Whatever the changes wrought in Iraq, the financial cost has been colossal. According to the Congressional Research Service, the price tag has been US$802 billion. According to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz it is closer to US$3 trillion —that would be roughly one-fifth of America's national debt.

Thinking at the Pentagon is now radically different from how it was on that balmy afternoon in 2003, when the sense of military possibility seemed pretty much limitless. As former Defence Secretary Robert Gates memorably put it in early 2011, anyone now advocating a land war in the Middle East or Asia should 'have his head examined.' Nor would anyone propose an open-ended military commitment elsewhere. America cannot afford it, and nor would the American public countenance it. The Pentagon's new strategic guidance document reflects this new political and fiscal reality: 'US forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.' Again, a statement of the new obvious.

A decade on, the 'Vietnam Syndrome' has been superseded by the 'Iraq Syndrome', a hesitancy to embark on new military adventures, a rejection of the doctrine of pre-emption, a return to multilateralism and international cooperation and, as in Iran, a heightened reliance on diplomacy and sanctions. There is a preference, as in Libya, to 'lead from behind', and to fight wars, ideally unmanned, from above. Military planners have come to rely much more heavily on drones and covert action. Counter-insurgency strategies are no longer centred on overwhelming force.

Syria has demonstrated America's strong aversion to enter into conflicts where there is no clear 'exit strategy', even in the face of such stark humanitarian need. A doctrinal approach to foreign policy, favoured by George W Bush and neo-conservatives, has been replaced by pragmatism applied case-by-case.

Far from being a symbol of American military might, as it was in 2003, the Pentagon itself reminds us of the country's relative decline. Over the next decade, it faces budget cuts totaling US$487 billion. Some of its giant aircraft carriers, awaiting refurbishments that the navy can no longer afford, cannot leave port. This includes the Abraham Lincoln.

Doubtless there have been moments of celebration since that 'Ground Zero' hoedown in 2003. The Iraq surge. NATO's involvement in Libya. The killing of Osama bin Laden. But ten years after the Iraq war, the Pentagon is a very different place. A mood of circumspection now prevails.

Image courtesy of Flickr user nkdby.

Football Federation Australia knows it should orientate itself towards its near neighbours, hence the 'Gateway to Asia' theme of its failed World Cup bid. But Australia also considers itself to be part of the footballing Anglosphere. Australia's finest players head for the Premier League. Manchester United and Chelsea are followed with just as much enthusiasm, if not more, than the Perth Glory or Adelaide Roar.

Of all Australian sports, football is by far the most demographically representative. The national team is packed with the sons of immigrants: Schwarzers, Aloisis, Ognenovskis, Brescianos. Its star player, Tim Cahill, was born in Sydney of a Samoan mother and an English father of Irish descent. In a nation of immigrants, it is the migrant game. Rare among the footballing codes, at the school level girls are as heavily involved as boys. Needless to say, it is also the only truly global team game.

The worldwide dispersal of Australia's footballing talent is also representative of the country's high-achieving diaspora. Current members of the national squad make their living as far a field as Russia, Uzbekistan, Holland, South Korea, Denmark, England, Qatar, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Germany and the US.

When it comes to global benchmarking, football is also usefully analogous. Up until 1974, the Socceroos failed to qualify for the World Cup, but the expectation now is that Australia will always make the finals. The best the Socceroos can normally hope for is to reach the last eight. But they would be disappointed not to make the final 16. A middle ranking power, should not Australian diplomats also be looking for top 16 status, while occasionally enjoying final eight influence? Occasionally, they might even pull off a bigger upset.

But the main reason I think the game works as a metaphor is because the Socceroos are great exponents of 'pragmatic improvisation', a phrase Graeme Dobell used in a recent post which rang true for me. They have been known to play 'home' fixtures in Britain. In Australia, in another sign of its flexibility, the team has no fixed abode (it has played at the MCG, Etihad Stadium, the new AAMI Stadium, the ANZ Stadium, Sydney Football Stadium and Suncorp). Often it cannot call on all of its best players, but usually makes the most of what it has got. In another demonstration of its adaptability, soccer has not been unafraid to call on outside coaching talent: Guus Hiddink, Pim Verbeek, Holger Osieck.

The Socceroos are flexible, nimble and geographically wide-ranging, three attributes that could also serve Australia well over the course of the Asian Century.

So no more let it be said that Australia punches above its weight in the diplomatic arena. Instead, it criss-crosses the field like a globe-trotting Socceroo.

Australia is well served by its Beijing correspondents, with Stephen McDonell of the ABC and John Garnaut of Fairfax as notable stand-outs. Richard McGregor, an Australian journalist who covered China for the Financial Times, is also the author of the acclaimed The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers. Elsewhere in the region, there is no shortage of fine Australian journalists reporting back from Japan, Indonesia or Thailand. Just look at ABC's regional strength, with correspondents of the calibre of Zoe Daniel, Mark Willacy and Helen Brown.

But there are supply-side problems. Newsgathering in China is obviously enormously difficult, given the Communist Party's strongly authoritarian, censorious and secretive streaks. Even the most rudimentary information, like the date when the Communist Party conclave was due to end, is hard to come by, according to TIME's Hannah Beech. And it can be difficult for journalists to get accreditation, although China is probably more accessible now than outsiders would think.

Storytelling is also a challenge, and not only because of language and logistical barriers. We are witnessing a seismic global shift, but finding ways of telling that story, over and over, requires imagination as well as diligence.

I found this when serving as the BBC's South Asia correspondent based in Delhi. There were only so many times you could film a call centre or contrast the shimmering mirror glass headquarters of its global out-sourcing giants with the slum conditions nearby. As the BBC's Asia bureau editor Jo Floto told me: 'The story of China is a story of process — of social and economic change — rather than events.' That is why the Bo Xilai story was such a sensation: it was a running Chinese news story that demanded updates everyday.

Asian coverage, in Australia and beyond, suffers more from a shortage of popular demand rather than problems with supply. For the reasons that Michael and Sam discuss, it is inevitable that America's great carnival of democracy, with its rich human tableau, should generate more excitement that the rather monochrome, heavily stage-managed events in the Great Hall of the People. Inevitably, the race for the White House is more riveting than the make-up of the Politburo Standing Committee.

