Nice summary of Obama's substanceless appeal

James Taranto in his Best of the Web column today puts into words very well something I've been thinking for some time but haven't been able to express nearly so well:

Such empty oppositionalism has been the dominant theme of Democratic politics at least since the emergence of Howard Dean in 2003. But there is a weird genius about the way Obama, with his soothing style and inspiring persona, is able to present it as if it were something of real substance.

This is the real issue with Obama - there's no substance there and yet he's able somehow to convince his supporters that there is. Will the media ever call him on this? Or will the scales fall from the electorate's eyes at some point anyway? I find it hard to believe that he can really keep this up for another nine months, but with the media's help it's perhaps just possible.

Time's debate scorecard - McCain won??

Time's debate scorecard for last night's debate demonstrates some incredible mental dexterity from Mark Halperin, who gave McCain a winning B grade (Romney got a D). The following quote is the first two thirds of his blurb on McCain's performance:

As a testament to his suddenly strong position in the battle for the nomination, he showed off all of his worst traits — and still won! Alternately cranky, elderly, caustic, equivocating, inarticulate, passionless. But he flexed his ability to intimidate Romney as needed, usually with an arch one-liner that was 3/5 mean-spirited and 2/5 light gag. Made little effort to defend his own tax record or negative Florida attacks, and failed to drive a positive message.

And this is the guy who won? It reads like satire. The idea that Romney was intimidated bears no relation whatsoever to what actually happened in the debate, where Romney stood very firm and countered all of McCain's smears. In the last third of Halperin's summary he suggests that questoiners and the other candidates treated him as the front runner. No doubt the questioners did - this has been their line for the last several weeks, even when McCain was badly lagging Romney in the delegate race. But given there are only two serious candidates left in the race, who else was Romney to go after? Huckabee? Paul?? And McCain certainly focused his attention on Romney - does this mean he thinks Romney is the front runner? The whole thing is bizarre, and another sign that the media is desperate to have McCain as the nominee - either because they believe he will implode or because they like his centrist positions better than Romney's conservative stance.

Excellent piece on Tony Blair

An excellent piece today in the Wall Street Journal online by Theodore Dalrymple of the Manhattan Institute on Tony Blair's legacy. It captures very well indeed the somewhat baffling contradiction between the gut reaction many people have (or once had) towards Tony as a "straight kind of guy" and what he actually achieved (or failed to achieve) as Prime Minister, and what he really stood for.

This paragraph sums up the thrust of the piece nicely:

Many have surmised that there was an essential flaw in Mr. Blair's makeup that turned him gradually from the most popular to the most unpopular prime minister of recent history. The problem is to name that essential flaw. As a psychiatrist, I found this problem peculiarly irritating (bearing in mind that it is always highly speculative to make a diagnosis at a distance). But finally, a possible solution arrived in a flash of illumination. Mr. Blair suffered from a condition previously unknown to me: delusions of honesty.

This is the inherent contradiction within Tony Blair, and Dalrymple does an excellent job of putting his finger on it - that Tony Blair believes the TB myth himself and so can blithely go on spouting the stuff he does and sound sincere at the same time. As far as he's concerned, it's all true and everyone who doesn't believe him simply isn't listening hard enough. Well worth a read of the whole thing.

Kennedy and Democratic snobbishness

An article in the Wall Street Journal today captures nicely the disconnect between those who ought to be the natural supporters of the Democratic Party (and its equivalents in other countries) and those who actually hold most of the leadership positions in those parties. The article is about the way the Democratic party has lost its way since the days of JFK precisely by misunderstanding and inflating the achievements and appeal of JFK himself. Towards the end we get the following astute observations (emphasis mine):

"John F. Kennedy & Co. took the party up-market, making it an Ivy League and, later, a Hollywood operation. After the Kennedy administration, the Democrats were no longer the party of the little man (Harry Truman's party), or the party of the underdog (Franklin Delano Roosevelt's party), but that of the intellectual and cultural sahibs pretending to speak for the little man and the underdogs because it makes them feel virtuous to do so; they turn politics into an affair of snobbery, where politicians are judged on elegance not substance. One recalls how much of an outsider the Kennedy people made Lyndon Baines Johnson feel -- LBJ, that vulgar Texan who attended Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

Because of the regularity with which John F. Kennedy's name is invoked by his skillful PR flacks, the Democrats keep turning up rather anemic Kennedy imitators -- Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, John Kerry (with only an occasional genuine hustler like Bill Clinton popping up almost by accident) -- to head their presidential tickets. But the criteria for president of the United States aren't the same as those set by the deans of admission at Harvard or Yale, Brown or Duke. The happy snobbery of feeling culturally superior and morally virtuous that is at the heart of the Kennedy myth shouldn't be what politics is about."

