It was, after all, only a staged joust in which the list of rules ran into 32 pages. But the first TV debate between the two men who would be President made an audience of us all. In America, they say it will be the spin put on it by handlers in the two camps that will count more than the debate. Well, the day after, it’s going Kerry’s way. Before, the media generally agreed he speaks in semi colons and is a flip flopper. Now, they’re rushing to him the highest compliment there is: Candidate Kerry looks like a ‘‘plausible commander in chief’’. But what was it, really, on display on TV that day? Even veteran American commentators look hard pressed for a clear answer. ‘‘I don’t think we’ve had a clear-cut difference between two presidential candidates on international issues since 1980,’’ Richard C. Holbrooke, former UN ambassador and now a top adviser to Kerry, told The New York Times on the eve of the foreign policy debate. Others contend that there are, in fact, clear differences on the priorities facing the American people, in a post 9/11 world. But does the debate, or even the whole presidential race, frame those differences? And are they about character, or policy? ‘‘In modern presidential campaigns,’’ explained the NYT, ‘‘candidates tend to pick foreign policy issues at least as much for what those issues say about them as for what they might have to say about the issues. They marshal policy differences as symbols, as markers of values, judgement or style’’. For the NYT, there are definitely two characters on show here, and two world views: ‘‘Mr Bush has a record of breaking with allies to act in what he perceives as vital American interest; Mr Kerry is more comfortable operating with consensus’’. Blair’s card Atal Behari Vajpayee did it all the time. In Britain, a two-term PM has expressed a desire to step down eventually and the exclamations haven’t stopped pouring in. On the last night of a party conference dominated by questions over his political future and on the eve of a stay in hospital for a recurring heart problem, Tony Blair decided to go public with his decision to resign at the end of the expected third term. Very few have read Blair’s announcement as a welcome signal that he doesn’t intend to go on and on. Mostly, they have set about parsing the statement for sly undertones. ‘‘No PM has ever announced his plans for his own future the way Blair did yesterday’’ wrote senior columnist Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. “Either they deflect the question, pretending they want to do the job forever, or they announce their resignation, effective immediately.’’ Blair has just converted himself into a lame duck PM, most agree — an outgoing PM, even though he may stick around till 2009. Was it a response to the criticism over Iraq that refuses to ease, or the long running tensions between the PM and his chancellor, Gordon Brown? Is Blair officially anointing Brown as his successor or is he actually throwing open the contest over the next four years? But in Prospect magazine, the focus was on Blair’s real opposition, or rather lack of it. The Tories. Leading Thatcherite Robin Harris analysed the modern Conservative party and saw a larger ailment. The reason why the Conservatives are on a ‘‘backward roll’, he said, is because the party has not been able to stake out new ground to the right where New Labour could not follow. With Labour shifting progressively to the right, the Tories are being self-destructive in not building on the victories Thatcherism notched in the battle of ideas in the 1980s, he said. The famously uncharismatic Michael Howard has promised, Harris wrote accusingly, to lead the party ‘‘from its centre’’. That G word Darfur. In Newsweek, columnist Samantha Power went back, more than 60 years. When Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe to the US and invented a word he thought would change the world. ‘‘Genocide’’, he thought, cobbled from the Greek geno (race or tribe) and the Latin cide (from caedere, killing), would ‘‘carry such stigma that States would be loath to commit the crime — or to allow it’’. Flash forward to the world this week, when Darfur remains the subject of the odd story in the media, no more. This is after the US President spoke of the ongoing ‘‘genocide’’ in Sudan last week at the UN. Earlier, the US Secretary of State delivered a formal finding of genocide to the Congress.
