We should decide who leads us
Americans do it clean, Britons do it dirty, explains Simon Jenkins. Americans have term limits on high office. Their contestants come out in the open, take off their shirts and fight to known rules. They say who they are and what they represent. The people then decide. For the second time in just over a year, Britain must contemplate a small political club choosing a new ruler without so much as a passing reference to the electorate. The public's sole participation in this decision is through the proxy of the opinion polls. As for whether I think this is a good way of choosing a leader in a democracy, I do not. But then all the constitutional reformers in the world will never persuade me that British politics is not stuck irredeemably in the 18th century.
Simon Jenkins The Guardian
Full article: A very British way to choose a ruler - down at one's club 
The Mole: Miliband tests Brown
A regular guy?
If ever circumstances were propitious to a Democratic White House landslide, it is this year, writes Rupert Cornwell. And yet Obama leads John McCain in the polls by a whisker, if at all. Why? All other things being equal, Americans tend to vote for the "regular guy", the candidate they'd rather have a beer or a coffee with. Measured by this standard, McCain versus Obama is currently no contest. Obama remains largely a mystery. His life narrative is simply too exotic, too far from the mainstream. That is why these final three months of the campaign are so important for Obama. Rupert Cornwell The Independent
Full article: Cool guy, Barack. But could he be too cool for US voters?
Boys, girls and mags
Michael Gove should not have praised women's magazines, says Liz Hunt. How long ago was it that Mr Gove last ventured into a newsagent's? Has he not seen row upon row of glossy "slag mags" that glorify the antics of those members of the sisterhood who seem to have no problem with appearing to be "permanently, lasciviously, uncomplicatedly available". Women are just as culpable as men in this tawdry business - if not more so, because they should know better. The irony is that men get the blame when the reality is that women are driving the business too, and many are its willing victims. Liz Hunt Daily Telegraph
Full article: Mags that demean lads and lasses
Are men hard done by? asks Zoe Williams. Society tends to denigrate men more openly than it does women, but then women are portrayed so routinely as hunks of flesh to be measured out by the pound that we only notice it happening to men because it's aberrant. The big mistake of the feminist movement was not that it attacked men, nor that it turned us all into slags (I think that's at the core of Gove's point), but that it separated itself from socialism. It shouldn't have. This movement either fights for fairness on behalf of all women, or it's just a petty squabble between middle-class people, fighting for dominance in a conversation no one else is listening to. Zoe Williams The Guardian
Full article: Men under siege? A sense of proportion, people, please
SATs fiasco
After the fiasco of this year’s SATs, who will give Mr Balls his notice to improve? asks Alice Miles. Testing has become not a tool of policy, but policy itself. As the date of publication of the SATs results approached, what were education ministers doing? Sending out multicoloured charts to the media to demonstrate their latest anti-obesity drive in primary schools. Hey, your kid may not be able to read, but at least he knows he's fat. This row over SATs is government gone wrong: contracted-out responsibility, lack of accountability, and a ministry that can send out 3,840 pages of instructions to head teachers in a single year, but cannot get exam papers marked on time. Alice Miles The Times
Full article: Today's SATs result: Government 0 Pupils 0
Emin embarrassing
The Tracey Emin retrospective is not so much an exhibition, more a cry for help, says Magnus Linklater. Being with Emin and her art is like walking unexpectedly into the bedroom of a teenage daughter who is going through a bad patch. The room is a mess, the things she has scrawled on the walls don't bear looking at, and you can only hope that she will grow out of it. Art, surely, has to show some way forward, some sense of its relevance, some connection with our world, our society or our collective consciousness. To be wrapped up so remorsely in oneself at the expense of everything else is to sacrifice any wider relevance. Magnus Linklater The Times
Full article: Help! I'm trapped in Tracey Emin's ghastly world
