Lexington

by Biodun Iginla, BBC News and the Economist

How the mass incarceration of black men hurts black women

Apr 8th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IMAGINE that the world consists of 20 men and 20 women, all of them heterosexual and in search of a mate. Since the numbers are even, everyone can find a partner. But what happens if you take away one man? You might not think this would make much difference. You would be wrong, argues Tim Harford, a British economist, in a book called “The Logic of Life”. With 20 women pursuing 19 men, one woman faces the prospect of spinsterhood. So she ups her game. Perhaps she dresses more seductively. Perhaps she makes an extra effort to be obliging. Somehow or other, she “steals” a man from one of her fellow women. That newly single woman then ups her game, too, to steal a man from someone else. A chain reaction ensues. Before long, every woman has to try harder, and every man can relax a little.

Real life is more complicated, of course, but this simple model illustrates an important truth. In the marriage market, numbers matter. And among African-Americans, the disparity is much worse than in Mr Harford’s imaginary example. Between the ages of 20 and 29, one black man in nine is behind bars. For black women of the same age, the figure is about one in 150. For obvious reasons, convicts are excluded from the dating pool. And many women also steer clear of ex-cons, which makes a big difference when one young black man in three can expect to be locked up at some point.

Removing so many men from the marriage market has profound consequences. As incarceration rates exploded between 1970 and 2007, the proportion of US-born black women aged 30-44 who were married plunged from 62% to 33%. Why this happened is complex and furiously debated. The era of mass imprisonment began as traditional mores were already crumbling, following the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the invention of the contraceptive pill. It also coincided with greater opportunities for women in the workplace. These factors must surely have had something to do with the decline of marriage.

But jail is a big part of the problem, argue Kerwin Kofi Charles, now at the University of Chicago, and Ming Ching Luoh of National Taiwan University. They divided America up into geographical and racial “marriage markets”, to take account of the fact that most people marry someone of the same race who lives relatively close to them. Then, after crunching the census numbers, they found that a one percentage point increase in the male incarceration rate was associated with a 2.4-point reduction in the proportion of women who ever marry. Could it be, however, that mass incarceration is a symptom of increasing social dysfunction, and that it was this social dysfunction that caused marriage to wither? Probably not. For similar crimes, America imposes much harsher penalties than other rich countries. Mr Charles and Mr Luoh controlled for crime rates, as a proxy for social dysfunction, and found that it made no difference to their results. They concluded that “higher male imprisonment has lowered the likelihood that women marry…and caused a shift in the gains from marriage away from women and towards men.”

Learning and earning

Similar problems afflict working-class whites, but they are more concentrated among blacks. Some 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock. The collapse of the traditional family has made black Americans far poorer and lonelier than they would otherwise have been. The least-educated black women suffer the most. In 2007 only 11% of US-born black women aged 30-44 without a high school diploma had a working spouse, according to the Pew Research Centre. Their college-educated sisters fare better, but are still affected by the sex imbalance. Because most seek husbands of the same race—96% of married black women are married to black men—they are ultimately fishing in the same pool.

Black women tend to stay in school longer than black men. Looking only at the non-incarcerated population, black women are 40% more likely to go to college. They are also more likely than white women to seek work. One reason why so many black women strive so hard is because they do not expect to split the household bills with a male provider. And the educational disparity creates its own tensions. If you are a college-educated black woman with a good job and you wish to marry a black man who is your socioeconomic equal, the odds are not good.

“I thought I was a catch,” sighs an attractive black female doctor at a hospital in Washington, DC. Black men with good jobs know they are “a hot commodity”, she observes. When there are six women chasing one man, “It’s like, what are you going to do extra, to get his attention?” Some women offer sex on the first date, she says, which makes life harder for those who prefer to combine romance with commitment. She complains about a recent boyfriend, an electrician whom she had been dating for about six months, whose phone started ringing late at night. It turned out to be his other girlfriend. Pressed, he said he didn’t realise the relationship was meant to be exclusive.

The skewed sex ratio “puts black women in an awful spot,” says Audrey Chapman, a relationship counsellor and the author of several books with titles such as “Getting Good Loving”. Her advice to single black women is pragmatic: love yourself, communicate better and so on. She says that many black men and women, having been brought up by single mothers, are unsure what role a man should play in the home. The women expect to be in charge; the men sometimes resent this. Nisa Muhammad of the Wedded Bliss Foundation, a pro-marriage group, urges her college-educated sisters to consider marrying honourable blue-collar workers, such as the postman. But the simplest way to help the black family would be to lock up fewer black men for non-violent offences.