So I doubt whether there will ever be parity between the news coverage of America and China. Beijing is unlikely ever to have the news entertainment value of Washington, or box office stars like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Better to hope that a more Asia-literate country will come to demand more Asian news, not out of a sense of geopolitical correctness but through genuine interest.

Clearly there is a long way to go. Just contrast the discrepancy in coverage on commercial news bulletins of the Chinese leadership transition with the visit of Charles and Camilla. In a sign of Australia's resilient Anglo-Celtic heritage, the cameras captured them on Melbourne Cup day watching from the VIP box as Green Moon, an Irish-bred horse, raced to victory.

Let's hope this kind of coverage of Asian Australians will also soon be a thing of the past: Channel Nine's A Current Affair 'racist beat-up' about the 'Asian invasion' of a shopping mall in the northwest Sydney suburb of Castle Hill, which was debunked within hours by the local paper. What Channel Nine put to air was not Australia in the Asian Century. It was Australia in the nineteenth century.

Photo by Flickr user slimmer_jimmer.

To begin with, the positive language of the White Paper seems at odds with the government's increasingly unwelcoming immigration and asylum seeker policies. Notes Soutphommasane: 'For many, the retreat from population growth and immigration, along with a hardened posture on asylum seekers, could be seen as a proxy attack on the conditions for a multicultural Australia.'

The White Paper claims also that Australians with Asian heritage have become 'active participants in Australian community and civic life'. But Soutphommasane shows that they are largely absent from the country's national institutions. Parliament can only boast three politicians of non-European background: Penny Wong, Lisa Singh and the indigenous Liberal MP Ken Wyatt. Wong is Canberra's only Asian-born politician.

The Australian Defence Force does not do much better. The 2007 Defence Census showed that 94% of the permanent members of the ADF were born in Australia, the UK, Ireland or New Zealand. Only 1% of permanent members hail from Asia.

Nor does Australian television, with the obvious exception of SBS, hold up a mirror to the country. Neighbours has not had a character of Asian background who has lasted more than a year. Commercial television especially could do much better, and there is a commercial imperative to do so. The ratings success of shows like MasterChef and Australian Idol is no accident. Both are more representative of the new Australia.

'A form of Anglo-Celtic community still defines the theory and practice of government,' he notes, and animates its national stories. But even in the ANZAC legend can be found 'unlikely dashes' of Asian flavour. Consider the role at Gallipoli and in France of Billy Sing, a sniper who was born of a Chinese father and British mother.

What makes Don’t Go Back To Where You Came From especially resonant is that Soutphommasane is the son of refugees. His parents escaped Laos following the communist rise to power in 1975, and made their home, via France, in Sydney's western suburbs. His study, which is both a history of the massive demographic changes that have overtaken this country and also a manifesto for placing multiculturalism at the very heart of national life, makes a vital and timely contribution to the Asian Century debate. 

Wrong side of demography

For the GOP, Romney's defeat is a massive loss. No president since Roosevelt has won re-election when the unemployment rate is above 7.2%, and presently it stands at 7.9% (though crucially it stands at 7% in Ohio). This should have been their year. Worryingly for the GOP, it is hard to think of an alternative Republican out of 2012's lacklustre field of candidates who could have performed better.

The Republicans really are on the wrong side of demography. In 2008, 67% of Hispanics voted for Obama. Romney did even worse, winning only 27% of the Hispanic vote. Hispanics now make up America's largest minority. In 1992, as the BBC's Jonny Dymond notes, they made up 2% of the electorate. Now its 10%.

The GOP's success in the late sixties to late eighties, when it won five out of six presidential elections, was based on the 'southern strategy', targeted at disgruntled white voters. Now it needs a Nevada strategy (a once reliably Republican state trending Democrat, where Hispanic population has grown 80% over the past ten years) or a California strategy.

Certainly, the party needs to reach out to new constituencies. Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina, puts it best: 'We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.'

A national election?

Oh for the races of old, voters in the battleground states must be thinking, after being carpet-bombed these past few months with negative advertising and presidential candidates. The battleground is shrinking to such an extent, as Adam Liptak notes, that this is no longer truly a national election. To bastardise Obama, it is not a blue states of America, or a red states of America, but a battleground states of America. In 1960 and 1976, 30 states were up for grabs. This year the focus has been on just ten: Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The political myopia is depressing turn-out, as Liptak notes, and having a distorting effect on policy. The biggest states in the union, New York and California, are completely ignored.

Small wonder that veteran commentators like Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker have repeated their calls for a national popular vote, something, of course, which will never happen.To boost turn-out, Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute has even called for America to adopt Australia's compulsory form of voting. Again, a non-starter.

Debates

I was among the many commentators who argued that, historically speaking, the televised debates rarely deserved the hype they now receive. This time, the first debate really did alter the dynamics of the race, though not enough, we will continue to note, to alter the outcome.

The debates do seem to growing in importance, perhaps because we are seeing the marrying of political culture and popular culture: an 'American Idol' effect. Television talent shows, in harness with social media, have greatly empowered viewers. They are also very in-the-moment; the focus is on a singular performance, rather than on what has come before. Is not the same now true of the televised debates? It helps explain why, in the space of ninety minutes, Romney could successfully reposition himself as 'Moderate Mitt'. We also saw something similar in the Republican primaries, where the 27 debates constantly changed the complexion of the race and made it so volatile.

Good policy makes good politics

It is an old adage in political circles, and one that seems to have been borne out by this election. A key moment of this race came not in 2012, but 2009 with the bail-out of the auto industry. It helped keep Michigan, Romney's home state, solidly Democratic. Crucially, it helped Obama win Ohio. We talked before the election about Obama's 'Midwest firewall'. The auto bail-out was one of the main reasons why it proved so flame-resistant.

Big issues

The fiscal cliff was barely discussed, nor climate change until Super Storm Sandy ripped through the north-eastern seaboard. Contrast that with the lavish coverage of trivialities, like the treatment of Romney's pooch, and 'gotcha moments' like the 47% tape. Foreign affairs hardly got a look in.

