Marbury

why ed's presentational issues are a blessing for the left

OK, I think we've had just about enough on Miliband and his big day. But two Times columnists weighed in today and I want to sneak bits of their columns out under the paywall for you, because they represent two slightly different critiques. First, Hugo Rifkind, who writes amusingly about Miliband's idiosyncratic speaking style:

Part of the problem is that, when Ed Miliband speaks, it’s very difficult to listen to what he’s actually saying. There’s the arms, for starters. On the radio the other week, the comedian Susan Calman pointed out that they often look like the limbs of somebody standing behind him, slipped under his armpits as a joke. Then there are the eyes. They keep closing and stay closed for ages, until the exact moment that the viewer starts to panic. “Well, that’s it,” you’ve just thought. “This time they will never open again.” Suddenly, they do. It’s terribly distracting.

Funny. But Rifkind goes on to make a serious point: that people in Britain are increasingly suspicious of big business, fed up with unchecked capitalism. Miliband is on to something - so it's a pity he's unelectable.

There are various versions of this analysis floating around; call it the 'Substance good, Presentation bad' view. Jonathan Freedland argued similarly the day after the speech. I'm afraid I think it's much worse than that - more like, 'Substance terrible, Presentation bad'. Philip Collins, possibly the sharpest commentator  on the Labour Party at the moment, is more of this persuasion. I think he nails it here:

This was a magical mystery tour through a nation that has been run by people with the wrong values for decades. The fault lies not with the people of Britain, who have the right values, British values, or with the previous Labour Government, of which Mr Miliband, who has the right values, is proud. A mysterious closed circle of bad people with the wrong values (MPs, asset strippers, phone hackers and predators) have turned the country to moral ruin by erecting a system to reward their wrong values rather than the right values of the people and Mr Miliband.

This is, essentially, a conspiracy theory, something you believe at school but grow out of. I half-expected him to cry out in frustration: “I just don’t understand how they did it. There can only be a few hundred of them.” The rank weakness of the argument is shown by the fact that it had to be illustrated with a long section on Fred Goodwin, which is the rhetorical equivalent of a Frank Spencer impersonation or a routine about the Daleks not being able to go upstairs.

Collins concludes that the speech was not a new beginning, but "the dying breath of vintage social democracy, in which state action directs the nation towards moral betterment." I think the speech was even worse that Collins suggests, if that's possible, because apart from being a weak-minded conspiracy theory it was also unforgivably parochial. There was not a word about the seismic economic changes going around this island. If the Eurozone crisis becomes a catastrophe, Miliband's speech will read as if it's from another era altogether.

The 'substance good, presentation bad' school of thought is dangerous for the Labour Party. It's interesting that even Miliband's strongest supporters in the press, like the New Statesman's Mehdi Hasan, have conceded that Miliband has presentational problems. I sense some hedging going on. If Labour goes down to heavy defeat on a left-wing manifesto at the next election, you might have thought the whole party would be forced to confront political reality. But the Vintage Social Democrats have found their escape route. Right policies, they'll say, but - this with a sad, regretful shake of the head - wrong guy. Yvette Cooper will be called upon to represent the true believers. The dream will never die.

not tony blair

I am not going to offer a long commentary on the Labour leader's speech today. I'm one of those who thinks it doesn't really matter what Ed Miliband says, because...well, he's Ed Miliband.

For what it's worth, my immediate impression was that the speech was underwhelming even for those more sympathetic to him than I am. It was a like a New Statesman essay; very much the speech of a backroom boy. There was no substance to it, just a string of clunky phrases pleasing to the ears of his party (Labour will support 'producers, not predators') that didn't add up to a story, beyond the vague sense that Tories are bad people and everything is unfair. The speech will be forgotten by next year, by which time commentators will doubtless once again be declaring that Miliband has to make the 'speech of his life'.

One moment struck me, though: the booing of Blair's name. It wasn't so much that it happened - we know that large parts of the Labour Party loathe the man who had the temerity to lead them into government. It was that Ed Miliband seemed to invite it. He said, "I am not Tony Blair" (as if we hadn't noticed), and paused for a second, wearing a coquettish smirk. Cue cheering and booing.