Posted by biginla at 9:36 PM BST

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Earthquake in China

by Xian Wan, BBC News and the Economist, for the BBC and the Economist's Biodun Iginla

Earthquakes in China's Qinghai province kill hundreds of people

Apr 14th 2010 | BEIJING | From The Economist online

POWERFUL earthquakes on the Tibetan plateau have killed hundreds of people and injured many thousands of others. The disaster presents the Chinese authorities with the challenge of another large-scale relief effort following an earthquake in neighbouring Sichuan province in May 2008 that killed more than 80,000 people. The remoteness of the affected area will make it all the harder.

The earthquakes, the strongest of which been reported as magnitude 6.9 or 7.1, began to strike early in the morning of Wednesday April 14th. They were centred on Yushu county in Qinghai province near the border of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Most of the buildings in the county seat, Jiegu, were damaged or destroyed. Yushu has a population of around 100,000, many of them Tibetan herders. A teacher in the adjacent county of Golog some 350 km (220m) to the north-east says he has been trying to console his weeping students since they learned that relatives in Yushu had been buried in rubble. He says Tibetan monks in Golog have been praying for the dead.

“The biggest problem now is that we lack tents, we lack medical equipment, medicine and medical workers” a local spokesman was quoted as saying by China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua. Overnight temperatures in the area are below freezing. Xinhua said three military transport aircraft had been deployed to ferry supplies and relief workers. Hundreds of troops have been mobilised.

In 2008 the authorities won praise from around the world for their quick response to the Sichuan earthquake and their unusual decision to give journalists free rein to visit the affected area. Foreign assistance helped to defuse tensions between China and Western countries caused by the government’s handling of widespread unrest in Tibetan areas in March that year.

The authorities are likely this time to pull out all the stops again, not least in order to show their concern for the welfare of Tibetans despite continuing harsh repression of Tibetan dissent. They will be somewhat relieved that the disaster did not happen in the Tibet Autonomous Region, given that this would have hugely complicated their handling of press coverage. Unlike Qinghai (most of which is regarded as part of traditional Tibet by the Dalai Lama and his followers), the autonomous region is off-limits to foreign journalists except for rare, supervised visits.

The government will be nervous of any news from Qinghai’s disaster that could give further ammunition to domestic critics of the shoddy construction of schools in Sichuan that was widely blamed for the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 earthquake. Since late last year two activists who campaigned on behalf of the children’s parents have been jailed for three and five years respectively. The sentences sent a clear message that the government, for all its openness in the immediate aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, still lashes out at those who cause it embarrassment.

Posted by biginla at 8:05 PM BST

Updated: Wednesday, 14 April 2010 8:09 PM BST

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Poland's tragedy

by Biodun Iginla, BBC News and the Economist

The death of Poland's president carries a terrible echo of his country's past

Apr 11th 2010 | From The Economist online

HE WAS a figure from another age. Weekend guests at Lech Kaczynski’s presidential retreat on Poland’s Baltic coast often found the conversation turning to the opposition politics of 1970s Gdansk.

That is indeed a fascinating subject, though not necessarily the most burning one for the head of state of eastern Europe’s most important country nearly 40 years later. Mr Kaczynski, who died along with 95 others, including many of Poland’s military and political elite, in a plane crash in Russia on April 10th, epitomised some of the best and the worst features of Polish politics.

He was a man of unquestioned, almost painful, integrity. In 2005 he moved to the presidential palace not from one of the palatial homes favoured by most mainstream Polish politicians, but from the shabby flat in Warsaw in which he and his wife, Maria, had lived for decades. His values, attitudes, habits and behaviour were those of the pre-war Polish middle class: a culture so strong that it survived decapitation and evisceration under Soviet and Nazi occupation, and the regime installed at gunpoint after the war. Obstinate, old-fashioned, provincial, gutsy, rather shy, awkward, suspicious, pernickety and scrupulous, the 60-year-old law professor was utterly uninterested in the tactful doublespeak usually required of politicians in modern Europe.