Industry caught in carbon ‘smokescreen’

More on the carbon cap and carbon credits scam from the Financial Times. Further evidence that the global warming lobby and its supporters have been more interested in being seen to do something than actually doing anything that makes a significant impact.

The Taxpaying Minority

Ari Fleischer - former press secretary to President Bush - has a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the progressive nature of the US income tax system. He focuses especially on the fact that a bare majority of American taxpayers actually pay any income tax at all and that 40% of the population pays 99% of the taxes.

This serves as another reminder of the fact that, while it's easy to raise taxes on "the rich" it's nigh impossible to lower them again later - "tax breaks for the rich" being unpalatable to even Republican politicians. So the system becomes ever more skewed in favor of progressive and redistributive taxation, with no end in sight.

It's not at all obvious how we ever get beyond this situation and move to a more rational future approach to taxation which allows the burden of additional taxation (which is inevitable given the inexorable rise in spending) to be spread more evenly across the population as a whole. Of course, in an ideal world, we would be reducing the overall tax burden by reducing spending, but that seems even less likely than a less progressive tax system.

Two candidates with ailing wives

In all the coverage over the return of John Edwards' wife's breast cancer, there has been little or no mention of the fact that he now becomes the second current presidential candidate - not the first - to have a spouse afflicted with a serious illness. Mitt Romney's wife Ann, of course, suffers from Multiple Sclerosis, and although the illness is currently in remission, it could presumably return at any time. It will be interesting to see how the illness of both these candidates' wives affects their candidacy and campaigns.

Some Dems take Andrew Jackson literally

The quote attributed to Andrew Jackson, "One man with courage makes a majority," (see this link for an explanation of why we shouldn't really attribute it to him) appears to have been both taken a little literally and distorted by his political descendants.

For the last several years (essentially since the 2000 election) Democrats and other liberals have acted as if small groups with strong enough opinions should be treated as if they were in fact majorities. After accusing George W Bush of "stealing" that election, they have since claimed that he was "not listening" on the war in Iraq, that we needed to pull out of the war, etc. even though for a long time these people did not constitute a majority. James Taranto included some comments on a recent story in his Best of the Web column this week (see Vandals for Peace).

Although the 2000 election provides a pretext (the 2004 election surely should have neutralised this, but of course didn't), Democrats no longer even tie their civil disobedience back to the stolen election. They just act like they're in the majority, and express disbelief when neither Bush himself nor their elected Democratic leaders in Congress are willing to adopt their extreme positions. They assume this means that they are "not listening" rather than understanding that their political leaders have listened and yet disagree with them. This must be particularly frustrating for them since Democrats now have a literal majority in Congress and yet haven't pulled troops out yet. On the other hand, it appears the original quote (even if attributed to Jackson's biographer and not Jackson himself) appears to have been "desperate courage makes one a majority" - so not such a far cry from the Democrats' current interpretation "desperation makes a majority".

Will this trend continue, or will things change if a Democrat wins in 2008? Chances are, the left wing of the left wing will continue to be unhappy with virtually any political leadership and will continue to act as if its strong opinions (not courage) make a majority.

Gordon Brown creating new "rights"

Gordon Brown delivered his 11th (and presumably last) budget on Wednesday. It appears that, among other things (including surprise "tax cuts") Brown is going to force all children up to the age of 18 to stay in school. However, instead of honestly describing this initiative in this way, he puts it thus:

"We will, for the first time in our country’s history, make education a right for every young person until 18" [my emphasis]

So now, when we force people to do something, we are describing it as a "right" on their part. I wonder what other rights we could think up? The "right" to pay high taxes? The "right" to have our children's education entirely dictated by the government? The "right" to speak only those words which are considered politically correct? Is this a preview of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister? Creating new obligations and labelling them rights?

