Contrary to accepted wisdom, the bitter mud-slinging between the two Democratic candidates over the few past months has probably helped the party more than it has hurt it, writes Mary Fitzgerald. While working on Obama's Pennsylvania campaign recently, I often heard party elders rueing the "ammunition" the warring camps were supplying for McCain in the November election (Obama the "elitist" snob, Clinton the amoral "monster" and so on).
But this ignores the enormous potential gains from their gripping contest. While the Democrats dominated the headlines throughout March and April, McCain slipped from the public eye. The ferocity of the competition enabled both candidates to amass formidable war chests (in March alone, they jointly raised $60m). And such was the frenzied interest in the battle that for the first time in the state's history, the number of registered Democrats topped 4m. Meanwhile, the successful Dem candidate will go into the November election battle-hardened, while McCain will not have been tested in debate for nine months or so.
What's more, the intelligence gathered by the legions of unpaid Obama and Clinton volunteers (who spent weeks knocking on doors and making phone calls up and down the state) has been pooled into a single database. Come November, then, the Democrats will have a goldmine of information about hundreds of thousands of voters—names, contact details, previous voting preferences. No bad thing in a crucial swing state.
More from Mary Fitzgerald on the Democratic race in herweb exclusive articlethis month
Arabia ascendant?
April's London book fair had as its special guest the Arab world, and paid homage to the progress being made in literary culture within the 22 countries where Arabic is an official language—as well as in the translation of key texts between Arabic and other languages. Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, promised a "glorious image of Arab culture" will replace the "stereotypical picture of Arabs and Muslims generated by extremism," and celebrated the fact that the Arab world has seen more books published in the last five years than in the previous 50.
Gordon Brown also put in an appearance at the fair, praising reading as "the great passion of my life." Quizzed about his tastes, Brown revealed his formative teenage influences: John Braine's Room at the Top, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. It's a distinctly higher-brow selection than Tony Blair's choices during his premiership: CS Lewis's Narnia books, Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. But do Brown's choices of two English authors and an American reflect a more delicate sense of Britishness than Blair's Irishman, two Scots and an Englishman?
Image, below: 600 police officers head down Romilly Road (home to Prospect publisher John Kelly) on the way to Blackstock Road as part of Operation Mista, aimed at criminal gangs dealing in drugs and stolen goods.
Credit crunch lit
Charles Morris's highly regarded new book on the credit crunch, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (PublicAffairs), will doubtless be the first of many to hit the shelves. But this is not instant punditry conjured up by a hack with a publisher on his back—the book has been in gestation for three years. In 2005, Morris left his job running a software company that designed the risk models used by investment banks. When he saw how the banks used his software, he decided they were crazy. The $1 trillion figure is Morris's estimate of the cost of the follies of recent years. But his forecasting isn't perfect: he thought the crunch would come in 2008, and had to bring forward publication after the events of last summer.
Meanwhile, the Audit Commission is meant to ensure taxpayers get value for money. But will that body subject its own official history—Duncan Campbell-Smith's Follow the Money (Allen Lane)—to the withering scrutiny of its bean-counters? Some might say that buying about 90 per cent of the print run at vast cost to the taxpayer was an act of, er… bureaucratic vanity publishing.
Standpoint
Best of luck to the new centre-right monthly Standpoint, due to appear shortly under the editorship of occasional Prospect contributor Daniel Johnson. Johnson recently told Radio 3's Night Waves that the magazine, published by the Social Affairs Unit, will aim to "defend western civilisation"—quite a tall order for anyone, let alone a small-circulation magazine. Johnson should start by having a quiet word with Wikipedia's editors, who recently removed a page about Standpoint on the grounds that it was insufficiently "noteworthy."
The Millwall fans of Jerusalem
The Premier League is not the only competition to attract profligate Russian oligarchs. Arcady Gaydamak (whose son owns Portsmouth FC) has spent lavishly on taking Beitar Jerusalem to the top of Israeli football. So imagine his chagrin when in mid-April, four minutes from clinching this season's title, Beitar fans launched a pitch invasion that forced the game to be abandoned, leaving the team's fate to a disciplinary tribunal.
For Gaydamak, who harbours political ambitions, Beitar have so far been a profile-raising asset. But like many would-be populists before him, he is now discovering that football fans are an unstable and capricious constituency.
Read more on the colourful politics of Israeli football in next month's Prospect, and tune into David Goldblatt's "Football in the Holy Land," Radio 4, on 24th April, 11am.
Oy vey, Prospect!
Last month's cover image landed Prospect in hot water. Dropping the Star of David into the image of the US flag was seen by some as an "indefensible mixture of cliché and Jew-baiting," as one "flag-antisemitism anorak" on the Engage-Forum website put it.
This tradition has an illustrious pedigree: previous offenders include the New Statesman, the Independent and the first edition of Mearsheimer and Walt's controversial The Israel Lobby.
The responses on the Engage site ranged from the sympathetic (the cover was an "ironic pastiche") to the outraged: one correspondent described it as a testament to the "dire state of liberal-left journalism."
Two Silvios
There is a consensus that Silvio Berlusconi is not, in the words of the Economist, a fit person to be prime minister of Italy (and the 71 year old is just a month younger than John McCain). But will we be forced to change our minds? In the closing hours of the election, as it became clear he had won, Berlusconi appeared on Bruno Vespa's chat show Porta a Porta—sometimes called the third chamber of parliament. Uncharacteristially subdued in triumph, Berlusconi talked of the need for agreement across the spectrum. After a bit of this rather low-key stuff, however, he appeared to get rather bored. He suddenly pulled out a prepared text, and began a bombastic series of promises. Which is the real Silvio? Will Italy's great problems—zero growth, creaking public sector, bankrupt state airlines—bring forth a different man? Will Berlusconi finally become fit for purpose in his third term of office?
My poor old China