Overall, this was a fairly dismal campaign. As I have written elsewhere, for those predicting America's decline, this campaign will not only have provided new footnotes, but entire new chapters.

If he loses, however, party ideologues will take a wholly different view, and argue he was insufficiently conservative. Exhibit A will be his handling of Paul Ryan, the vice-presidential nominee. The choice implied that Romney would run as an unabashed conservative. Then he distanced himself from Ryan's signature policies, most notably his plans to privatise Social Security and to introduce Medicare vouchers.

For all the talk from Karl Rove during the Bush Administration of creating a 'permanent Republican majority', the GOP is on the wrong side of demography. Its hard line on immigration has obviously alienated Hispanics. Its tough stance on abortion has put off many women. As Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian reminds us, if Romney loses, it would be the third out of four presidential elections where the GOP has failed to win the popular vote. The party is in danger of suffering the same slump in presidential politics as the Democrats experienced in the late-1960s and early 1970s following their lurch to the left. The GOP won five out of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988.

In the short term, a return to more centrist policies is unlikely. On Capitol Hill, the GOP will suffer a further depletion of its dwindling  ranks. Some leading moderates, like Olympia Snowe of Maine, have retired. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana was ousted in a Tea Party challenge. Another GOP moderate, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, has also damaged his chances of one day becoming the party's presidential nominee by being so fulsome in his praise of Obama's post-Hurricane Sandy response.

In an otherwise negative and uninspiring campaign, the sight of this self-styled Republican attack dog embracing the President provided one of its most arresting moments. But it also spoke of the problem that besets America's increasingly dysfunctional politics. It took a storm with the destructive power of Sandy to deliver this fleeting moment of bipartisanship.

Photo by Flickr user edebell.

Public anger has led to military action in the past, most notably in 2009 when some 80,000 troops swept into the Swat Valley to flush out extremists after a video had been aired showing the Pakistani Taliban flogging a woman. What now?

For years, the Pakistan military has been ignoring American and NATO demands for a similar clamp down on the Taliban in Waziristan. But the generals, for all their contempt of democracy, have found it hard to resist the will of their own people when it is expressed so strongly. In a sign that the military was attuned to public feeling, the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, visited Malala in hospital before she was airlifted to Britain: 'We refuse to bow before terror,' he said afterwards. 'We will fight, regardless of the cost. We will prevail.'

Maybe. By the end of last week, Declan Walsh of The New York Times, another long-time Pakistan watcher, was reporting that the 'Malala moment' had passed. '[T]he backlash against Ms Yousafzai had already started in earnest,' he wrote. 'The religious right attacked the wounded schoolgirl, circulating images on the Internet that showed her meeting senior American officials and implying that she was an American agent.'

On the political front, Walsh also noted that the Karachi-based Muttahida Qaumi Movement was the only party to organise rallies against the Taliban: 'A stark contrast with the violent riots that seized the country weeks earlier in reaction to an American-made video insulting the Prophet Muhammad.'

The 'Malala moment' poses an interesting, if often neglected, question for western policymakers: what can be done to boost Pakistan's moderate middle? How can the people so outraged by Malala's shooting be given a stronger and more lasting voice?

In a recent essay for The Washington Quarterly, Reversing Pakistan's Descent: Empowering its Middle Class, Xenia Dormandy, a senior fellow at Chatham House, addresses this precise issue. Among other initiatives, she calls upon the State Department to harness Pakistani diaspora groups in America, to encourage a greater number of exchanges under its International Visitor Program and to open up the US textile market to Pakistan firms, which would bolster the ranks of the middle class. 'The middle class has both the desire for change,' she argues, 'and, in time, the potential to bring greater influence to bear on the elites to effect this change.' The problem, she says, is that Washington has played the short game rather than the long and dealt with the military rather than devoting enough effort to achieving wider societal change.

Empowering the middle class could certainly help end the country's India fixation, which lies at the root of the military's support for Jihadist groups who have been such useful proxies in the 'Great Game' power struggle with Delhi.

In one of my happier assignments in the country, I saw this for myself at a one-day cricket international between India and Pakistan in 2004, a game that marked the end of the cricketing drought between the two rivals that started after the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.

Pakistanis, rather than going in for the usual face-paint nationalism, turned up with the flags of both nations daubed on their cheeks. Many carried aloft banners with messages such as 'We Wish Friendship Forever'. Someone had sewn together a massive flag combining the Indian and Pakistani colours, featuring the slogan 'One blood'.

Most remarkable of all was the near delirious response to the scions of India’s most famous political dynasty, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, who appeared in the stands joyfully brandishing the Indian tricolour. This in a city that their grandmother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had bombed during the 1971 war. It was almost as improbable as watching the Bush twins turn up at a soccer match in Baghdad and receiving a standing ovation.

 The optimism that I left the ground with that evening proved short-lived. In the eight years since, Pakistan has become more radical and dangerous. It looks as if the Malala moment has proved just as fleeting. As the BBC's M Ilyas Khan notes: 'At a time when the US is talking about an endgame in Afghanistan, the attack on Malala puts the Pakistani government in a difficult spot. If it deals a decisive blow to Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, some elements within the establishment fear they would lose any leverage they might have in the future settlement of Afghanistan.' For the Pakistan military, regional 'Great Game' politics will always win out.

Photo by Reuters. 

Journalists, at a time when their own worth is ever more judged by how many page views they can muster, tend to warm to an internet sensation. The ricochet effect of social media has made the Gillard speech resonate even further. Certainly, she has achieved a global star power that she didn't enjoy previously.

There is a certain irony that a speech in Parliament House in Canberra has had more of a global impact than her address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. But it hammers home an important truth of diplomacy in the digital age: the internet means that any venue is potentially a global stage.

On the public diplomacy front, the effect has been pretty much instantaneous. Certainly, it has lent an unexpected frisson to her trip to India, a country where celebrity is of especially high currency. Were it not for the speech, I very much doubt whether the influential Indian newspaper The Hindu would have allotted so much space on its editorial page for her visit. As it was, Ratna Kapur greeted her arrival with a five star review: 'Gillard's speech has been hailed as a pivotal moment not only in Australian politics, but also globally,' she wrote, 'as it is rare for a woman leader to make such a forthright speech on sexism in public life.'