More coverage of the climate change debate

The WSJ has a good article summarising some of the changes in the coverage of the global warming debate of late - focusing on Al Gore's personal issues in this department but also some of the other coverage of respectable scientists who disagree with Gore in part or in totality.

One of the biggest themes of the last several weeks is hypocrisy on Gore's part. It appears that, while urging all others to change their lives now to save the planet, he continues to live the same old luxury lifestyle while using his cash to pay off his guilt. There are obvious parallels here with the old practice of rich landowners sending others to fight in their place in wartime - it was no more honourable then.

More on business and climate change

The Wall Street Journal has an article on climate change (Cap and Charade) which looked at the issue of businesses getting sucked into the climate change debate. See previous blog from 27 January for the first mention of this. It focuses on the artificial scarcity in CO2 emissions caused by a cap-and-trade system, and the perverse incentives a plan to introduce such a system creates for businesses. Efficient ("green") businesses which already have low carbon emissions are seeking to get their allowances set as high as possible so they can make big windfall profits from selling their CO2 rights.

A nasty cynicism on the part of businesses has crept in around climate change - whereas they used to fight the climate change agenda on the basis that it would force them into changes in practices that would be detrimental for their businesses, they are now embracing it at least in some cases because they see a way to make a quick buck. But of course this lends additional false legitimacy to the whole campaign and it could end up coming back to bite them if it adds further to the "the debate is over" trend we're seeing.

Romney's CPAC speech

Mitt Romney gave a phenomenal speech at the CPAC conference on Friday. It's great written down (RedState has the full speech here) but he also did a great job delivering it (you can see part of it on Mitt TV here). So much better than his announcement speech, which was a bit of a damp squib. I guess it's a pretty different audience at CPAC from the nightly news, but this is the kind of stuff he's got to be saying and the way he's got to be saying it to really get attention and win votes. I hope we have more of it.

Gore's Nobel nomination

CNN reports that Al Gore has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, apparently for his work as an environmental advocate, primarily his film An Inconvenient Truth. There are two primary objections to this nomination.

Firstly, the prize was to be awarded, according to Nobel's will,

"to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".

Last year's nominee, Muhammad Yunus, though a person of considerable achievements and benefit to the nation of Bangladesh, was also a bit of a poor fit with the stated aim of the prize, having neither done much to promote fraternity between nations or had anything to do with promoting or holding peace congresses. Al Gore, a controversial figure at best, has hardly promoted peace and has done nothing in connection with fostering peace or "peace congresses". This is a point which the Economist, for one, picked up on back in October.

The second objection is that Al Gore is far from being universally admired for his work on environmentalism. He has been widely criticised (along with others) for mis-stating or exaggerating the problems of global warming and his alarmist tone. The alarm and worry caused by his presentations and his movie are certainly inconsistent with at least one definition of peace (and have very little to do with any other definition either).

Hopefully, this will turn out to have been a political statement on the part of the nominators and will not gain any greater credence. If it does gain wider attention and support, the Nobel Prize Committee will really have to think hard about a new set of criteria for the prize which are less in keeping with their founders' stated wishes but more in keeping with actual recent outcomes.

CNN report on global warming

A CNN report this week on the soon-to-be-released IPCC report on climate change has the headline, "Experts slam upcoming global warming report". The first paragraph of the report states:

Later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures.

So presumably, the experts (scientists and others with a commitment to the scientific method) have criticised the forthcoming report as alarmist? Not a bit of it. See the second and third paragraphs of the report:

But that may be the sugarcoated version.

Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. Many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers.

So it turns out that the critics are concerned that the report is not alarmist enough. CNN is here playing the game reporters occasionally do, whereby they seek to shift the centre of debate towards the left by presenting as opposing viewpoints more or less extreme versions of the same position, from the left of the political spectrum. This allows them to act as if the debate is not whether global warming is real, is caused by human action, or even is problematic, but on exactly how bad it is and how quickly we're all going to die. The article focuses on the melting of large ice sheets, which some "critics" say has not been taken into account in the report.