He was an unabashed and instinctive Atlanticist. When government ministers tried to haggle with America about a planned missile-defence base, he undercut them. Poland would be happy to have the installation on any terms. He took a similar attitude to Lithuania, brushing aside that country’s refusal to allow its ethnic Polish minority to write their names in official documents with letters such as w, Å‚ and Å„ that are not part of the standard Lithuanian alphabet. Other Polish politicians saw Lithuanian foot-dragging on the issue as deceitful and infuriating; for Mr Kaczynski it was merely a pity. His affection for the Baltic states, Ukraine and other ex-captive nations was palpable: had they not suffered, just like Poland? They should stand together.

When Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008, it was Mr Kaczynski who rushed to the rescue, leading a hair-raising trip to Tbilisi with leaders of other sympathetic ex-communist states. He tried to overrule protests by the presidential plane’s pilot, that the trip into a war zone was unsafe. Mr Kaczynski was furious at what he saw as cowardice; the pilot later got a medal for resolutely putting his passengers’ safety ahead of prestige. Mr Kaczynski may have repeated just that error in the minutes before the disastrous attempt to land the presidential plane at a fog-bound airport on April 10th.

That seems by far the most likely explanation for the tragedy. The Polish presidential plane was an ageing Tupolev 154: old, noisy and thirsty, admittedly, but also robust and reliable. It had been recently renovated with modern avionics. Russian air traffic controllers seem blameless too. They insisted that the fog at Smolensk airport was too thick and had repeatedly told the plane to land elsewhere. The pilot refused, making three abortive attempts to land before hitting tree-tops on the fourth try.

Mr Kaczynski’s single greatest political mistake was in failing to see that modern Germany, led by Angela Merkel, was a potentially powerful friend for Poland, rather than an adversary that harboured sinister revanchist tendencies. Along with his brother, Jaroslaw, who leads the main opposition Law and Justice party, Mr Kaczynski became a laughing stock in Germany for his dogged hostility and on occasion outright rudeness towards the federal republic. His distrust of Poland’s western neighbour was matched by a visceral hostility towards the Soviet Union and its defenders. To Mr KaczyÅ„ski, his brother, and many of their supporters, Russia was still a menace, run by the former KGB and with a shameful disregard for the atrocious crimes committed in the past. The complexities of modern Russia were often brushed aside.

His robust attitude to Poland’s enemies, past and present, pleased his supporters. But it was compounded by a pronounced tendency to make gaffes, and a staff who frequently seemed overwhelmed by the demands of even daily protocol, let alone strategic thinking. That invited criticism, and sometimes caustic caricature.

After Law and Justice lost power in 2007, a new government, in the hands of his arch-rival Donald Tusk, was pursuing an ambitiously emollient foreign policy. Where Mr Kaczynski stoked rows and fumed about historic wrongs, Mr Tusk, and his high-profile foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, smoothed them over. Poland defused tension with Germany, revived the Visegrad grouping of central European ex-communist states and managed a remarkable breakthrough with Russia.

This centred on the Katyn massacre, of 22,000 Polish officers in the spring of 1940. It was more than the illegal execution of prisoners-of-war. It was the decapitation of the country’s pre-war elite. The officers, including many reservists, were the lawyers, doctors, teachers and intellectuals who would have posed the most profound challenge to the cynical division of Poland under the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. They included, incidentally, the chief rabbi of the Polish army, Baruch Steinberg.

The crime of their murder was compounded by a grotesque Soviet lie: that the murders were the work of the Nazis, not the NKVD. It was only in 1990 under Mikhail Gorbachev that the Soviet Union finally admitted what Poles and their friends had maintained all along. Boris Yeltsin visited the Katyn monument in Warsaw, as Russian president, and said as he laid flowers “forgive us, if you can”.

But that was a high-water mark. Under Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, the clock started running backwards. In September 2007, a Russian government newspaper, Rossiskaya Gazeta, published a commentary casting doubt on the idea that Katyn was a Soviet massacre. Sued by relatives of the Katyn victims in the European Court of Human Rights, the Russian government argued that blame for the massacre was unclear. The judicial rehabilitation of the victims has been blocked; the archives are still sealed.

It was therefore a huge breakthrough that, after painstaking and intricate diplomacy, the Polish government was able to bring Mr Putin to KatyÅ„ for a joint commemoration ceremony on April 7th. That was preceded by an unprecedented showing on Russian television of a magnificent and harrowing film about KatyÅ„ by Andrzej Wajda, Poland’s greatest film-maker. The film was repeated, on a more widely watched channel, on the evening of April 11th.