My sense is that the guest bookers on British and American television would have taken notice, as well. Let us hope the Prime Minister's office, which has tended to neglect the growing corps of Australia-based international media, returns their calls.

So far, as I wrote last month, Julia Gillard has been more of a Billy McMahon than a Kevin Rudd in terms of her diplomatic impact. By her own admission, domestic affairs have been the priority, a narrow view shared by Tony Abbott. But the Canberra speech has greatly amplified her global voice.

Nor has its grubby context, a motion touching on Peter Slipper's horrid text messages, undercut its appeal abroad. As if to prove the point, a Guardian editorial in praise of the Gillard speech originally got the background story badly wrong and suggested the former Speaker had sent offensive texts to a female staffer.

For Tony Abbott, a possible future prime minister, there is obviously a downside. The speech gives him a certain international infamy. The 15-minute YouTube clip, rounding 2 million views and counting, renders him virtually speechless. His opponent has defined him, wholly negatively – neanderthally even. Here, perhaps, there is succour to draw from the first time Kevin Rudd generated a swathe of global headlines, following revelations about his drunken night at a New York strip club (his famed ear wax video also gained over 800,000 YouTube hits).

Internet fame can be startlingly short-lived. Twitter moves on at a hurtling pace. Fifteen megabytes of fame are even more fleeting than 15 minutes. For the Prime Minister, the challenge in global terms is to turn this into something more significant than a Julia Gillard moment. 

Photo of Julia Gillard at Ozfest in India by Auspic via Flickr user Julia Gillard.

During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, for example, the press favoured Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, according to a study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, partly because the election of the first black president was deemed a better story than the election of the first female. In 2000, Al Gore received poor coverage, I thought at the time, because journalists had decided that a Bush restoration was more compelling than a continuation of the Clinton era without its charismatic leading man. In an electoral reworking of the old 'if it bleeds, it leads' principle, candidates are often assessed on the basis of their news value – even, to put it another way, their journalistic entertainment value.

Journalists also like shifting storylines. Asked before the presidential debate what Mitt Romney had going for him, my first thought was the boredom of the campaign press pack. They wanted a tighter race and were itching to write the comeback narrative. President Obama, with his languid performance, more than obliged.

The amped-up tone of much of the post-debate commentary, however, revealed the lurching nature of modern-day coverage. In the space of a few days, the 'Obama cruising to victory' narrative was replaced by 'Obama sleepwalking to defeat'. 'Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion,' wrote Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast. '[O]n the core issues of the economy and the deficit, Romney is now kicking the president's ass.' The piece was entitled Did Obama Just Thow The Entire Election Away? The headline for a blog post only a few days before the debate was: Is Romney The Weakest Candidate In Modern History?

In this age of concertinaed news cycles, journalists also favour plenty of plot developments. It helps explain the boom and bust Republican primary season, where Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain rose quickly to the top and then fell away just as quickly. True, these candidates were ultimately eliminated by voters – they do still get the decisive say – but journalists also played a role in building them up and knocking them down.

So as the race reaches its climax, I am reminded of two pieces of advice a colleague was kind enough to pass along when beginning a posting in South Asia. The first was to protect my health: never drink from a bottle labelled Strong Indian Beer. The second was to protect my professional reputation: never try to predict the outcome of an Indian election. It's a rule worth applying universally, as the Romney fightback has reminded us again. 

Photo by Flickr user US Mission Geneva.

How do Australian embassies compare?

Mindful of the 2004 car-bomb attack that killed nine people, including the suicide bomber, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has faced a not dissimilar dilemma with the construction of its new embassy in Jakarta. But last month it unveiled a stylish design solution that would grace the skyline of any global city, whatever the local threat level. Designed by the Melbourne powerhouse practice of Denton Corker Marshall, the five-storey chancery will be built on a 45,000 square metre brownfield site and should open in three years.

DCM, the architects behind well-known buildings like Sydney's Governor Phillip Tower and the Melbourne Exhibition Centre, have also incorporated some 'Australian Moment' panache: the building's brass, copper, zinc, steel and aluminium cladding is meant to represent the country's mineral riches. It stands as a monument to the success of modern-day Australia, while at the same time satisfying the security requirements of the day.

Elsewhere in the world, Australia's diplomatic architecture is a mixed bag. In Washington, the embassy occupies a magnificent position on Embassy Row (above left), where Massachusetts Avenue meets Scott Circle, but is one of the American capital's more nondescript diplomatic missions. It looks like it should house a corporate law firm or K Street lobbyists. Australia House in London (above centre), which occupies a similarly distinguished site where Aldwych meets the Strand, is much more successful. Still, its imperial design, by the Scottish architect, Alexander Marshall Mackenzie, reflects a period when Australian foreign policy was essentially British foreign policy.

The embassy in Paris (above right), designed by Australia's most influential post-war architect, Harry Seidler, is one of the more critically acclaimed. But Seidler was not perhaps the best choice of architect to project Australian design abroad. After all, he is famed for bringing internationalism to Australia, rather than local design to the rest of the world. Indeed, he questioned whether it is was even worth trying to forge a uniquely Australian aesthetic.

More recently, DFAT has had the good sense to rely heavily on DCM. Its design for the Australian Embassy in Beijing, which opened in 1992, was seen as particularly groundbreaking. As the architectural writer Deyan Sudjic has noted, it 'is often described as the first example of an authentic piece of modern architecture to be built in China since Mao declared the People's Republic'. While the building had architectural echoes of Old Beijing, DCM deliberately punched a hole in the containing wall to demonstrate the openness of Australian culture. DCM’s embassy in Tokyo, which opened in 1990, is also successful architecturally.

The new Jakarta building, DCM's first diplomatic mission since 9/11, may well turn out to be its finest yet. In a city where Australian diplomats have been in the firing line, it has come up with a solution that successfully balances form, function and security. It has managed to steer clear of the architecture of fear.

Photos by US Diplomacy Centre and Flickr users failing_angel, NCinDC,  Mal Booth, seier+seier. 