Others believe the ice melt is temporary and won't play such a dramatic role.

That debate may be the central one as scientists and bureaucrats from around the world gather in Paris to finish the first of four major global warming reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel was created by the United Nations in 1988.

Luckily, however, the IPCC is known for playing it safe and under-stating the risks:

Rahmstorf, a physics and oceanography professor at Potsdam University in Germany, says, "In a way, it is one of the strengths of the IPCC to be very conservative and cautious and not overstate any climate change risk."

Thank goodness for that, then. At least it's not like the last IPCC report has been used as the basis for every hysterical bit of news reporting about the environment for the last five years.

"Big CarbonCap"

While the rest of the country was obsessing about Iraq and the State of the Union address, few commentators picked up on the meeting of business executives urging President Bush to do more about climate change. One who did was Kimberley Strassel, who has taken over the re-launched Potomac Watch column at the Wall Street Journal.

This week's column dug a little deeper into the meeting and the attendees than anyone else and came up with some interesting titbits.

Democrats want to flog the global warming theme through 2008 and they'll take what help they can get, even if it means cozying up to executives whose goal is to enrich their firms. Right now, the corporate giants calling for a mandatory carbon cap serve too useful a political purpose for anyone to delve into their baser motives.

An interesting point. When business leaders turn green, their usual critics on the left keep mum because they need whatever support they can get. Somewhat more worryingly, no Republicans pointed out what was going on here. At any rate, it was under-reported.

But what we risk doing here is what has already been happening in the UK - i.e. that all the major parties sign up to "doing something" about climate change before we really know what that "something" should be. At this point, there are at least five major obstacles to conclusively proving what needs to be done about climate change:

• We still don't have a clear and consistent picture of how much temperatures have risen or are likely to rise
• We haven't been able to establish a causal link between human activity and any warming that has taken place, only a correlation between increases in carbon dioxide emissions and observed warming
• We don't know how much warming (or cooling) would be taking place without the human impact, which makes it very difficult for us to try to get back to a notional planetary equilibrium
• We don't have a good idea of exactly how much we need to reduce greenhouse gases to achieve the desired levelling in temperatures
• We don't understand what impact global warming would have in totality, and whether this impact would be, on balance, positive or negative for human welfare across the globe.

In the absence of really good answers to these questions, it seems foolish to rush headlong into signing legislation that would make significant attempts to impact climate change. This could end up being nothing but a costly exercise in PR for the politicians, lobbyists and now business leaders who jump on the bandwagon. Much more attention needs to go to answering the questions more authoritatively, stating what we really do know in measured terms rather than hysteria, and understanding more about the possible conflicts of interests in the lives of those who are driving the climate change agenda. Strassel does a good job in identifying the key conflict of interest which exists for these business leaders - they are supporting a plan that would reward their companies for something they are going to be doing anyway:

The Climate Action Partnership, a group of 10 major companies that made headlines this week with its call for a national limit on carbon dioxide emissions, would surely feign shock at such an accusation. After all, their plea was carefully timed to coincide with President Bush's State of the Union capitulation on global warming, and it had the desired PR effect. The media dutifully declared that "even" business now recognized the climate threat. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who begins marathon hearings on warming next week, lauded the corporate angels for thinking of the "common good."

Four of the affiliates -- Duke, PG&E, FPL and PNM Resources -- are utilities that have made big bets on wind, hydroelectric and nuclear power. So a Kyoto program would reward them for simply enacting their business plan, and simultaneously sock it to their competitors.

Hopefully the reporting of future statements by this group will see these efforts for what they are - the same old tactics that Democrats and the left in general usually smears but sees fit to overlook when they work to their advantage.

Interesting take on Mitt Romney

Ralph Kostant had an interesting take this week on Mitt Romney and whether his religion matters (and indeed whether it is an asset or a liability). As a Jew, he has a somewhat different perspective from the evangelicals who are presumed to be most likely to object to Romney's Mormonism. From his piece:

let me... explain why it would surprise me if any American hesitates to vote for a Presidential candidate solely because that candidate is Mormon. The answer is "St. David." St. David is a town of about 1750 residents, in Cochise County, Arizona. I first discovered St. David on a drive to Tombstone, Arizona, some 10 years ago. It was a beautiful, almost impossibly picturesque small town, and the most prominent building was the ward of the Mormon community, to which I suspect the entire population of St. David belongs...