At the joint ceremony, Mr Putin categorically acknowledged that the massacre was a crime of the Stalin regime—although he also brought up the deaths of captured Soviet officers in Polish prisoner-of-war camps 20 years earlier, apparently as a balancing item in the ledger of historical guilt. Many Poles felt that the Russian side had not gone nearly far enough.

It was that feeling which brought Mr Kacznyski, along with almost the entire foreign-policy leadership of his party, the commanders of the army, navy, air force and special forces, senior intelligence veterans and top historians, to board the plane that crashed on April 10th. They were paying their own private visit unencumbered by—in their eyes—the phoney reconciliation and dubious politicking of the event earlier in the week. The Russian authorities’ exemplary behaviour since the crash and visible displays of public grief by Mr Putin and others may have assuaged some of those feelings.

Poland is convulsed by the tragedy. Not since the height of Stalinist repressions have so many of the country’s best and brightest perished. Some find the conspiracy theories irresistible. Was not General Wladyslaw Sikorski murdered in 1943 for embarrassing the Soviet Union about Katyn? Now the same fate has befallen another brave Polish president. The sinister symmetry of that theory is misleading, though. Despite extensive investigation, nobody has found a credible sign of foul play in the death of General Sikorski. And it seems overwhelmingly likely that the latest plane crash is a tragic blunder-cum-accident.

For Poland’s friends and neighbours, condolences are mixed with questions about the country’s future. Mr Kaczynski was already facing an all but insuperable challenge from Mr Tusk’s Civic Platform party in the presidential elections in October. They will be held much sooner now. Bronislaw Komorowski, now acting president by virtue of his position as speaker of the lower house of parliament, the Sejm, is also the Civic Platform candidate. Law and Justice will struggle to find a candidate to beat him. Mr Tusk’s efforts to consolidate the centre-right of the Polish political spectrum are starting to look unstoppable.

A victory for Mr Komorowski would also make foreign policy run more smoothly. The Polish constitution is unclear about where the real responsibility for foreign policy lies. Who should attend EU summit meetings was a particular bone of contention between the presidency and the government. Mr Tusk’s aim is to have a German-style ceremonial presidency, with much reduced powers of veto. He seems likely to get it.

Yet the socially conservative, prickly, ethics-conscious and patriotic constituency that voted for Mr Kaczynski will not go away. And neither will the political ideas and values for which Law and Justice stands. Poland’s liberal-minded urban elite, exemplified by Civic Platform, have many qualities. They are able, cosmopolitan and flexible. But the lingering suspicion remains that the country’s old communist elite and their children have morphed into a new nomenklatura. Poles call this idea the “UkÅ‚ad”, an all but untranslatable word meaning something like “deal” or “arrangement”. The price of the communist regime’s surrender in 1989 was that members of the elite were able to turn their power into wealth, using their connections, slush funds and privileges to gain a head start in the country’s shift to capitalism.

Mr Kaczynski found that idea revolting, and wanted a fresh start: a “Fourth Republic”, in his words. During the ill-starred Law and Justice-led government of 2005 to 2007, the atmosphere was more Robespierre than Benjamin Franklin. Prosecutors conducted trial by press conference, denouncing victims on live television on what often seemed the flimsiest and most political of grounds.

An obsessive focus on the military intelligence service (known by its Polish acronym of WSI) also consumed huge amounts of time and energy. Undoubtedly the organisation needed reform. It had survived largely untouched since the collapse of communism. Its links with business and public life were alarming. But the cure proposed by Law and Justice seemed even worse than the disease. A close ally of the Kaczynskis, Antoni Macierewicz, was put in charge of a new military counter-intelligence service, as a political appointee. His investigations into past wrong-doings produced little of substance. But many feared that under his control, the new service would be used to spy on the Kaczynskis’ political opponents.

With Civic Platform in charge again, aggressive policies towards the well-connected old guard are off the agenda. People like Jan Kulczyk are finding life easier. A billionaire tycoon whose business career started in West Berlin in the early 1980s—an unimaginable privilege in communist Poland for those without the tightest connections to the old regime—he epitomises to the Kaczynski camp everything that is wrong with their country. While they were in power, he moved to London. Now he is a frequent visitor to Poland.

Poland’s economic success under the Tusk government has blunted the edge of public resentment over corruption and unfairness. Unlike any other country in Europe, Poland boasted economic growth last year, of 1.7%. Its banking system is stable; the public finances sound. Road-building—once a signal failure of public administration—has suddenly accelerated thanks to Mr Tusk’s ability to push local politicians into speedy agreement.

