More proof that candidates' images are critical

Well, well, well - what did I say the other day about the race for the White House?

Hmm. Let's have a look: 'Things will probably be closer in the end than they look today... remember the lesson: nothing is set in stone, even when an election looks like it should be in the bag for one party or the other'.

It's not exactly Nostradamus. But it's not bad. For after his comprehensive shoeing at the hands of his Republican rival, Mitt Romney (above), Barack Obama finds himself on the slide. Suddenly, inexplicably, he could lose. He peaked at just under an 80 per cent likelihood of winning the election on betting sites, and one numerically-minded commentator gave him an 87.1 per cent chance of winning just a week ago. Now those numbers have been cut to about 64 per cent and 74.8 per cent. Going into the first debate, the President led by between three and four per cent: now his lead has shrivelled to almost nothing. Indeed, left-leaning Americans were sent into a state of panic by a Pew Research Poll putting Mr Romney four points ahead.

What a turnaround - all of which backs up what I said before the duel in Denver. Images of candidates and policies remain critical, even in an era of cynicism and highly-developed electoral campaigning technology. Voters had heard a lot of things they didn't like about Mitt Romney. He reassured them, suddenly posing as a concerned, moderate, middle-of-the-road businessman. Take away existing health cover? He seemed shocked. Not me, he opined. Privatise Social Security? No, I never said such a thing. Where would I find all the money for my tax cuts? Why, I'll stop giving money to public television - the equivalent of paying your mortgage by selling off a few tins of baked beans in your larder. The sheer brass neck of this grand intellectual larceny was breathtaking, but that's politics.

Mr Obama, on the other hand, seemed rather tired and disengaged. He wasn't as bad as people inside the media echo-chamber say: indeed, he was clam, measured and reassuring at points. But he wouldn't or couldn't even stir himself enough to attack his opponent's half-truths and obfuscations: an unforgiveable omission on the part of a man who carries about half his compatriots' political hopes on his back. He didn't even look into the camera during his wordy summation. No wonder voters preferred his rival by a margin of two-to-one. These little things shouldn't matter - but they do.

Yes, the 'essentials' of the campaign - a slowly recovering economy, a rising Presidential approval rating, even in that Pew poll, the perceived likeability of Mr Obama himself - all point in one direction: a very narrow Democratic win.

But now it will be close. The essentials might not matter. Mr Obama has turned an amble into a sprint. All because of candidates and policies. Or, if you prefer, 'events, dear boy: events'.

An Enlightening Greek Conference

Now, where was I? Oh yes, the relevance of history to policy. Well, if I've been a bit quiet of late, it's because I was trying to get some of that stuff done - rather than just writing about it.

I've been in a warm and sunny Athens (above) talking to corporate movers and shakers about 'creativity and innovation' - in my case, about urbanity and the city's role as a historic cluster of energy, innovation and creativity. 

What did I get out of it? Well, it was fascinating to see how many corporate structures force people to think tactically and (for those of us with an economics training) at the 'micro' level - rather than strategically and at the 'macro' level.

The audience was full, for the most part, of Human Resources professionals. What they wanted to know was: how can we get people to perform with more vim and vigour? What are the roots of creativity and innovation? How can we encourage those traits? Can we listen more effectively to their needs and desires, and would that help us free our employees' potential?

And lots of the academic and business professionals speaking responded: let's look at the whole picture. What about the one-offs such as William Blake, brave enough even to be despised and pitied in their time? What about the business environment in your sector - drowing in 'red water', where everyone cuts each other up, or 'blue water', a calmer and more co-operative environment? What about the insights of psychology and the types of people you're dealing with?

In my case, the insight was perhaps this: what about the energy limitations that we're going to face in the next thirty years, overcome in the nineteenth century of course by massive inputs of coal? What about trying to locate somewhere desirable at a time when we're going to face a huge drought of young people? What about links to government and the third sector, when growth is going to perhaps come from 'softer' or less expected places?