Was that deliberate or accidental? I suspect the booing of Blair will feature significantly in this evening's news reports, as it's a neat way of symbolising a break with New Labour. That may be what Miliband wanted - or he may have just stumbled into it. Either way, it was symptomatic of his focus on pleasing the people in the hall, rather than talking to the viewers beyond. Voters watching that moment on the news will take two things away: that the party is an undisciplined rabble, uneasy with its immediate past, and that Labour is turning to the left.

dice of truth

How do you get the truth out of someone who may think it's not in their best interests to tell you it? One answer is to get them to throw a die.

Conservationists working in South Africa to protect wild leopards come up against this problem when interviewing ranchers. They need to find out how many leopards are being killed by ranchers, in order to target their conservation efforts. But they know that the ranchers may be unwilling to tell them the truth, because of the possibility of a fine or prison sentence.

To get round this problem, environmentalists from Bangor University have pioneered the use of a method known as "randomised response technique", sometimes used by public health professionals who interview people engaged in illegal activities, like prostitutes or drug-users.

It works like this. You give the person being interviewed a die, and tell them that before they answer the question they have to throw it, without revealing the number that is rolled. If they roll a one, then they must respond to the question with a "no"; if they throw a six, then they must answer with "yes". All other numbers they have to answer truthfully.

This catch means that when the respondent answers, his or her "yes" may not actually be a truthful "yes"; their "no" might not mean "no". Because of the leeway this gives them, respondents are more likely to open up and give truthful answers on numbers two through five. The forced "yes" and "no" answers introduce a predictable amount of "noise" into the results, but overall the technique gets better answers than a more straightforward approach.

You can read more about this here.

britain's holocaust centre

On Sunday evening I attended a fundraising ball for the Holocaust Centre in Nottingham. If you didn't know that Britain has its own Holocaust Centre, well, neither did I until recently, but it's an important place and behind its very existence lies an extraordinary story.

The centre was founded by two (non-Jewish) brothers, Stephen and James Smith, who were moved to do something after learning about the horrors of the Holocaust on a trip to Israel and later on trips to the surviving camps in Eastern Europe. They sacrificed their careers to set up and run the centre. Now, over 20,000 children visit it each year. It performs an invaluable service. The most moving part of Sunday's event was watching a film of Holocaust survivors (many of whom were in attendance and in fine form) talk about what a difference the centre had made to them. It has encouraged them to share long-buried memories; to educate young people about what happened, thereby helping to prevent the Holocaust from being forgotten, or -  the greater danger - becoming a dry story from history books rather than a deeply felt cultural memory.

Pictured are Arek Hersh (left) and Dennis Avey. When he aged 11, Arek was taken to his first concentration camp, and spent several years at Auschwitz. He was liberated by Russians at the end of the war. 81 members of his family had been killed. Of the 5000 Jews in his hometown, he was one of 40 survivors. He now lives in Yorkshire. Dennis Avey is from Essex and went to war as a British soldier. He was captured by the Germans and as a prisoner he heard rumours of mass killings at Auschwitz. Possessed by the need to see this for himself, he arranged to swap uniforms with a Dutch Jewish inmate, and smuggled himself in. Dennis witnessed the corpses piling up and inhaled the stench of the crematorium. Now he is as intent as ever on telling the world about what he saw.

The centre runs an annual deficit and is constantly in danger of running out of funds - hence Sunday's event. It needs donations, but most of all, it needs visitors. You can find out more here.

confidence man

Another Awkward Ed Miliband moment, courtesy of the New Statesman.

In the New Statesman, Mehdi Hasan asks the Labour leader about his first twelve months in the job:

“What I've learned is that I'm a far more level-headed person than much of the Westminster village." Miliband believes that the weekly joust that is Prime Minister's Questions, in particular, is over-rated. "I always say after PMQs, whether it goes well or badly, that the gap between triumph and disaster is incredibly narrow. Me saying Cameron chucked bread rolls was a great triumph and yet, the week before, [my performance] was supposed to be a great disaster. 

Miliband is surely right not to get too worked up about each PMQs. But on reading this, something about his self-congratulation seemed significant to me, and not in a good way. In the Guardian today, Allegra Stratton - very sympathetic to Miliband - helped me work out what it was:

Miliband has two endearing character traits that are sadly not serving him in good stead here: he is a very nice man, and he is really quite self-assured. He thinks his nice man-ness exudes, and it does compel those with whom he has personal contact. But since it is not connecting with the broader public, it ends up being an anti-asset – encouraging complacency. Similarly, the deep well of confidence that comes from the tips of his toes desensitises him to those moments when something really should be done.

