From the Summit of the Moral High Ground

This week’s Republican primaries certainly taught us one thing: Virginians love Ron Paul, and they’re pretty fond of Mitt Romney, too. Paul captured roughly 40 percent of the Virginia primary vote, by far his best non-caucus showing of the entire campaign. Romney won the remaining 60 percent. That’s good, but it was not even Romney’s best performance of the night on Super Tuesday. By the way, Romney and Paul were the only GOP contenders on the Virginia ballot. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich failed to file the necessary paperwork, so voters could not choose them. Did that affect the results? Of course it did. How? That’s harder to say. Answering that question forces us to consider the framing effect , a human tendency to answer questions differently depending on how the options are presented to us, even when the options are identical . Strictly speaking, the framing effect was not at work in Virginia, since the choices presented to voters there were not identical to the cho...

With apologies to Tom Gruchy, but it has taken a while to condense the lessons from the US political process into a legitimate idea for the future of Jersey politics. On the 280th anniversary of George Washington's birth the final four met to debate the issues. A lot of speculation has arisen as to whether Mitt Romney will have Ron Paul as VP (or perhaps his son Kentucky Senator Rand Paul). Even the  Guardian  which has ignored Paul's presence to date is now looking at the candidate with fresh eyes and recognising that his campaign may be delivering results whilst not always getting headlines. But what was more interesting for me was the way that all four candidates were drawing together on policy and it seems to me that behind the scenes the Republican Party is drawing up its manifesto: (converted into Jersey English) Return welfare from the federal government to the States (return welfare from the States to the Parishes) Balance the budget and work to pay down the debt (this...