Though televised debates tend to be judged now as presidential boxing matches and receive the same big fight hype, the debates are rarely decided by 'knock-out blows.'

A case in point is that first ever televised clash between Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy. True, there are those grainy shots of Nixon's glistening upper lip (the vice-president had been recovering from a gammy knee, which he injured again on the way into the Chicago television studio). But even the most dedicated archivist would struggle to find a crushing soundbite. Rather, Kennedy was deemed to have won because he appeared so preternaturally calm, sounded authoritative across a range of issues and thus managed to close the 'stature gap' with his more experienced rival. The impressionistic nature of his victory was underscored by that oft-quoted poll of people who had listened on radio to the debate, who ruled Nixon the victor.

The paradox is that the presidential debates that have failed to produce dramatic exchanges sometimes end up having a bigger impact on the race. Like Nixon-Kennedy, the debates in 2004 between George W Bush and John Kerry produced no exchange that lives in the memory. Yet that first debate on 30 September shifted the polls. Bush had gone into it with a sizeable bounce from the GOP convention, and an average lead of 5.9%. Yet, as William Galston reminds us: 'Kerry's performance substantially exceeded expectations. Within a week, Bush's lead had fallen by more than two thirds, to only 1.8 points, and it stayed in that zone for the remainder of the campaign.'

Mitt Romney will be hoping for a similar outcome. The bad news for his troubled campaign is that the debates only rarely have a transformative effect on the race and have proved surprisingly inconsequential. The most authoritative academic study on the subject comes from the political scientist James Stimson, who studied polling data between 1960 and 2000. 'There is no case where we can trace a substantial shift to the debates', Stimson concluded.

Even a mega-gaffe like Ford's did not have an election-altering effect. And although John Kerry managed to eat into Bush's lead as a result of the debates, the President still ended up being re-elected.

There are various reasons why the debates are not as consequential as the lavish media coverage heaped upon them would suggest, not least their timing. By this late stage in the race, with less than fifty days to go before election day, most voters have made up their minds. Debates tend to reinforce views of a candidate rather than transform them. They tend to have a more race-altering effect in the primaries (as Texan Governor Rick Perry can attest) precisely because they are more formative. They are often the first time voters will have seen the candidates perform at length.

Inevitably, the first debate in Denver is being framed as Mitt Romney's 'one last chance', but don't be surprised if it ends in anti-climax. Historically speaking, most presidential debates have tended to be non-events.

Two years into her prime ministership, Julia Gillard has become a regular at summit meetings. She has also come to enjoy an obviously warm relationship with Barack Obama and addressed a joint session of Congress, an honor not even conferred on Robert Menzies. As Hugh White wrote in The Monthly, ahead of a particularly busy spurt of international travel this time last year: 'Gillard has all the attributes of a successful summiteer, she is a good listener and a capable chairperson, charming and gracious in company, and not prone to silly gaffes or inappropriate outbursts.' But though she has become a popular presence at these gatherings, she has hardly become a creative diplomatic force.

Here, Julia Gillard hobbled herself from the start. First, she gave Kevin Rudd the foreign affairs portfolio, which meant that he continued to hog much of the international attention. So much so, that he almost appeared to the rest of the world as an acting prime minister-at-large.

Second, she indicated, largely for domestic consumption, that she had no passion for foreign affairs. As she famously told Kerry O'Brien in an interview on the 7:30 Report on her first prime ministerial trip abroad, she would rather spend time 'watching kids learn to read in Australia than here in Brussels at international meetings.' In other words, she was happy to remain a stay-at-home prime minister, and outsource foreign policy, pretty much, to her predecessor. For her own political survival, it helped that he spent so much time out of the country.

Since then, Gillard has not delivered a major, wide-ranging foreign policy speech or set out a clear vision of Australia's place in the region or the world. Other than the surprise decision to sell uranium to India, she is not associated with any major new diplomatic initiative.

Would Tony Abbott make more of an international mark? In recent months, the Liberal leader has delivered what were billed as major foreign speeches at the Heritage Foundation in Washington and in Beijing. But neither speech could be described as diplomatically imaginative. Like Gillard, he has also sought to make a virtue of his focus on domestic issues. As told the Wall Street Journal early in his leadership: 'Oz pollies who think the world is interested in them have tickets on themselves.'

The ambitions of both Gillard and Abbott seem happily accommodated within these shores. When they retire from politics, for instance, it is hard to imagine either taking up any kind of international role. Nor does it help Australia's bid for a seat on the UN Security Council that the present PM and her possible successor have decided to make global affairs such a low priority.

Here, not for the first time, the Canberra story is starkly at odds with the national story. Rarely, if ever, has the rest of the world shown so much interest in Australia, whether it is country's economic success, the introduction of the carbon tax or the move to restrict cigarette packaging. But rarely, if ever, have the leaders of the two major parties shown such little interest in the rest of the world.

Photo by Flickr user Gobiermo Federal.

Even if Clinton cannot match the lyricism of Obama, he showed that the folksy can trump the flowery, especially when it comes to the unromantic task of winning re-election.

Obama was going to struggle, whatever the quality of his oratory. Had he delivered a sparkling speech, the Republicans would have argued he can dispense poetry but has problems with the cold grammar of government. A sub-par speech would prompt criticism that he cannot present an overwhelming argument for his re-election. In the event, the Obama speech-writing shop was apparently instructed to write an 'earthbound speech', precisely to avoid the charge of vacuous rhetoric.

What struck me, above all, was not so much what Obama said but his war-weary tone. It spoke of the debilitating grind of the modern-day presidency and the gridlock of Washington. For large portions of his speech, he addressed the convention with the cheerless air of a leader who knows that, even if he wins re-election and claims a decisive mandate, the checks and balances of the American system, combined with the hyper-partisanship of Capitol Hill, will conspire to make his second term a period of consolidation rather than restless reform. Missing from the speech was any bold new legislative agenda.

It says much about the obstructionism of modern-day US politics that the President was at his most passionate when he cast himself as the blocker: the leader who would prevent the Republicans from ditching Medicare or increasing university tuition fees.