Maybe Stratton confuses her own point a little - clearly, his niceness isn't the issue here. Miliband's "anti-asset" is his self-assurance, which is also complacency.

A deep pool of self-confidence is a great and indispensable asset for successful politicians, and Miliband, whatever his other weaknesses, has one. It's what enables him, the week after a disastrous PMQs, to get up and appear confident under Tory fire. It's what makes it possible for him to face the public while hearing, day after day, that they find him 'weird'. When things are going badly for an opposition leader, as they have for most of this year for Miliband, there can be no more punishing job in politics. You could see the confidence drain out of Neil Kinnock or Iain Duncan-Smith. I haven't seen that with Miliband and I don't expect to. He has the blithe self-assurance of an adored younger sibling, endlessly confident of his own place in the world.

But the best politicians combine personal self-confidence with a seething anxiety about their own prospects. Read Alastair Campbell's memoir of the opposition years and you get a picture of Blair that didn't come across so much in public, as a driven, obsessive worrier, calling aides at 4am, rewriting speeches thirty times, convincing himself, even when ahead in the polls, that defeat was imminent. Perhaps this is what Ed is like in private, too. But somehow I doubt it. Ed just seems too at ease with how things are going, even when they are going badly. And make no mistake, they are going badly. That isn't Westminster Village chatter - that's long-term, steady, undeniable fact. He should be more pessimistic then commentators, not less. If Miliband doesn't think things are going appallingly, then it's even less likely he'll be able to turn them around.

If Ed Miliband loses at the election, even he won't be able to convince himself that things are going just fine. He'll be disappointed, and upset on behalf of his colleagues. But then he'll shrug his shoulders and walk away.

bill vs barack

Seeing as Marbury has been mean to Obama recently, here's a corrective.

MSNBC asked Jonathan Alter, an Obama-sympathetic journalist who wrote a book about the president's first year in office, about that "home alone" quote from Suskind's book. Alter confirmed he'd heard it being used around the White House by former Clintonites (why did he chose not to include it, then? Presumably it didn't fit his narrative). But he went on to explain the view of those same people on whether they preferred working for Obama or Clinton:

They thought Clinton was more creative in his policymaking, but they prefer to a person Obama in a crisis, which was what they were in. He was decisive and making as many decisions in a week as Bill Clinton made in a year, and making the decisions crisply. 

obama turns left

 

 

Yesterday, Obama did something he's never really done before: he staked out a clear position to the left of centre and said to the Republicans, 'Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.' Up until now, he's been so keen to be reasonable that he has, to paraphrase George Bush, 'negotiated with himself', coming to the table with proposals that are already close to the Republican position. The Republicans then reject them for being too left wing or wrench them further to the right. The end results is that, even to the uninvolved spectator of politics, the president comes off looking weak and impotent.

This time, he's decided to draw a clear contrast with the right: tax raises on the rich vs deeper cuts to Medicare and social security. He'll probably end up in the middle - in fact, that's where he should end up, if he wants to win in 2012. But he's betting that the best way to get there is via the left. It's a big bet. The danger is that even though the policies he laid out are, on their own terms, popular, the signal they send about his position is that he's a traditional tax and spend Democrat. During the British 2005 general election the Tories took a hardline on immigration because polls told them it was a popular position. But the signal it sent was 'same old Tories'.

Much will depend on how Obama communicates his proposals. Yesterday's performance was feisty and energetic, for him, which is good - he can't afford to come across as passive right now. But he walks a fine line. The danger is that the more he talks about 'fairness' the more left-wing he sounds. The focus of his message needs to be on paying down the deficit.

The worst possibility, for Obama, is that it doesn't matter what he says. The credibility of politicians follows something like Hooke's Law - it is elastic, but it has a limit. Politicians can mess up, and recover their credibility, and if they're good they can do so more than once. But at a certain point, voters just lose faith altogether - the spring is broken. Obama must pray that hasn't happened yet. If it has, it doesn't matter what he says - nobody will be listening.

how to argue with conspiracy theorists

In short, don't - there really is no point. The best thing is to ignore them, preferably with the Hitch's insouciant style:

president summers

White House/Souza.