Yes, the Government's much-derided impact agenda (encouraging universities to work with business and civil society) is cramped, short-sighted, even absurd. But history - that history for which historians have suffered and struggled, that history that can open our eyes and enrich our minds - that's not so easily dismissed.

That's what I learned in Greece.

Statistics... not as simple as they look

Here's an interesting fact: statistics are complex things.

Sure, they always look like they're making clear points. Inflation is up by this much; unemployment is up by this much; this politician is this far 'ahead' of this other one. But it's not so simple, as I've argued in print many, many times. You have to be able to interpret the data, to explore the context, to understand the history.

So when The Daily Telegraph reported the other day that there were 'only 100 mature cod left in the North Sea', it was a misleading picture. It misled your present correspondent, though not quite as badly as many in the mainstream press. What they really meant to say was 'one estimate of 13-year-old cod in the North Sea says that there might only be 100 left of that age'. Except, of course, that this isn't a very good measure of what it means to be an 'adult' fish, and there are many millions of four-year-old and above cod left in that part of the world. So this blog is sorry if it gave a false impression. We should have stuck to our previous, more optimistic and published conclusions about recent legislation - which does at least offer some sort of way out via reform of the Common Fisheries Policy and the establishment of Marine Conservation Zones. At least we're admitting it here. Many outlets don't.

All the same, Fishing Ministers everywhere have been quick to pounce on the snafu to calm public nervousness. Don't worry, they imply; there's years of fish left. We don't need to shrink the fishing fleet by much. You can keep on munching on your fish and chips. Well, it's not true. Measuring fish by the millions doesn't account for the effect that fishing them out as quickly as they mature. Numbers are still far below replacement levels, and we still need to fish less, and more responsibly. Some economists even think that a temporary freeze on all fishing would be the best way to go - and prove more profitable in the end, as stocks are replenished. So the message is still: don't eat lots of white chunky fish without the dark blue Marine Stewardship Council label on it. Otherwise, you're helping to destroy the world.

In a way, this brings us back to one of the most interesting controversies raging over the present US Presidential election. That is: are the polls 'skewed'? Some Republicans think they are 'over-sampling' Democratic-leaning sympathisers with President Barack Obama. Pollsters answer that this is nonsense: by and large, they just report the party balance of the sample they get. If Democrats become more enthusiastic (and the evidence is that they have since their party's convention in North Carolina), then their presence among respondents becomes more noticeable. Who's right? Well, given how accurate and non-partisan polls have been since the 1970s, the pollsters are probably right. But you have to delve into the past, and into the statistics, to find that out. You have to know the history.

So, yes, there aren't only '100 adult cod left in the North Sea'. But there sure as hell aren't enough, either.

A big thank you to readers: I just wanted to say that last month was again Public Policy and the Past's best month ever, with traffic up yet again by ten per cent on the month before. So to the growing band of loyal surfers: thanks, let others know about PPP, and here's to many more readers!

Nick Clegg's fees apology: why it won't wash

The news that Liberal Democrat leader, and Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg had apologised for his vote in favour of raising student tuition fees (above) sounded like a welcome move. A political leader apologising? Taking responsibility for a broken promise? Spelling out the realities of plain old real life? It could only be welcome.

Until you looked at what he was apologising for. Because he wasn't saying 'we're sorry - we couldn't secure that because we're in a coalition'. He wasn't even saying 'we're sorry, we found out that we couldn't afford it once we were in office'. The voters might have thought that fair enough - and perhaps a refreshing change from leaders who blame everyone else, all of the time.

But no.

He wasn't apologing for any of those things at all. He wasn't offering those types of explanations. What he was really saying - and this is even more obvious after his leadership speech to the party's conference - was: the party's left-wing got it wrong all the time. We should never have even made the pledge. I warned you against it. I tried to reverse it. We should never propose underfunded social policies all the time. They're silly and opportunistic.