The new go-ahead Poland is looking forward to some time in the spotlight. It will host the European football championships in 2012, jointly with Ukraine. In 2011, less glamorously but probably more importantly, it will hold the rotating six-month presidency of the EU, preceded by Hungary. As the ex-communist country with the strongest economy, most solid government and most constructive diplomacy, it has gone a long way to dispel the old stereotypes of backwardness and chaos. This month’s accident is appalling. But it does not derail Poland’s path to success, out of the ruins of the pre-war republic, from the devastation of war and communist rule, and from the grim consequences of this week’s crash.

Posted by biginla at 7:04 PM BST

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Europe's Greek rescue plan

by Natalie de Vallieres, BBC News and the Economist, for the BBC and the Economist's Biodun Iginla

The EU-led aid package is huge—but more will be needed

Apr 11th 2010 | BRUSSELS | From The Economist online

AFTER two months of bluff and bluster, the European Union finally unveiled the details of a financial rescue mechanism for Greece on April 11th. The package was unveiled in an unusual Sunday press conference in Brussels, following a round of telephone conference calls among the governments of the 16 countries that use the single currency. It would offer Greece up to €30 billion ($40 billion) in bilateral loans in the first year, with more available in 2011 and 2012. Interest rates would be set at around 5% for three-year loans, at least to start with. That is a rate about midway between the punitive rates that markets have been demanding from Greece in recent days, and the interest rates being paid by the next weakest members of the euro-zone club, such as Portugal.

The interest rate reflects the need to offer Greece a breathing space from the markets, while mollifying German-led calls to avoid any hint of a “subsidy” for an errant and profligate member of the euro club. When and if (though it is surely a case of when) Greece seeks to activate the mechanism, the loans from the other 15 euro-zone members would be topped up by substantial funds, perhaps amounting to €15 billion, from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF would set its own interest rates and conditions for its loans, the first of which could be available within hours of a Greek request.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, who also chairs the Eurogroup of euro-zone finance ministers, insisted that the mechanism, if activated, would leave intact the “no bail-out” clause in the EU’s treaties, on the grounds that “the loans are repayable and contain no element of subsidy.”

As the largest EU economy, Germany will contribute more than any other country towards a Greek rescue (though German banks also hold large amounts of Greek government debt, and thus would suffer greatly in the event of a default). In these recessionary times, German public opinion is strongly opposed to anything amounting to a handout for Greece, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has duly taken a tough line in advance of important regional elections her coalition must fight on May 9th.

Backed by Austria and the Netherlands, Mrs Merkel repeatedly demanded that Greece be made to pay market rates for any rescue loans (even though such a rescue would only logically be necessary once market rates reached levels Greece could not afford). The German government has also said that the country’s federal constitution outlaws any help that might undermine the strict rules created to ensure the stability of the single currency.

The Brussels announcement amounted to the third and most detailed attempt by EU bosses to sell a tricky message to financial markets and voters alike: that Greece would not be allowed to fall victim to a sovereign credit crunch, but that the euro zone stands by its founding principle that profligate members cannot be bailed out.

EU leaders first pledged in February they would not allow any member of the euro zone to fall victim to a sovereign credit crunch, but failed to explain how they would carry out this promise—as if hoping that their resolve alone would frighten the markets into submission. In March, tense negotiations led by the two largest euro members, France and Germany, generated a second pledge with more details—such as a substantial lending role for the IMF—while still maintaining the polite fiction that a rescue mechanism might never be needed.

As so often before, the Greek finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, told reporters that Greece had not sought help, and hoped to continue borrowing on financial markets. However, his boss George Papandreou, the prime minister, displayed striking candour, telling the Sunday edition of To Vima, a newspaper: “The question remains whether this mechanism will convince markets just like a gun on the table. If it does not convince them, it is a mechanism that it is there to be used.”

Whether it does convince the markets may soon be clear: On April 13th Greece was due to try to auction a fresh slice of short-term debt. The government needs to borrow about €11 billion by the end of May to roll over maturing debt and service interest charges. All in all, the country may need to borrow more than €50 billion in 2010 (estimates vary).

