Lexington's notebook

APOLOGIES for the long break in blogging. Lexington has been, in part, busy giving the American hospital system a road-test (nothing lethal). More to the point, I have also been busy reporting and writing this week's cover article on President Barack Obama's foreign policy, as his second term begins.

The article argues that there is much to like about the foreign policies pursued by Mr Obama during his first years in office. Rational and reasonable, they have blended strategic optimism with tactical caution, and tempered grand visions with a careful weighing of costs. Only one flaw has betrayed Mr Obama’s thoughtful plans. Time and again, they have not really worked.

IT IS clearly good news that Democrats and Republicans have reached a deal to avoid the most damaging consequences of falling off the fiscal cliff. So why does Lexington feel as much irritation as relief?

I think it is because, if you take a step back from the previous weeks, days and hours of partisan squabbling and turkey-cocking, the emerging details of this short-term fix—analysed at greater length by my colleague G.I. here—show that the two political parties are really not as far apart as all that when it comes to America's budgetary future.

My last foreign posting (not counting two recent years in Britain, which only feels to me like a foreign country) was in Belgium.

IS RURAL America still politically relevant? The question is sincere, and not mere journalistic impertinence. Since the 2012 presidential elections, a cottage industry of comment has sprung up, examining the growing ideological gulf between America's countryside and its urban centres. All sorts of nifty maps have been created to explain just how Mitt Romney managed to lose the election, despite winning a crushing majority of American counties (nearly 80% of them).

A clever 3D image (on the right) from Robert Vanderbei of Princeton University uses columns of differing heights to show the relative populations of each county.

WITH each passing day, news seems to break of another Republican grown-up, pinning the party's presidential election loss on Mitt Romney's comments about the "47 per cent". Today came word of a bruising analysis from Mitch Daniels, the outgoing governor of Indiana. For Mr Daniels, the Wall Street Journal reports, it was a "self-inflicted fatal blow" when Mr Romney told donors at a private dinner that the roughly 47 per cent of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes are dependent on the government and therefore would never vote for him, comments which leaked in September, causing a flurry of negative headlines.

MY PRINT column this week is about Barack Obama's foreign policy in his second term, and how the watchword is avoiding deep entanglements overseas. Speaking to senior officials in the government and also to senior Republican foreign-policy types, there is a consensus that Mr Obama's overwhelming goal is to draw a line under the massively militarised foreign policy of the Bush era in favour of something more arms-length.

Critics call the approach an abdication of American leadership, and plain unsustainable in the face of crises breaking out all over the globe.

MY PRINT column this week argues that the Republican Party's big problem is not that it just lost the race for the White House. The real problem for conservatives is that they did not lose the 2012 election cycle badly enough. Political parties sliding into a long-term, structural crisis typically only start to climb after a brutal defeat or—usually—defeats.

My column considers all manner of comforting arguments that explain why the Republicans did not have such a bad night on November 6th, or might find it easier than expected to avoid the demographic trap made visible by Mr Obama's win.

Such arguments are not wholly wrong, but miss two large problems facing Republicans.