And you know what? He's wrong. And everyone knows he's wrong. Not really because the student fees pledge was funded and was affordable within the manifesto itself. Radically downsizing Britain's Trident nucler deterrent, for instance, is both a Liberal Democrat policy - and one that would easily pay for all English students to go to university for free.They have, to be fair, not been able to push many of these concepts through in office, because they are indeed in a coalition with a very different party.

No: Mr Clegg is being disingenuous because (as this column has argued again and again) the new student fees system is actually more expensive in this Parliament and the next than the old one. It's taxpayers, not undergraduates, who pay up front - to see the money only decades later, and with about 30 to 40 per cent of it written off forever. The whole structure is completely unsustainable, and will bankrupt both the Treasury and English Higher Education if allowed to wheeze on for too long. That's one of the main reasons why the Government is preparing to come back for even more cuts to university funding in the next spending round.

So it's got nothing to do with having to break a pledge that turned out to be unaffordable - one that was both costed, and the breaking of which squanders money on setting up a ridiculous off-the-balance-sheet accounting trick. Mr Clegg's rather painful (and easily satirised) apology video has got everything to do with shoring up his position within his party - precarious indeed now that there's a ready-made alternative waiting in the wings.

That's why it won't wash.

Election shock: candidates and messages matter

Whisper it softly, but President Barack Obama (above) has been stretching his lead for days and days now. The best statistical probability site gives him an all-time high chance of being re-elected, at nearly 82 per cent. Right now, punters on betting websites are giving him about a 75 per cent chance of victory. He leads in the national polls by an average of four per cent.

How can you tell that conservatives are worried? They are fulminating against pollsters' methods, arguing (largely falsely) that sampling based on the 2008 turnout is likely to be inaccurate. They've even set up their own polling site. Well, we'll know soon, won't we? But questioning the data - and questioning the media, the bearers of that data - is a sure sign that you're losing. Sorry, but there it is.

And why? Well, we should again perhaps keep pretty quiet about this, but it's just because Americans quite like their President as a person, and they like his challenger, Mitt Romney, less and less. They don't really like what they've heard about Republican policies on abortion, pensions, taxes and the economy. They think the Republicans have headed off into a right-wing desert - a fact that the President has very skilfully played on. So although they are unhappy about the state of their country, and they think that the President has been a bit ineffectual and perhaps too left-wing for them, they're willing to give him another chance. That's it.

Americans, of course, think of the 2004 election, when another not-particularly-popular incumbent was narrowly re-elected. But Brits will look historically at the 1992 General Election in the UK, when the Conservatives under John Major were (just) returned to office despite the terrific head-wind of a full-on recession. Why? Well, this is going to sound familiar: voters quite liked John Major, they didn't blame him for the crisis, and they suspected that his opponent (Neil Kinnock) wasn't up to it following his battering by a very right-wing press. Turn those party labels around, and you have 2012 in the USA.

This isn't to say that the economy doesn't matter. Yes, it doesn't look great. Yes, unemployment is high. But the stock market has been booming, surfing on a wave of cheap money from the Federal Reserve - a fact that is boosting pension plans and savings accounts across the USA. And if we look at the situation of the economy in 2009, and compare it to today, there's no contest. America has been slowly, painfully recovering - but moving ahead, inch by inch, all the same. Voters know this. They feel it. Statistical modelling that takes this into accout, indeed, would predict an Obama victory based on the numbers alone - even without his opponents' bungling.

Things will probably be closer in the end than they look today. But remember the lesson: nothing is set in stone, even when an election looks like it should be in the bag for one party or the other. Candidates, policies and messages matter.

Now that China has an aircraft carrier...

...lots of Americans are going to worry that their days of hegemony are numbered.

The news that the Chinese have today launched their first aircraft carrier (above) seems designed to hack into American fears of inevitable decline. 'Declinism', we call it in a British perspective - the organicist, determinist but almost certainly incorrect view that national decline is inevitable.

