ruthless predation and job-destroying short-termism.

Mr Romney did well enough on both fronts. There were clunky moments, notably a tribute to the recently deceased lunar pioneer Neil Armstrong, of whom he said: “The soles of Neil Armstrong's boots on the moon made permanent impressions on our souls.” But he talked well about his admiration and love for his father, the former Michigan governor George Romney, his voice cracking when he recalled his father’s death (revealed when his mother did not find her daily gift of a rose from her husband, waiting on her bedside table). Stepping away from his campaign’s usual talk of his sterling business career, he admitted to “too many long hours and weekends working”, while raising “five young sons who seemed to have this need to re-enact a different world war every night”. Travelling a lot for his job, he would try to call and offer support, he recalled. “But every mom knows that doesn't help get the homework done or the kids out the door to school.”

He also explained his career move from business consultancy to private equity investment with unusual clarity, explaining how: “My partners and I had been working for a company that was in the business of helping other businesses. So some of us had this idea that if we really believed our advice was helping companies, we should invest in companies. We should bet on ourselves and on our advice.”

Yet the effect was almost undercut by the strange amateurism of the convention’s stage management. By far the most powerful moments of the closing night involved personal testimonials from a series of old friends and fellow Mormons who had been helped by the Romneys. One elderly couple, a stout, unfashionable pair whose voices quavered with nerves and emotion, described quietly how their son had died from cancer aged 14, and how the busy, successful Mitt Romney had devoted nights and weekends to visiting the young man, at one point solemnly agreeing when he asked for help drawing up his will, so he could leave his skateboard to his best friend.

The normality and humanity of the couple, and the remarkable generosity they described, moved many in the convention hall to tears. Bafflingly, it was scheduled so early in the evening that it was not broadcast on prime-time television, throwing away a golden opportunity.

The crowd, made up of delegates from the states, activists and elected Republican officials, was also oddly muted at times, and streamed home from the convention centre in a business-like mood, rather than an ecstasy of excitement.

Mr Romney does not inspire passionate excitement, it is not who he is, even among a party that is now united behind him as their candidate after a bruising primary season. But he does not have to. Like a private-equity boss coming into the offices of a newly acquired company, he remains an outsider to many diehard Republicans, who do not trust his conservativism and frankly prefer his young vice-presidential running-mate, the Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan. But even tough, outside executives can win respect if they achieve success. Republicans leaving Florida want more than anything else to defeat Barack Obama who they believe is rendering their country un-American with too much welfare, government spending and defeatism about American greatness.

Mr Romney, a businessman, played up to the business-like ambitions of his party. In the most effective single swipe of the night, he recalled the impossibly grandiose promises of the 2008 election.

"President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet,” he told supporters, amid mocking laughter. “My promise is to help you and your family.”

It was not a transformative, race-changing convention, in short. But as attention now turns to the Democrats’ own gathering next week in Charlotte, it was more than good enough to keep Mr Romney in the race.

(Photo credit: AFP)

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/mitt-romneys-big-night?fsrc=gn_ep

Live-blogging the Republican convention

(Photo credit: AFP)

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/presidential-race-2?fsrc=gn_ep

Live-blogging the Republican convention

(Photo credit: AFP)

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/presidential-race-1?fsrc=gn_ep

The bitter end

FIGHTS often break out in ice-hockey arenas. Usually, however, they happen during ice-hockey games, not major political-party conventions. But on the first full day of the Republican National Convention, the party adopted by voice-vote changes to two rules: one strengthening penalties for delegates who vote for a candidate other than the one that state law requires them to support, and the other allowing the Republican National Committee (RNC) to change the party’s rules between conventions, rather than putting them to a full vote at the convention itself.

Those changes prompted some supporters of Ron Paul, a 12-term congressman and candidate in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries representing the party’s libertarian wing, to storm out of the convention hall, firing off charges of “voter suppression” and “election fraud”. Many of the storm-outs came from Maine, where Mitt Romney narrowly edged Mr Paul in the non-binding popular vote (the one who stayed on the convention floor shouting, “Fuck you, tyrants!” came, of course, from Texas). But the superior organisation of Mr Paul’s supporters won him 21 delegates to Mr Romney’s three. A few weeks before the convention—and after some of his delegates had bought their tickets from Maine to Florida—the RNC filed a complaint alleging multiple irregularities at the Maine convention. Mr Paul’s delegates claimed that the RNC wanted to avoid the embarrassment of Mr Romney losing a state on the night he officially clinched the nomination. The RNC said the rule-change simply closed “a loophole in our nominating process”. In the end, Maine awarded 14 delegates to Mr Romney and ten to Mr Paul.