Addressing foreign affairs, where he obviously enjoys more flexibility, Obama was stronger. Membership of 'The President's Club' lends him authority. It helps, too, that he has a saleable foreign policy success that makes for a snappy bumper sticker: 'Obama got Osama.' He sought to brand the Democrats as the party of national security, which has traditionally been a Republican boast. He portrayed Mitt Romney as both a neophyte and a Neanderthal whose thinking was stuck in the Cold War age. Needless to say, foreign affairs, barring some major international crisis, will have only a negligible impact on the race.

The conventions, by contrast, may prove to have been decisive. All the tracking polls show that Obama has increased his narrow lead, despite another month of lacklustre job figures. Romney therefore approaches the final fifty days of the campaign knowing he has never held a substantive lead in the polls. Nate Silver, the New Yorks Times' savvy number cruncher, notes:

If even at his high-water mark, he can only pull the race into a rough tie, what pitch can he come up with in October or November to suddenly put him over the top?

The candidate leading in the polls after the conventions traditionally goes on to win, although George W Bush came back from 4 points behind in 2000, the biggest post-conventions turnaround since 1968.
 
This week, Bill Clinton will campaign in Florida. But the polls as well as historical precedent suggest Obama might no longer need him.

 Ann Romney (pictured) proved herself a useful guarantor of her husband's personality, especially to sceptical female voters. She also came across as a highly plausible FLOTUS, even if she failed to come up with a ripping anecdote that unlocked her husband's opaque personality.

A doe-eyed Paul Ryan, by downplaying his controversial Medicare plans, showed that he is willing to play the role of the disciplined vice-presidential candidate rather than freelancing as a young buck House insurrectionary (tellingly, the focus after his speech was on its errors and distortions rather than his Ayn Rand-inspired ideology).

In a better-than-expected acceptance speech, Mitt Romney tried to cast his Mormonism as being part of the religious mainstream and also went some way towards reclaiming his business career at Bain. It was also smart to aim his speech at voters who are disappointed with President Obama rather than those who are enraged (or deranged). Though short on detail, the speech focused on his economic ambitions for the nation rather than the party's social agenda — creationism centred on jobs rather than Genesis. It also included his best zinger of the campaign so far, one which crystalised the sharp difference in their campaigning styles: 'President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans. And to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.'

There were some ugly moments, not least when a couple of delegates revealed their Jurassic side by throwing peanuts at a black CNN camerawoman. 'This is how we feed animals', was reportedly their racist taunt. The Republican platform also contains an uncompromising anti-abortion plank, banning the procedure even in cases of rape and incest, which many independent-minded voters especially would consider extreme.

In the main, however, most of the messages delivered from the stage were aimed at the lounge rooms of America rather than the convention hall. They were intended as vote-winning rather than rabble-rousing.

Here, the response has so far been disappointing for the Republicans. The polls suggest that the convention produced either a negligible bounce for Romney, or no bounce at all. Surprisingly incautious, Romney advisers had predicted as much as an 11 point gain, even though the average bounce is between 5 and 6 points. According to Gallup, 38% considered Romney's acceptance speech 'excellent or good', but that was the poorest rating of any of the eight acceptance speeches Gallup has measured since Bob Dole, another lackluster candidate, delivered his convention address in 1996.

Given the potential for infighting and incendiary rhetoric, perhaps a benign convention is not such a bad outcome. Those three days in Tampa might not have fired up the electorate, but the polls could have been considerably worse had it showcased fired-up Republican insurgents who now make up the party's rank and file.

Photo by Flickr user NewsHour.

If Lebanon succeeds in genuine 'disassociation' from events in Syria, could extend model to disassociation from wider regional manipulation.

This week, a new global study of 'Twiplomacy' from the PR firm Burson-Marsteller showed that something of a digital divide is opening up. Three-quarters of European governments are active on Twitter, while the figure for Africa is 60% and 56% in Asia. In Oceania, only four out of the 14 countries have a presence on Twitter, which these days seems akin to building an embassy without a flagpole.

It comes as little surprise to learn that Barack Obama is the most followed world leader, with over 17 million followers. His most popular tweet, interestingly, was 'same-sex couples should be able to get married', which gained over 60,000 retweets (or RTs, in Twitter's abbreviated argot). Next comes Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Tellingly, Vladimir Putin does not follow anyone, thus shutting himself out of the 'Twitter conversation'. Over 50 global leader accounts, including that of French President Francois Hollande, went quiet after they took office, revealing how many leaders view it primarily as a vote-winning tool rather than a diplomatic one. In another indication of how Twitter is not being used for any meaningful high-level diplomacy, nearly half of all world leaders on Twitter – 120 out of 264 – do not follow any of their peers.

But that misses the point of the potential for social media in the public diplomacy sphere. One of its primary functions is to indicate a willingness to engage.

A good illustration came after writing the BBC ediplomacy piece, when I suddenly found myself in Twitter conversation with Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe. At the end of the exchange, when he linked to a recent blog post on the progress made after the 2010 earthquake, I came away with an altered and more positive view of his troubled land.

Australians may be heartened to hear that Julia Gillard is the second best 'connected' world leader in the Twittersphere, with 11 'follows' from her peers (the EU President Herman van Rompuy tops the league on that front). Can DFAT achieve a similar level of online engagement?

Photo by Flickr user ABC Archive.

For those who yearn for more reasonable politics, there are some hopeful indicators. Mitt Romney, one of the two most moderate candidates in the GOP field, has secured the presidential nomination. The Tea Party movement did not get to exercise a veto. Perhaps it will come to be seen as a victory for 'sensible Republicanism'.

In the Romney 'veepstakes', Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who comes from the pragmatic wing of the party, is getting a lot of attention.

In recent weeks, Donald Trump, the country’s most prominent 'birther', has been completed discredited (see the video above for an example).

The Lexington column in The Economist has also reported on the pragmatism of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Democratic opposite number, Harry Reid. Recently, for example, they compromised on student loans and joined forces to save the Bush Administration's Wall Street bail-out. Occasionally, both are prepared to put country before party.

So far, during this pre-convention lull, the contest between Barack Obama and Romney has not been especially rancorous. Come November, 'the sensible majority', the waverers in the middle, will decide the election's outcome.