St. David is about 16 miles north of Tombstone...

What does all this have to do with American presidential elections? Well, while Tombstone was founded in 1879, St. David was settled 1877. Mormon farmers started a town in the middle of Apache territory before Ed Schiefflien ever ventured out of Camp Huachuca. While Tombstone flourished as a Western mining boom town, filling our frontier lore with the tales of Wyatt Earp, the Gunfight at the OK Corral, the Bird Cage Theater and Boot Hill, some 16 miles away Mormon farming families went about their quiet lives, without the bars and brothels of their notorious neighboring community.

Just as Tombstone is part of American history, so is St. David. St. David itself is just one page from the rich history of the contribution of Mormon pioneers to the development of the American West. The Mormons have been part of the American scene for over 175 years. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints began in America. Love the Church or hate it, one cannot deny its essential Americanness. Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution requires that the President be a natural born citizen of the United States. The Mormon Church is a natural born religion of the United States. It would be indeed be ironic if American voters were to conclude that an adherent of this most American of religions should not hold the nation's highest office.

The upshot of all this is: the Mormon Church is about as American as they come - as some have said, Mormons (who originally were separate from the United States before Utah achieved statehood) have become more American than the Americans since that time. The Church is not some new-age cult cooked up in the latter part of the 20th century, but rather is a long-standing religion with a rich history rooted in America (and just 54 years younger than the country itself). Perhaps this might suggest positive rather than negative associations for those who are its members.

Jacob Weisberg's rant

I know the thought that Republicans will probably win the presidency for the 6th time in 8 elections has got the Democrats worried, but they are beginning to take their response a little far.

Jacob Weisberg has a piece in Slate and in the Financial Times about Mitt Romney in which he posits that his religion disqualifies him for office. It seems that Romney has the Democrats particularly worried, and even though he's still officially unannounced as a presidential candidate, we've already seen him attacked for his change of stance on abortion, a perceived change of stance on gay rights, his hiring of a lawn care company that hires illegal immigrants and his underwear.

Weisberg's column takes this a step further and is arguably more honest about what really gives the Democrats the heebie-jeebies about Romney - his faith and his religiosity. Democrats are always uncomfortable about religious people holding office, because they feel that religiosity is inherently irrational. However, they're willing to suspend this distaste for faith when it comes to their own candidates (Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy...) or when the religion in question is Islam rather than Christianity.

Weisberg's central argument appears to be that the central tenets of Mormonism are particularly unbelievable and that anyone who subscribes to them must be inherently off their rocker. He does his level best to make these beliefs sound as ridiculous as possible - case in point: "Smith was able to dictate his "translation" of the Book of Mormon first by looking through diamond-encrusted decoder glasses and then by burying his face in a hat with a brown rock at the bottom of it." While this clearly has some basis in Smith's actual claims, it uses language intended to mock and degrade rather than to enlighten. He concludes with the rather strong statement, "He [Smith] was an obvious conman." Weisberg dismisses all who hold such religious beliefs with the assertion: "By holding them, someone indicates a basic failure to think for himself or see the world as it is."

However, he appears to have realised that most major religions have beliefs which those of a strictly scientific bent would find hard to swallow - Catholicism has transubstantiation and the infallibility of the Pope, Judaism has the parting of the Red Sea and the predicted return of Elijah, Islam believes that conversion through force is acceptable, Hindus believe in reincarnation etc. etc. He dismisses this strongest of counter-arguments with a lame comment about the fact that Mormonism's "fraud" is more "transparent" and "recent". Apparently, one is only tainted by holding beliefs in the supernatural if the events in question occurred less than 200 years ago... His assertion that the "greater religions" have had time to "splinter, moderate, and turn their myths into metaphor" - i.e. that they have been victims of in-fighting and disagreement over doctrine, have changed some of those doctrines over time and have distanced themselves from some core precepts by describing them as metaphors rather than reality. If these conditions are supposed to recommend these religions to us, Weisberg's views are strange indeed.

