Throughout this week Lord Ashcroft will be submitting a diary from Tampa, Florida where the Republicans are meeting to nominate Mitt Romney for the US Presidency. American political conventions may be show business on a gigantic scale – there are 50,000 delegates in Tampa, with the biggest international press corps for any event outside the […]
By Tim MontgomerieFollow Tim on Twitter Recent opinion polls had suggested that at this very early stage of the presential run-in (the big Conventions and potentially decisive debates are still to happen), Obama was beginning to open up a reasonable lead in national and battleground opinion polls. Mitt Romney has decided to respond with a very […]
By Tim MontgomerieFollow Tim on Twitter The Financial Times has been running an interesting series on the future of American conservatism. I've spotted five contributions so far: Senator Olympia Snowe on how the Republican Party can win again; Glenn Hubbard on a long-term growth agenda; Governor Jon Huntsman of the need for true conservatives to "despise […]
Dennis Lennox is a newspaper columnist for The Morning Sun, a daily newspaper in the U.S. state of Michigan. He is also a public affairs consultant, who has worked internationally and observed elections in Canada, Norway, Sweden and elsewhere. Follow Dennis on Twitter. The ruling today by the federal Supreme Court that the law commonly […]
By Tim MontgomerieFollow Tim on Twitter There are two important US-related pieces of news overnight. First is that another very senior leader of al-Qeada has been killed by a drone strike. It has been one of the strengths of the Obama presidency that he has continued to take the fight to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network […]
David Skelton is Deputy Director of Policy Exchange. You can follow him on Twitter @djskelton. Newt Gingrich’s annihilation of Mitt Romney in the South Carolina primary served to highlight the Republican front runner’s biggest weakness – he finds it difficult to empathise with blue collar voters. His campaign was found out in a state where unemployment […]
A shorter version of this piece appeared on Comment is free. It was almost poetic that Mitt Romney should score 25% in the Iowa caucus and win by just eight votes. The narrow result encapsulated the lack of enthusiasm for the man who Ann Romney introduced, last night, as “the next President of the United […]
By Tim MontgomerieFollow Tim on Twitter. The Wall Street Journal is hailing last night's US budget deal (that still needs to be formally ratified) as the biggest victory for small government conservatives since the 1996 welfare reforms. What does the deal do? It is a two phase process; In phase one the debt ceiling is […]
Commenting on the US debt ceiling debate Vince Cable has described the US Republicans as behaving like "right-wing nutters". Ryan Streeter of ConservativeHomeUSA explains why John Boehner and other Republicans have decided to play hardball with the high-spending President Obama. The debate raging in Washington over America’s debt ceiling has generated a flurry of competing […]
By Matthew BarrettFollow Matthew on Twitter US Republicans are having a tough time considering who their candidate should be for the 2012 Presidential election. Mitt Romney is the current front-runner, but has a ceiling of support at around 35-40% of the vote. He is fatally hamstrung, however, by the healthcare law he passed when he […]
Tim Montgomerie Many of us would have liked David Cameron and George Osborne to have set out their deficit reduction strategy in more (if not full) detail before the last General Election. My belief was that the country was ready for candour and would have voted for truth telling. Cameron and Osborne decided that it […]
At the beginning of the month, Tim wrote about the battle going on between the Republican Governor of Wisconsin and the vested interests of the public sector unions. Watch the video below to see how some important progress was made last night.
Tim Montgomerie On one side of the battle are Wisconsin’s public sector unions. 60,000 of them have been protesting in sub-zero temperatures. Teachers have walked out of classrooms. Doctors have abandoned their surgeries. On the other side is the new Republican Governor, Scott Walker. He wants to cut pay, entitlements and end collective bargaining. Obama […]
Tim Montgomerie Two noteworthy pieces on Ronald Reagan. First from William Rees-Mogg in today's Times (£): "He is one of the four major Presidents in the history of the Republican Party: Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan. He brought the Cold War to an end — the last great global victory for the United States. […]
Tim Montgomerie I've just finished the final and full dress rehearsal for the launch of ConservativeHome USA. We launch at 11.30am tomorrow, UK time. One of the pieces I wrote was a summary of Sarah Palin's letter to the new Congress. Here's my post… *** Sarah Palin has written an open letter to Republican Freshmen, […]