For those who take a more pessimistic view, the angry conservative response to Roberts' ruling will heighten fears. So, too, the presence in Congress of so many partisan warriors who refuse to countenance ceasefire.

After the Brown decision, the American south did not change overnight. The Supreme Court ruled that school districts should move 'with all deliberate speed', a pace that Deep South states interpreted to mean glacial. Perhaps that will be the case with the Obamacare ruling. The mood will not change immediately. But in protecting the reputation of his court, John Roberts might also have helped saved Washington from itself.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who, significantly, were not members of the White House press corps, changed that culture. Post-Watergate, political coverage became much more adversarial, with the fall of a president as the ultimate journalistic scalp. More drearily, the suffix '–gate' soon came to be attached to any scandal, large or small, robbing it of any meaning.

Much more profound is the extent to which Watergate led to the closer marrying of the US political and legal systems. The process continued with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and reached its zenith at the end of the Florida recount in 2000, when the US Supreme Court, in Bush v Gore, essentially decided the outcome of the race. Post-Watergate, the juridical letter of the constitution has come to crush its spirit. Law has overtaken history as the academic touchstone of politics. Washington, which throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s had a surprisingly collegiate and bipartisan feel, now has a sour, prosecutorial air. Just as politics has become more legalistic and investigative, the US Supreme Court has become more politicised.

Little wonder, then, that the very legitimacy of the last three presidents, Clinton, Bush and Obama, has been challenged. Often, they have been cast by their opponents as crooks, liars and frauds.

Certainly, the imperial presidency is no more, but the changes in the balance of Washington power, and the new checks and balances that have flowed from it, have had an emasculating effect. Much of America's present dysfunction can be traced to the aftermath of 17 June 1972, the night of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in a once obscure office complex. Indeed, one of the main effects of that third-rate burglary has been to contribute to a second-rate politics.

At other times, the tone is wide-eyed, and arguably a little too what-I-did-do-on-my holidays. 'Last week in Washington,' he wrote, 'I met two former candidates for the presidency: John Kerry and John McCain. Both hugely impressive.' Perhaps there is even something of the Space Cowboy about his tweets: the musings of a politician brought out of retirement, who still cannot quite believe his luck at being given the chance to embark on a final mission that comes with so much adventure.

The voice is usually informal, which some will see as welcome proof that Australia still does not take itself too seriously, but which others might see as a little too frivolous. Rarely does he take to Twitter to issue admonishments or diplomatic warnings. As for his most controversial tweet, it involved a rare foray into domestic politics, when he described the House Speaker Peter Slipper's accuser, James Ashby, as 'more rehearsed than a kabuki actor.'

Often his tweets read not so much as thoughtlines as after-thoughts. Sporadic and somewhat half-hearted, they do not appear to be part of a broader communications strategy acting in harness with his press team at DFAT. 

His Twitter feed, then, is indicative of Australia's more general approach to ediplomacy, which, as Fergus Hanson points out, has been non-committal and amateurish. DFAT has fallen a long way behind the US State Department and British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

So perhaps Bob Carr should look a closer look at the Twitter account of the British Foreign Secretary William Hague. His feed, while occasionally chatty, is nowhere near as whimsical or everyday. As a result, the voice is more weighty and authoritative. Hague has taken to Twitter, for example, to issue the kind of diplomatic broadsides of which Lord Palmerston would have been be proud. Consider this tweet on the day Ratko Mladic appeared before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague: 'Syrian leaders should reflect on the sight of Mladic in the dock today – reach of international justice is long.' Twitter, with its 140 character restriction, can be the enemy of diplomatic nuance. But when it comes to plain-speaking, it can be powerfully direct.

To underscore his e-engagement, Hague has taken part in question and answer sessions on Twitter (one of the few times Carr has done so was to ask for advice on protein shakes). The Yorkshireman has also demonstrated his literacy by issuing 'Friday follows' (recommendations of which accounts to track) for his fellow British diplomats. Then there is his use of hash tag hieroglyphics, so central to the grammar of the medium. Most important of all, his tweets have become a key arm of British diplomacy.

In contrast, Bob Carr comes across as a test cricketer in the twilight of his career who likes the idea of Twenty20 cricket, understands its rising significance and who can play the occasional crowd-pleasing shot, but who feels much more at home in the traditional, five-day format.

Given that ediplomacy instantly eradicates what has long been an obstacle to Australian diplomacy, its distance from the vital centres of global power, does he not need to up his game?

Photo by Flickr user adamknits. 

In the first national poll undertaken since Obama's reversal on gay marriage, the former Massachusetts Governor has overtaken the President, 46%-43%. And most worryingly for the White House, the poll suggested it was because of the economy, rather than same-sex marriage.

Economic growth has slowed, so too the pace of job creation. Consumer confidence, which had been rising, has also flattened out. For the third northern spring running, the White House is confronted by a deflating set of economic numbers. As the presidential elections in 1968, 1976, 1992 and 2000 demonstrate, incumbents are especially vulnerable when the economic climate is poor.

Romney's position has also markedly improved since becoming the presumptive nominee, as William Galston of the Brookings Institution points out in this hugely informative paper. Though the former Governor's negatives rose sharply during the primaries, they have now started to stabilise. For all the predictions that Tea Party voters would reject a Mormon nominee, a survey has suggested they are solid for Romney – more solid, counter-intuitively, than GOP voters who do not identify with the Tea Party.

In some of the all-important swing states (the election will basically be decided in nine states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia) Romney is also tied statistically among independents. Tellingly, though voters view Obama and the Democratic Party as politically synonymous, this is not true of Romney and the GOP, which, again, could help him among independents put off by the Tea Party.

One recent national survey found that 48% of respondents said they would never vote for Obama (compared to the 46% who said they could never bring themselves to vote for Romney). His approval rating is also 2 points lower than Jimmy Carter's in 1980 (though higher than George HW Bush in 1992). Turnout among young voters is expected to be lower than in 2008, a problem for Obama, as is a fall in voter registration among Hispanics.

The press, who help invent the narrative of a campaign, also has a vested interest in keeping things interesting. They want to see, and write about, a narrow contest.
 