Let's return though to Weisberg's assertion that someone who holds such beliefs will fail to "think for himself or see the world as it is". Where is the evidence of this in Mitt Romney's career to date. Where, when he ran Bain & Company or later Bain Capital, when he turned around the Salt Lake Olympics, or during his time as governor of Massachusetts, were the signs that this man could not think for himself or see the world as it is? Where is such evidence in the career of Harry Reid (now Senate Majority Leader and also a Mormon), Orrin Hatch, Michael Leavitt or other members of the LDS Church currently prominent in politics?

The fact remains that the best possible measure of someone's fitness for presidential office is his or her past performance and achievements, not proxies for their state of mind, whether religious, sexual or racial. Weisberg again pays lip service to the fact that religious tests are constitutionally prohibited but then uses his whole article to propose such a test. Religious tests are banned precisely because they attempt to replace a judgment about an individual's fitness for office with a judgment about their religion - exactly the mistake Weisberg makes in this piece. There is no analysis of his record or of how his religious views will shape his policy stances - which is a legitimate subject for discussion.

Still, this is all just another sign that Mitt Romney along with the raft of other strong candidates for president from the Republican side, are scaring the living daylights out of Democrats staring the stark choice between Hillary Clinton (all the baggage of the Clintons without the charisma) and Barack Obama (untested junior Senator with left-wing views) in the face.

Washington on politics and religion

From an article in the Sacramento Bee this past week comes this quote from George Washington's farewell address:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness -- these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.

This makes the important but subtle point that religious motives should certainly inform and guide political behaviour, even if no particular religion may be officially endorsed by the state. In the context of Mitt Romney's campaign, this suggests that he should make clear the ways in which his faith will inform and guide his policies while at the same time making clear that he will "render unto God that which is God's, and render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's".

Back after a hiatus

It's been some time since I've posted here and there's been quite a gap since my last post. However, I hope to post more regularly in future. There will probably be more emphasis on Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency going forward as well as I've taken a personal interest in this campaign.

Jan

Enjoy it while it lasts

Enjoy the honeymoon while it lasts. The liberals won't give the President credit for long. This short-term quasi-endorsement of President Bush's Middle East policy will crack up within weeks.

Democracy will not be achieved overnight in the Middle East, and the President has never claimed that it will. But count on it that the liberals - whose motto might well be "no-one will ever call me on it if I change my tune" - will quickly return to their strategy of calling his policy "an impossible dream" etc. Having briefly accepted the blindingly obvious because not to do so would smack of stupidity, they will quickly return to the negativist attitude which characterises all liberal foreign policy - "nothing ever changes, especially when America tries to bring about the change."

How long will this about-face take? I predict a matter of weeks from now.

Democracy in the Middle East

It seems that President Bush's hopes for democracy in the Middle East are already beginning to bear fruit, despite the skepticism of many on both sides of the political divide.

Just a few examples of the spread of democracy and reform in the Middle East in recent months:

• the collapse of the Lebanese government in the face of huge protests
• hints by President Assad of Syria that he might consider reforms both at home and in the Lebanon
• moves towards democracy by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt
• the extension of suffrage to women and municipal elections in Saudi Arabia

All of these since the President's inaugural and state of the union addresses, in which he emphasised the need to spread democracy and freedom throughout the world. And of course, all of them come on top of the elections in Iraq at the end of January and the Palestinian elections which followed the death of Yasser Arafat. A nice summary of the current state of democracy in the Middle East is available on the BBC website.

It now seems that we may be witnessing a Ronald Reagan-like vindication of a much-ridiculed Republican president's policies, despite the assertions of the foreign policy intelligentsia. Of course, we know from experience that none of those who ridiculed President Bush's plans will ever acknowledge that they were wrong.

State of the Union address

As ever, the State of the Union speech has been picked over ad nauseam by the press, and commentators both pro and con allowed to share their views on TV and in the press. Those who enjoyed the speech were primarily those who supported President Bush's re-election campaign, while those who denigrated it were primarily those who supported Kerry in the recent election. In other words, it won over none of those commentators on either side of the spectrum - no surprise there.