It is certainly possible that rising tensions between Japan and Taiwan might escalate into fully-fledged armed conflict - though hardly likely at this point. Still less does it look likely that the mainstream Chinese leadership would ever mount an armed challenge to Taiwan's independence, a foolish adventure that would indeed lead to a dangerous confrontation - with the USA.

But for now, China's carrier is a perfect paraable for that state's ability to project power itself. It looks good, arrayed with rank upon rank of naval personnel. It makes a statement. It rattles a sabre. But underneath all that pomp, it's an ex-Soviet ship that spent years rusting away in the Ukraine. There's not much of a strike force capacity off its deck. And just who is it aimed at, in any case? The whole thing is a 'look at me' pennant shoved up a not-particularly-impressive flagpole.

It is indeed the case that China is now the third biggest economy in the world - though of course its population is vast, so it ranks at only 121st in wealth per person. And although the United States faces vast challenges managing its debts (partly because its politicians are so bone-headed they won't compromise, even as they head towads a fiscal cliff), Chinese prosperity has in fact been propping up and reinforcing American growth prospects.

Fear of China is at this stage irrational - despite its launch of an aircraft carrier, sure to evoke echoes of Wilhelmine Germany's launch of a battle fleet in the last years of the nineteenth century. It's the equivalent of the persistent idea, virulent at the height of the Cold War, that the USSR was going to 'bury' the West's economy because of its purposeful, superior use of science and technology.

It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. China is going to run into capacity constraints, labour conflicts, inflation and good old-fashioned political dogfighting as the years go by. Come back and talk to us historians when they've got some of the marks of successful economies: the rule of law; labour rights; a functioning patent system; representative government... and two or three proper carrier battle fleets.

The gulf between voters and the political class yawns ever wider

US Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney (above) has had a pretty terrible couple of weeks. He failed to get a polling bounce from his Republican Party's national convention. He was deemed to have intervened too hastily, and too clumsily, when the Middle East erupted against an obscure American video insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Then an article broke the news of deep-seated discontent and in-fighting inside his campaign. To top it all, of course, a secret video recording was then released basically which basically said that Governor Romney had written off nearly half of all voters. Faced with the inaccuracies and bare-faced untruths in his string of insults, Romney then refused to apologise and turned his fire on a 14-year old video of President Obama

He is, by all rights, toast - so much so that many journalists have variously pronounced his run for the White House doomed, a farce that was over before it even began. 

But who has pronounced on all this? Not the voters. Not really. Despite a big swing towards the Democrats in Senate polling since that party's activist-enthusing convention, the numbers in the Presidential race have not shifted all that much. Despite a sizeable 'bounce' from President Obama's own gathering in North Carolina, that effect now seems to be fading a little. Polling averages have Obama about three percentage points ahead, rather than the two that he led by in late August. Big deal.

Now the President will probably still win. As of right now, betting sites give him about a 70 per cent chance of victory, and some of the best predictive modelling sites about a 75 per cent chance.

But that's not the point here. The interesting thing to notice about the furore surrounding Romney's campaign - according to many observers the worst in modern history - is that all this doesn't really play in Main Street. On K Street, Washington DC's lobbyist heaven, maybe. Inside newspaper offices, among scribblers and in the blogosphere, definnitely. On 24-hour cable news, most certainly.

But among the voters? Not so much. The majority of independent voters in key states say that Governor Romney's eye-watering '47 per cent' gaffe will make no difference to how they vote. Their questions remain: where are all the jobs going to come from? Will I be able to get one of them? Will petrol prices keep going on up, year after year? When will the housing and foreclosure crisis come to an end? There are tentative signs that the economy is looking up, at this stage only the barest of green shoots - but another reason to suspect that President Obama will win out in the end.

That's much more important than Mr Romney's tragi-comic blundering. The fact that you wouldn't know it from the media only shows how far apart the political class and the people have now drifted.