Mr Paul’s supporters can seem callow and obsessive, as can Mr Paul himself, who is prone to secreting sound sentiments—a fondness for limited government, distaste for American sabre-rattling—amid mounds of batty rhetoric. Still, his views attracted passionate support, particularly among younger voters, where Republicans often struggle.

The question now is where those voters go. Mr Paul is 77, and will not seek another term in Congress. The foreign policy of a President Romney would lean far more towards neoconservatism than non-interventionism, and though he is likelier than Barack Obama to slash spending, he will not “End the Fed”, as one of Mr Paul’s books demanded. Party insiders are no doubt hoping they will simply mature into mainstream Republicans. But they may look elsewhere. To Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico and current Libertarian presidential candidate, perhaps, or to another Paul: Ron’s son Rand, an ambitious junior senator from Kentucky.

(Photo credit: AFP)

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/ron-pauls-campaign?fsrc=gn_ep

A tough job

ON THE first full day of the Republican convention, Ann Romney steals the show, while Chris Christie fails to inspire. Our correspondents give their take.

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/republican-convention-2?fsrc=gn_ep

Live-blogging the Republican convention

(Photo credit: AFP)

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/presidential-race-0?fsrc=gn_ep

Getting their message out

THE Republican convention was called to order on Monday, but due to Tropical Storm Isaac the real action begins today. We have a full slate of coverage planned, starting with this chat between our US editor and Washington bureau chief in Tampa. We'll discuss each day's events in similar style. Our correspondents will also be posting during the day, and live-blogging each night from 8pm. So stay tuned to Democracy in America.

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/republican-convention-0?fsrc=gn_ep

Growing disbelief

AMERICA is not an easy place for atheists. Religion pervades the public sphere, and studies show that non-believers are more distrusted than other minorities.

Several states still ban atheists from holding public office. These rules, which are unconstitutional, are never enforced, but that hardly matters. Over 40% of Americans say they would never vote for an atheist presidential candidate.

Yet the past seven years have seen a fivefold increase in people who call themselves atheists, to 5% of the population, according to WIN-Gallup International, a network of pollsters. Meanwhile, the proportion of Americans who say they are religious has fallen from 73% in 2005 to 60% in 2011.

Such a large drop in religiosity is startling, but the data on atheists are in line with other polling. A Pew survey in 2009 also found that 5% of Americans did not believe in God. But only a quarter of those called themselves atheists. The newest polling, therefore, may simply show an increase in those willing to say the word.

This change may have come about because of an informal movement of non-believers known as “New Atheism”. Over the past eight years, authors such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens have attacked religion in bestselling books, appealing persuasively to logic and science. Mr Dawkins, a British biologist, has especially encouraged people to declare their disbelief.

Earlier this year he spoke at the “Reason Rally”, a gathering of thousands of secularists on the Mall in Washington, DC. “We are approaching a tipping point”, he predicted, “where the number of people who have come out becomes so great that suddenly everyone will realise, I can come out too.”

Some are doing so loudly. When Democratic convention-goers arrive in Charlotte, North Carolina, they will be greeted by a billboard sponsored by a group called American Atheists that claims Christianity “promotes hate” and exalts a “useless saviour”. A similar billboard mocking Mormonism was planned for the Republican convention, but no one would sell the group space.

American Atheists is also trying to block the display of a cross-shaped steel beam at the September 11th museum in New York. The beam, found in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre, was a totem for rescuers. The atheists see its inclusion as an unconstitutional mingling of church and state. The museum says the cross is an historical artefact, and that anyway it is not a government agency. Fights like this are unlikely to enhance atheism’s growing appeal in America.

(Photo credit: AFP)

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/atheism?fsrc=gn_ep