But according to polls conducted by CNN and others with ordinary people throughout the country, those who listened to the speech responded much more favourably to questions about President Bush after the speech than before it - by about 15%, apparently. This is worth looking at. What was it about this speech that had such a powerful impact? Wasn't President Bush just reiterating many of the same policies that he outlined during the election campaign? He was, but now that the "ra ra ra" aspects of campaigning have been dispensed with, President Bush is able to articulate his policies in a more measured fashion, explaining his stance and providing the supporting evidence on subjects such as social security.

This, along with last week's inaugural address, also marks the first time since the Republican Convention that a substantial speech has been shown in full on national TV. During the campaign, the positions of both the President and Senator Kerry were reduced to soundbites, as is customary, so that the Social Security debate was reduced to "Social Security is almost bankrupt" versus "Bush wants to take away your benefits." In the State of the Union speech, Bush was able to explain the real situation, which is more nuanced than soundbites are able to convey. The fact is that Social Security will not fall apart tomorrow, or even next year, if nothing is done to reform it. But, at the same time, if nothing is done over the longer term, it will run out of funding, which will lead to either a need for increased taxes or a cut in benefits. Ironically, it is the "do nothing" position which would put future benefits at risk, not the reformers' position.

President Bush used the customary terminology to describe this situation, saying that Social Security faces bankruptcy unless the system is reformed. Nancy Pelosi and others rejected this terminology as alarmist, but conceded that the system faces a funding shortfall if it is not reformed. In a business, a chronic inability to fund obligations would lead to just that - bankruptcy - but apparently this standard terminology is unacceptable when used to describe the Social Security quandary. Why should this be? It's simple - bankruptcy is a concept most ordinary people can relate to - it withdraws the cloak of complexity the opponents of reform want to use to convince people that the problem is not simple to define, and therefore not simple to solve. Allow people to see how simple the problem is, and President Bush's desire to reform the system is much more compelling. Hence the Democrats' unwillingness to submit to the logical clarifying terminology.

On other issues, too, the President explained his policies in his trademark, straightforward style, and viewers responded positively to that too. On healthcare, foreign policy, immigration and other policy areas the President discussed in his speech, he was rightly applauded for setting an overall framework and calling on the combined legislators of the House and Senate to prepare bills to bring these policies into effect.

And, of course, there were the non-verbal sections of the speech - the introduction of invited guests from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the parents of a soldier killed in Iraq. The image of those parents embracing and being embraced by the Iraqi pro-democracy activist was a fitting confirmation of the rightness of the war in Iraq, regardless of the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction.

In all, the speech set a solid foundation for the second Bush administration. He made it clear that he was serious about his campaign promises, as those who know him and his style could have told us, and does not intend to conform with the supposed precedent of lame-duck second-term presidents. Assuming there are no real or imagined scandals, and assuming the Democrats don't follow through on their anti-democratic filibuster plans, President Bush should be able to get a great deal done in his second term.

It is conceivable that by the end of that second term, we could have significant progress towards peace in Israel and Palestine, fledgling democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, reform underway in Social Security and the tax system, and many other positive changes. The world in 2008 could look very different indeed from today's world, and this would set things up nicely for President Bush's heir, whoever that may be.

The search for WMDs ends

It has now been announced that the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq has ended, without finding the weapons being searched for. This has naturally re-ignited the debate about the reasons for going to war in Iraq and the justification used at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and might use them against his enemies in the Middle East and beyond. Since the war has always been unpopular with a (sometimes very vocal) minority and there have always been those who suggested WMDs were not to be found in Iraq, this is reasonable. But the fact remains that (a) the Bush administration genuinely believed that there were WMDs in Iraq and (b) even if there were no WMDs, the war was still justified. It is worth taking each of these points in turn.

