Daily catch-up: 'Don't do stupid stuff' is a pretty good foreign policy, actually

A bulletin of American politics (and modern architecture), plus a genuine business location on a van

It is not exactly a Genuine Shop Name, more a genuine business location, but I do like this, via Brian McC.

µ There's a short-book-length article in The Atlantic on Barack Obama's foreign policy by Jeffrey Goldberg. I confess I have not read it all yet, but I commend it to you anyway. This account of a flare-up between the President and Hillary Clinton, after she stood down as Secretary of State, gives a flavour:

When The Atlantic ... published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro-stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit.

They are of course both right, although Obama is more right than Clinton. Not doing stupid stuff may not be an organising principle, but it is necessary condition of good government.

µ Talking of American foreign policy, Edwin Heathcote draws attention to the "eye-wateringly bad" architecture of the new US Embassy emerging in Vauxhall, south London. You wouldn't have thought it likely that they could have made it worse than the existing embassy in Grosvenor Square, but they seem to have been determined to try.

The new US Embassy, Nine Elms, London

µ Another election upset, and another post on Five Thirty Eight explaining why the opinion polls got it wrong. Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primary in Michigan by 1.5 points when the polls had Clinton ahead by 21 points. The two important things to say about this are (a) thank goodness politics remains unpredictable, and (b) the delegates are split proportionally, so Clinton still takes 60 and Sanders 67.

Clinton is virtually unassailable in the overall delegate count, which is, as we learned in 2008, what matters. Clinton has 1,223, more than half the number needed to win, and Sanders has 574.

As we bid him farewell, I liked Pat Tobin's description of the socialist challenger: "Bernie Sanders always looks like he's trying to figure out what all the cables behind his entertainment center are connected to."

µ And finally, thanks to Tom Freeman for this:

"Actually, 'Cookie' was the name of the creator."