The President still has numerous advantages. He leads in many of the key swing states. Team Obama has identified five different paths to an Electoral College victory, whereas the Romney campaign, at best, has two. Obama also enjoys a fund-raising advantage over Romney (though he did not raise as much in April as in March), and a tried-and-tested campaign operation in Chicago.

These advantages make him still the favourite. But rather like Nixon, there could be some sweaty moments ahead.

Photo by Flickr user Capt. Tim.

In 2003, there were 450 health facilities in Afghanistan. Now there are more than 1800. Over the past decade some 20,000 community health workers have been trained. It helps explains why the life expectancy has leapt from 47-50 to 62-64, and why, according to the latest figures from UNICEF, infant mortality has been cut in half. Women are more likely now to survive pregnancy. Afghan girls have the chance of an education. Three million are now in school, compared with two million three years ago. As Ian Livingstone and Michael O'Hanlon observed in the New York Times at the weekend: 'Afghans are wealthier, healthier and better educated than ever before.' They also have a menu of basic civil rights forcefully denied them under the Taliban.

The question of whether they are safer is more vexed. Although Kabul is still the target of headline-catching attacks, as was the case earlier this week, it now accounts for less than 1% of violence nationwide, as O'Hanlon and Livingstone point out. The fact that Afghan forces took the lead in repelling the latest attack is also a positive sign. That would have seemed inconceivable eight years ago, when watching new recruits being put through their paces was often inadvertently comic. In 2009, just 5 Afghan battalions were wholly or partly self-sufficient. Now the number is 137.

The security situation is still unsatisfactory, woefully so in the east. The number of Afghan civilian deaths has risen from 400 in 2009 to 500 in 2012. Because of infiltration from the Taliban, the number of foreign troops killed by Afghan forces has risen, too, from two in 2009 to 15 last year. A lone actor, like the American sergeant who massacred 17 Afghan civilians in March, can destroy years of confidence-building in one homicidal moment. The quality of Afghan Government, nationally and provincially, will long be a problem.

Needless to say, the mission also has been bedeviled by mistakes, from Donald Rumsfeld's initial obstinacy about restricting ISAF troops to Kabul — for years, Karzai's nickname, the 'Mayor of Kabul', tidily captured his powerlessness — to the diversion of military, intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq.

So the picture is mixed, but not unremittingly miserable. And often lost in the debate about whether Australia and NATO have achieved their strategic objectives, which can often be overly academic and abstract, is the human dimension. It is essential to bear in mind the lives improved as well as the lives lost.
 
It is not for me to say whether Australia's sacrifice has been worth it or not. But just as I have long been wary of anyone promising a definitive victory in Afghanistan, I am equally sceptical of those who argue that nothing has been achieved.

Photo by Flickr user isafmedia.

Ayodhya, of course, has long been the rumbling fault-line of Indian communal politics, the town where Hindu nationalists in 1992 demolished a fifteenth century mosque in the frenzied desire that a Hindu temple would soon rise from its ruins. At the very least, the authorities turned a blind eye. Some of the worst violence took place within metres of police stations, where unmanned switchboards echoed to the sound of unanswered calls for help.

Worse still, the politician ultimately in charge of the police during the riots, Gujarat's Chief Minister, Narendra Modi (pictured), is not only still in office, but spoken of as a future Indian prime minister. This despite allegations from a senior police officer that he deliberately allowed the slaughter to occur (Modi denies this), and his refusal to apologise for the violence.

Nor has the Bush Administration's bold decision in 2005 to bar him entry to the US impeded his progress. If anything, Modi's notoriety and celebrity have risen in tandem. 'He may be a mass murderer,' wrote the influential columnist Vir Sanghvi, as he tried to explain the spike in popular support for Modi after he was assailed by Washington, 'but he's our mass murderer.'

Now, he is the most high-profile figure in the Hindu nationalist BJP, a party which has struggled to find a commanding figurehead since Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee suffered a surprise defeat in the 2004 'India Shining' election. Aged just 61, young by the standards of India's gerontocracy, he also has time on his side. Rahul Gandhi, a possible future rival in general elections scheduled for 2014, is the only other Indian politician who attracts such unending speculation.

Burnishing Modi's reputation is Gujarat's economic success. Impressed by its double-digit growth, The Economist has labeled the state the 'Guandong of India' (though The Economist regularly criticises Modi). The Chief Minister, presumably eyeing national office, has also sought to rehabilitate his image, most recently, and barefacedly, by mounting a three-day fast to promote peace and reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims. This week, Modi has made the cover of the Asian edition of Time, his face accompanied by the caption: 'Modi means business but can he lead India?'

Again without evident embarrassment, Modi is also pushing ahead with plans to build the world's tallest statue, twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, which he refers to as the 'Statue of Unity.' Yet the people of India would do well to remember the burned-out buildings that continue to disfigure what were once prosperous Muslim neighbourhoods, and also the slain residents who died in them. Derelict and haunting, they are the true landmarks to Narendra Modi's rule.

 Photo by Flickr user Al Jazeera English.

Just as Gore looked like a man for the new millennium, Mitt Romney has the sort of skills-set that would appear to suit these straitened times. Arguably, he would be the most economically-literate GOP candidate of the post-war years. Certainly, he could boast the most successful career in business. Then there is his track record in Massachusetts, where he worked productively with a hostile state legislature, and his turnaround success at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

But just as Gore tried to be a Democratic populist, Romney has tried to position himself, even more implausibly, as a GOP populist. Like the former Vice-President, he has lost himself in his campaign.

It is too early to write off his chances in November, should he win the nomination. The results of the 2000 election, where Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes, showed he was a much better candidate than his many detractors believed. And Romney is surely better suited to a general election contest than this primary cage-fight (the latest poll from the Washington Post suggested a photo-finish between Obama and Romney, were the election held this week).

But here he faces a problem with which Gore never had to contend: Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party into the moderate mainstream, whereas the GOP in recent years has lurched towards the fringe right.

Mississippi and Alabama speak of that problem, and also remind the beleaguered Republican frontrunner of the challenge ahead. Since the 1960s, no Republican who did not either come from the Sunbelt or make it their political home has won a presidential election. On present form, Mitt Romney does not look bucking that trend.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.