(a) The Bush administration genuinely believed there were WMDs in Iraq

This point has been so belaboured by all involved that it does not justify an exhaustive treatment here. The facts, however, are these: not only President Bush and his team, but also the UK government, the UN, previous US president Bill Clinton and many others believed that there were WMDs in Iraq. This belief was reinforced by several facts: Saddam had previously had WMDs and these were not accounted for, Iraqi dissidents and sources within Iraq continued to tell western intelligence agencies that they did exist, there was some photographic evidence of programs still going in Iraq. In addition, in the category of circumstantial evidence, Saddam and his government continued to resist the efforts of the UN weapons inspectors to certify that his previously-held WMDs had been destroyed, behaviour that is difficult to explain unless there really was something to hide.

The question then becomes, how did our intelligence services get it wrong? And why did Saddam Hussein act as if he did have WMDs and fail to comply with the UN ultimatum that would have prevented war? Several explanations present themselves:
(1) WMDs really did exist in pre-war Iraq, but they were destroyed and/or moved to neighbouring countries such as Syria before the war began. Thus, all the evidence was accurate, but the WMDs were no longer in Iraq when the search began post-war.
(2) Saddam Hussein genuinely believed he possessed WMDs, because the culture of fear he had created made his minions mislead him into believing they still existed even when they didn't. Thus, it is not surprising that the evidence suggested there were still WMDs in Iraq because the leader of the administration himself still believed there were WMDs
(3) Saddam Hussein knew he did not possess WMDs but had to resist the advances of the UN to maintain the respect (if that is the right word) of his people. He could not be seen to be bowing to outside pressure when his whole regime was based on a show of power and intimidation. This does not explain the evidence suggesting that WMDs existed in Iraq pre-war, but does explain his resistance against inspections.

Whichever of these scenarios is correct, it does not change the fact that the Bush administration and many others genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and that this posed a threat at least to Iraq's neighbours and possibly also countries further afield including the US and the UK.

(b) Even if there were no WMDs, war in Iraq was still justified

The official justification for the war in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and that he therefore posed a threat to Iraq's neighbours and others. This justification was necessary because for many citizens of the US, the UK and other countries involved in the war, the only legitimate reason to go to war was to neutralise a threat against those countries. However, there were several reasons for going to war, and this was only emphasised because it was the most compelling and because there was a need to focus on a single justification to provide simplicity and clarity for the people of the countries involved to rally around.. This justification has subsequently turned out to be less compelling than it seemed at the time, but the other justifications still hold.

Arguably the best reason for going to war was simply that the international community had issued a number of ultimata to Saddam Hussein, with which he had refused to comply, and at some stage the UN and its members were going to have to back up their threats with action to maintain any kind of credibility with dictators such as Hussein. Although the US has been accused ever since of attempting to bypass the UN, the action of the "coalition of the willing" has actually bolstered the position of the UN and its leading members in that it prevented this loss of credibility. An interesting side-effect of going to war in Iraq has been the compliance of Libya with the demands of the US and UK to dismantle its own weapons programs. Regardless of whether WMDs were found in Iraq or not, the need to maintain the credibility of the international community in meeting threats posed by rogue threats remains a compelling reason for the war in Iraq after the fact.

Among the other reasons for going to war were:

• the need to remove a cruel dictator from power - the "regime change" argument. This argument is shaky on its own, because it is easily argued that other countries have their own dictators, which are at least as worthy of removal as was Saddam, but it adds weight to the other justifications for war when taken collectively
• the need to establish democracy in the Middle East as an example to the rest of the region. With elections in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, the argument that Muslim countries are incapable of embracing democracy will slowly be exposed as the myth it is, just as the same myth about Asian cultures was debunked fifty years ago
• the need to dismantle havens for terrorists across the world. Iraq has long been a safe haven for terrorists. Although some of the attempts to link the 9/11 attacks with Saddam's regime have stretched the truth, it is the case that terrorists have been safe in Iraq for far too long. The war in Iraq may therefore also be considered a part of the Bush Doctrine that those who harbour and aid terrorists are to be treated like the terrorists themselves.

Therefore, even when the WMD justification has fallen flat, these other justifications, paramount among them the need to maintain credibility for the leading democratic nations in their international efforts, still make the war in Iraq justifiable. All of these arguments will be that much more powerful when the effort in Iraq is finished, when power is handed fully back to the Iraqis and when the insurgency is crushed. But they still hold considerable weight now and help neutralise the argument that the absence of WMDs in Iraq removes any justification for the war.