Toby Harnden

OK, so it’s been snowing a lot. There’s been a couple of feet of it around our house in northern Virginia, which has necessitated a lot of digging and paying to get a snow plough in. On Saturday, the main day of Snowmageddon, we didn’t venture out. But I managed to make it into work yesterday and again today. Frankly, it wasn’t that difficult – I got the Metro yesterday and drove in today.

But downtown Washington DC is a ghost town. That’s because the federal government has closed down for the second day and pretty much every other business associated with the government has followed suit. 

The dirty little secret? When it gets a good excuse, the vast US government bureacuracy prefers to stop working.

My Sunday Telegraph column this week is about Barack Obama’s strange failure to engage the rest of the world:
Europeans cheered Barack Obama every step of the way to the White House. They swooned when the candidate took his stump skills to Berlin, where he spoke of “the burdens of global citizenship” and promised to “remake the world”.

He had lived in Indonesia as a boy, travelled to Pakistan and Africa in his youth and came from a family that looked, as he liked to quip, “like the United Nations”. Then, in his first year in office, he made 10 trips abroad to 21 countries, making him the most travelled of all United States presidents in their first 12 months.

So it came as a rude shock….
Read the full thing here.

My Sunday Telegraph column this week is about John Edwards:
Even judged alongside the caddishness and sexual misdeeds of politicians through the ages, John Edwards will take some beating. Just when it seems that the pretty boy former Senator and 2004 vice-presidential candidate can sink no lower, a fresh revelation emerges.

We now know that Edwards cheated on his cancer-stricken wife by having an affair with Rielle Hunter, a New Age loon he met in a New York bar and then employed as a campaign videographer. He branded this “false”, “untrue”, “ridiculous” and “tabloid trash” until he was confronted with proof.
Read the whole thing here.

Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address last night (Photo: Getty Images)

A few thoughts after a very long and I though flatly delivered speech by President Barack Obama:

1. He’s not going to pivot towards the centre a la Bill Clinton 1995 – yet.

2. Obama realises many people find him too cool and detached so he laid on the “I feel your pain” stuff with a trowel. But this sat uneasily with the passages in which he tried to be optimistic. It was a difficult thing to pull off and I don’t think he succeeded.

3. The speech was uninspiring. Perhaps deliberately slow. Soaring rhetoric would not have worked. Perhaps the greatest talent Obama has – speechifying – is now not much use to him.

4. He… Read More

I’ll be sending updates on the State of the Union speech and the Republican rebuttal by Bob McDonnell, new Virginia governor, via Twitter here. Afterwards, I’ll paste all my tweets below – along with some post-SOTU blog thoughts.

   pretty good #sotu response from Bob McDonnell. brilliant staging 31 minutes ago from TweetDeck
 Justice Alito mouthing “not true” may be biggest moment of #sotu. Prob wasn’t clever of Obama to go for scotus. 34 minutes ago from TweetDeck
 Bob McDonnell has very presidential hair. Almost Romneyesque. #sotu 40 minutes ago from TweetDeck
 Is there a guy at back of room with sign saying: “NOD!” 41 minutes ago from TweetDeck
 Bob McDonnell goes for Benetton ad backdrop #sotu 45 minutes ago from TweetDeck
 Bob McDonnell limits himself to 10 minutes #sotu about 1 hour ago… Read More

Barack Obama is in trouble. His signature health care reform has been doomed by the Democrats losing their Senate super-majority. He needs to reconnect with ordinary Americans, his advisers tell him. So what does he do? He does a long interview with Diane Sawyer, the new ABC News anchor, in which he states that his big mistake was “we started worrying more about getting the policy right than getting the process right”.

Then the White House pushes out the disastrous Valerie Jarrett – who recently and hilariously described the Obama administration as “speaking truth to power” by bashing Fox News – to tell Politico that “there’s no one more frustrated than President Obama” and that the Scott Brown Massachusetts massacre was, er, nothing to do with Obama. “I don’t think it was directed at Barack Obama,” she said. “In fact, Senator Brown said himself he didn’t run against the President.”

This come… Read More

After the stunning loss of a Senate seat in Massachusetts there are no good options for the White House and Democrats in Congress. Whichever way you look at it, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Obama’s health care reform is doomed. He came within a whisker of passing historic legislation that had eluded his predecessors over the course of a generation – but that’s water under the bridge now.

The odds don't stack up well for Obama's health bill (Photo: EPA)

So how could the Democrats push through a heath care bill?

1. Ram it through by voting before Senator-elect Scott Brown is sworn in.

This seems to be off the table. Senators Jim Webb and Claire MacCaskill have ruled it out. If it was tried, it would… Read More

It still seems unthinkable that the Democrats could lose a Senate seat in Massachusetts. Ever since everyone got it wrong in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire in January 2008 we’ve all been reluctant to call New England election races before the votes have been cast. But Barack Obama’s party is already forming a circular firing squad and engaging in a big-time blame game. So if Scott Brown does beat Martha Coakley what will it mean? Here are 10 suggestions:

1. Health care reform is dead. Even if there was (and it’s doubtful) some procedural way the Democrats could push it through, such a move would be political suicide.

2. Obama will have failed to achieve his signature reform despite Democrats having had a healthy majority in the House and a 60:40 advantage in the Senate. That is a… Read More

Check out this passage from the unclassified six-page summary of the President Barack Obama’s review of the intelligence failures that led to the attempted attack by the Knicker Bomber on Flight 253 on Christmas Day:
Mr. Abdulmutallab possessed a U.S. visa, but this fact was not correlated with the concerns of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father about Mr. Abdulmutallab’s potential radicalization. A misspelling of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name initially resulted in the State Department believing he did not have a valid U.S. visa.
So this means that the US government’s computers apparently don’t have an equivalent of Google’s “Did You Mean?” tool that picks up misspellings and finds results for similar words.

If it had been realised immediately that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has a valid US visa then presumably the alarm bells would have begun to ring weeks before he actually flew – but they believed he had no visa because the State Department database or whatever… Read More

Barack Obama is angry. Very angry, apparently. The intelligence agencies “screwed up” (White House aides were eager to quote him as saying this inside his big meeting). There was no “I screwed up” moment from the commander-in-chief but he has repeatedly mentioned the a-word recently – “accountable” for the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab knicker bomber fiasco.

As in:
“we need our intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement systems – and the people in them – to be accountable” (Jan 5th)
and
“I will do everything in my power to make sure our hard-working men and women in our intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security communities have the tools and resources they need to keep America safe.  This includes making sure these communities-and the people in them-are coordinating effectively and are held accountable at every level.” (Dec 29th)
and
“a full investigation has been launched into this attempted act of terrorism and we will… Read More