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For a long time the weekly conference calls convened by John Kerry's foreign policy team seemed like an exercise in futility. After all, what was the point of creating a [...]

In Washington's fashionably international neighbourhoods, there is a palpable sense this US presidential election year that John Kerry, now confirmed as the Democratic candidate, is carrying the hopes not only [...]

A new religious uproar is sweeping the US amid the furore over Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. This time, it is over a controversial book. The book, a [...]

If the Democrats had pre-scripted their primary campaign, which ended yesterday with the withdrawal of John Edwards and the anointment of John Kerry as their candidate, it is hard to [...]

Several of my children have now reached that painful threshold of intellectual development associated with the discovery of verbal humour. Painful not in any sense for them, of course. Merely [...]

In the 2004 presidential election campaign almost nothing has gone according to plan so far for President George W. Bush. At the start of the year, Republicans were expecting events [...]

Americans are often accused of having a simplistic view of the world. Countries are either free or unfree; their leaders are good or bad; wars are just or unjust; policies [...]

There is something rather poignant about the fact that, on one of the rare occasions when a member of the Bush administration's economics team speaks plain honest economic sense, he [...]

How will you be spending Valentine's Day? A quiet assignation in some bijou little bistro with the object of your affection? Frantically searching for the last bunch of roses in [...]

If you haven't been following the 2004 Democratic primary election, it's too late. It was over sooner than a Britney Spears marriage. It lasted about as long as a Janet [...]

As alert readers may know, Americans are not wildly popular in Europe at present. John Kerry, Madonna and Michael Moore might get a hearing at the average European dinner party, [...]

Now that the American football season has ended we can surely be grateful for one thing. John Kerry will presumably have to stop drawing those painful analogies between his own [...]

The first time I ever watched an American eat, I wondered sympathetically whether she might have some crippling disability of the left arm. Despite the abundance of cutlery flanking her [...]

On the face of it, the oblique interventions this week by David Kay and Lord Hutton on the causes, justification and aftermath of the Iraq war would seem to point [...]

What happens when Howard Dean comes off the medications? Since his infamously primal moment in Iowa last week, the one-time front-runner for the Democratic nomination has been wandering sedated through [...]

With due deference to President George W. Bush, the most consequential speech this week was not the one he gave to the US people on Tuesday night but the one [...]

This week, in accordance with modern political ritual, voters in the midwestern state of Iowa fired the starting gun for the 2004 US presidential election campaign. Between now and November [...]

The Col Ballroom, a gaudy pastiche of Victorianathat sits forlornly in a desolate block of downtown Davenport, has echoed over the years to the great swing and jazz bands of [...]

Paul O'Neill - A Correction This newspaper, along with most others, may have given the impression over the last few years that Paul O'Neill was the most comically inept person [...]

Send back all those campaign contributions; roll up that map of electoral college votes; spare us the attack ads and the photo ops. The 2004 presidential election is over before [...]

Gerard Baker There is a wizard of OZ quality to ex-dictators, stripped of their apparatus of fear, the fawning underlings, the presidential palaces, the torture chambers, they often end up [...]

The forecaster's equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns' are the events no one could have predicted, writes John Willman. There were plenty of these in 2003, including the failure to [...]

President George W. Bush could hardly have imagined a better end to the year for his administration's foreign policy goals than the events that have unfolded in the last three [...]

Among my favourite pleasures of the Christmas season are the cards from friends who kindly attach one of those one-page summaries of their family's news this year. Each Christmas I [...]

Gerard Baker There is a wizard of OZ quality to ex-dictators, stripped of their apparatus of fear, the fawning underlings, the presidential palaces, the torture chambers, they often end up [...]

This is the weekend when I shall undertake what is surely one of the most enviable chores in any father's life - the ceremonial purchase of the family Christmas tree. [...]

No good deed goes unpunished. A year ago, Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic party's vice-presidential candidate in 2000, graciously deferred his own decision on whether to run in the 2004 presidential [...]

Still thinking about a suitable Christmas present for that special someone? How about The Bush Hater's Handbook? Or The Lies of George W. Bush - two cheery stocking-fillers flying off [...]

There is a simple binary quality to my social life these days. As a father who resides in Washington I no longer have leisurely supper parties that roll on late [...]

Thanksgiving is the perfect model of American exceptionalism. Americans, wherever they are, will today observe the sacred rituals handed down from generation to generation since the Pilgrim Fathers plucked their [...]

In 1992, when he was campaigning for vice-president as Bill Clinton's running-mate, Al Gore liked to repeat a pithy and rather devastating line in his stump speech about the economic [...]

For years Massachusetts has enjoyed a special place in the psychology of conservative Americans. Its predilection for far-left liberal causes has earned it some famous soubriquets: Taxachusetts, the Socialist Republic [...]

One of the things I love most about America is that I feel so at home here in a nation of hypochondriacs. In Britain, an abiding conviction, on the basis [...]

From the public reaction, it will be hard to tell whether it is President Kim Jong-il or President George W. Bush who flies into London next week. A clear majority [...]

By my estimate the US economy grew in the three months to September by an amount roughly equal to the total annual economic activity of Belgium. Since the prospect of [...]

Nikita Khrushchev is said to have observed that the only problem with free elections is that you never know who is going to win. On this, as with most Soviet [...]

Perhaps getting tired of the game of charades he has been playing with global currency traders for the past six months, John Snow, the US Treasury secretary, this week decided [...]

Few cities are as one-dimensional as Washington. In LA the tinsel masks only a small part of the grime. Nashville has more financial institutions these days than recording studios. Las [...]

With its gruesome parade of ageing porn peddlers, third-rate actors and new-age lifestyle gurus, the California recall campaign looked from the start like an attempt by America's largest and oddest [...]

It's a fundamental paradox of human progress that each step we take up the ladder of material advancement makes us yearn more urgently for the simplicity we left behind. Nowhere [...]

Last weekend, a couple of dozen miles and a large mood swing away from the stein-wielding, lederhosen-clad revellers of the Oktoberfest, a group of American and German scholars, policymakers and [...]

From Joseph Guillotin to Vidkun Quisling, history is littered with the names of those whose exploits or notoriety have earned them verbal immortality. Few seem to get favourable treatment. Most [...]

Long ago my wife and I made a mental commitment that we'd leave America before our children reached their teens. Having four daughters was already shaping up to be a [...]

If General Wesley Clark did not exist, the Democratic party would surely have tried to invent him. The former US supreme commander in Europe, who announced yesterday that he was [...]

It was an event at the mysterious intersection of Hate and Love. Hate had been planning for years, concealing itself in the routines of ordinary life. Hate had learnt to [...]

There was only one, minor, transatlantic skirmish during my neo-American family's lengthy holiday in France. But it was, I like to think, freighted with cultural significance. For most of the [...]

George W. Bush has had a problem keeping campaign promises. When he sought the presidency in 2000 he was a free-trader who railed against fiscal deficits, nation-building and pointless efforts [...]

As temperatures in Baghdad began to soar this spring, many of the Americans and Iraqis drafted to help rebuild the country suffered from the heat. The reason: air-conditioning was not [...]

Arnie, the former bodybuilder from central Europe, wants the big prize, but his enemies are whispering that he has a zipper problem and his wife Maria doesn't want to put [...]

Next week we'll do our dubious bit for frayed transatlantic ties when we pack up our vast menagerie of a family and head to that alien land, the home of [...]