In recent days market anxiety had pushed Greece’s long-term bond yields to their highest levels since the country joined the single currency nearly a decade ago, partly thanks to uncertainty over the EU’s readiness to provide aid. Amid press reports of wealthy clients withdrawing deposits from local banks and sharp falls on the Greek stockmarket, Fitch, a credit-rating agency, downgraded the country’s debt by two notches to BBB-, the lowest investment grade, just above “junk” status. In its announcement on April 9th, Fitch cast doubt on the Greek government’s vow to cut its public deficit by a third—the equivalent of 4% of GDP—this year, in light of the country’s deepening recession and the rising costs of servicing a €300 billion mountain of public debt.

In theory, the rescue mechanism is equipped with a double lock: once Greece has decided it has reached the end of the road with normal market borrowing, officials from the European Central Bank and European Commission must agree that Greece is out of options. In practice, once Greece signals it has lost the confidence of the markets, things will move fast.

Representatives from the commission, the ECB and the Greek government will meet IMF officials on April 12th to discuss the conditions that would be imposed on Greece and the exact size of the IMF contribution. The combined EU-IMF package is a substantial one but few imagine that it will be a one-off: on Sunday Reuters news agency quoted a Greek official as saying the country is likely to need a total €80 billion of loans over three years. If so it will be the largest multilateral rescue of a debt-ridden country yet seen.

Posted by biginla at 6:58 PM BST

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America's Supreme Court

by Biodun Iginla, BBC News and the Economist

Another chance for Barack Obama to shape the Supreme Court

Apr 9th 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print edition

ONE of the most effective ways for a president to put his mark on the future is to nominate judges to the Supreme Court. Because the nine justices are entitled to serve for life, and because something about life on the court appears to promote longevity, such opportunities are rare. Barack Obama got a first chance early in his presidency. Last summer he appointed Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina judge. Now he will get a second chance. John Paul Stevens, the present court’s longest-serving justice, turns 90 on April 20th. On April 9th he announced he would retire in the summer.

Mr Stevens is still vigorous and mentally alert. He spends a lot of his spare time swimming and playing tennis in Florida. He says that after more than 34 years on the bench he still loves the “wonderful job”. But since the Supreme Court is the final interpreter of the constitution, appointments are fiercely political. Mr Stevens's retirement gives Mr Obama a chance to replace him with another liberal.

Presidents cannot always be sure that the judges they nominate will perform as expected. Mr Stevens was the only Supreme Court justice to be appointed by Gerald Ford, a Republican president, and at a time when the young judge thought of himself as a Republican too. He told the New York Times recently that his judicial philosophy was conservative, in that he believes that the job of the court is to decide cases and resolve controversies, not write “broad rules” about society’s questions. But he is now generally held to be the leader of the court’s four liberal judges, the other three being Ms Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. John Roberts, the chief justice, is a conservative, as are Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Anthony Kennedy, though conservative on most issues, is the court’s swing voter.

This delicate imbalance of power in favour of the conservatives is not something Mr Obama will be able to change when Mr Stevens retires, no matter how much he would like to. The president’s relations with Chief Justice Roberts are fraught. In January’s state-of-the-union message in front of Congress, Mr Obama criticised the court’s decision the previous week to overturn swathes of campaign-finance law and allow corporations and other organisations to spend as much as they liked on political advertising at election time. After that speech, Mr Roberts complained that the state-of-the-union message had become a “political pep rally”. And another thumping collision between the administration and the court could be on the way. Some Republicans question the constitutionality of the requirement in Mr Obama’s new health law for every citizen to buy insurance on pain of a fine.

When Mr Stevens goes, the most Mr Obama can hope to do is to keep the court’s balance as it is by replacing one liberal with another. But even this might not prevent a slight shift to the conservatives. The new judge would certainly lack Mr Stevens’s experience. Nor is the timing of his departure altogether ideal. Hearings before the mid-terms would, it is true, allow the Senate to vote when the Democrats can still generally rely on mustering a simple majority. But they would need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, and an election year gives the Republicans an extra incentive to use the hearings to score political points. For example Goodwin Liu, whom Mr Obama has nominated to a lower court, has run into trouble with critics who accuse him of withholding information about his liberal beliefs. Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had urged Mr Stevens to wait.

As for replacements for Mr Stevens, several possible names are being discussed. Most of them were considered last year before Mr Obama settled on Ms Sotomayor. For the moment Elena Kagan, the solicitor-general and a former dean of Harvard Law School, appears at the top of this list. But choosing a candidate in the shadow of an election will be tricky. Another liberal in the mould of Ms Sotomayor might fire up Mr Obama’s loyal base. It could also be the perfect way to alienate those all-important independent voters.

Posted by biginla at 6:44 PM BST

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