There is a book published this week that may have a quite devastating effect on perceptions of Obama's presidency, at least in media circles and possibly among the wider electorate too. Ron Suskind has written a book about this White House's first two years, with a focus on the handling of the economic crisis. Suskind wrote one of the most perceptive and damaging books about the Bush presidency (he garnered that deathless quote about the 'reality-based community'). Like Bob Woodward, he has an uncanny knack of not only getting top sources to meet him but to be marvellously indiscreet. He's worked himself into the perfect position for a political journalist: everyone feels they have to talk to him because they know that everyone else is talking to him. So, for this book Suskind talked to everyone, including Obama, with whom he spent fifty minutes in the Oval Office.

Obama will be repenting that at leisure, for the picture that Suskind paints of his White House is not one that he or his supporters will enjoy reading. This discussion of the book, by Adam Moss and Frank Rich at New York magazine, gives you a good idea of what it contains. In brief, Obama comes out looking like a hapless ingenue entirely at the mercy of three powerful, ruthless and aggressive advisers: Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Rahm Emanuel. The three of them pursued their own agendas, together or in conflict with each other, and each felt quite able to ignore the wishes of the man behind the Oval Office desk or, more subtly, to ensure that his wishes matched their own.

Summers (right, above) emerges as Obama's very own Gordon Brown: a brilliant mind and a fierce in-fighter, possessed of an absolutely implacable will to power. Like Brown he is emotionally tin-eared, routinely unpleasant to colleagues, and prone to acts of petulance. Also like Brown, he was much better at stopping things getting done (because they didn't originate from him) than at making things happen. He was finally called out by Pete Rouse, Obama's interim chief-of-staff, who wrote a memo to the president recommending that Summers be removed, for his "imperious and heavy-handed direction of the economic policy process." He was, but by then it was too late.

At least Tony Blair knew Brown well and had the confidence to fight their battles to a draw and even win some. But Obama was entirely unprepared for Summers, and Summers knew it. The quote from the book we're likely to hear over and over - right up until the 2012 election - is from Peter Orszag (on the left, above), who recalls Larry Summers saying to him after a meeting with the president: "You know, Peter we're really home alone. There's no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes." Well, Clinton would almost certainly have made the mistake of appointing Summers, and she also showed herself, during the 2008 campaign, incapable of adjudicating between warring advisers. So I'm not sure she would have handled this any better. Summers was widely regarded as having the biggest economic brain in the country, he had great experience of governing, and the markets were reassured by him. So probably any Democratic president would have wanted him around during a crisis. But he was also a Grade-A shit, and in the end his shittiness proved more destructive than his undoubted talents were creative.

Geithner comes out just as badly. A subtler man than Summers, perhaps, but no less wilful, he more than anyone else is responsible for the absence of any meaningful financial reform on Obama's watch.

All this makes me reflect that we who supported Obama in 2008 were wrong, very wrong, to dismiss the value of experience. It matters - of course it does. No matter how smart you are, no matter how many smart people you talk to, and no matter how many you appoint, it takes years of governing experience to learn the strong instincts a president needs if he is to impose his will on the machine in the midst of the frenzy of governing. It may be that Obama has learnt his lessons and is all set up to be a first-rate president in his second term. But I wouldn't blame the American voters for deciding he hasn't earned a second chance.

gigs

I've always hated the word 'gig', for some reason. It reminds me of being a student and everyone pretending to be cool. But now here I am using it myself. What disgusting hypocrisy.

I'm doing two gigs this week, one for the book, one for kicks.

The first, book-related gig is this evening, courtesy of the glamorous, chic, intellectually sexy and hell, just downright sexy, London Salon, or Salon London, however you prefer. It is being held at the Adam St club on, er, Adam St, just off The Strand. From 7pm for 7.30pm.  It promises to be a fun, funny and stimulating evening.

The second event ('event' is fine, isn't it?) is in Lewisham on Friday night, courtesy of the Lewisham Literary Festival. I'll be on as one small part of a brilliant troupe of clever comedy performers collectively known as Tall Tales. They include the disablingly witty Miss Jones, the absurdly talented John Finnemore, the brilliant and hilarious Helen Arney, and many more. Well, a few more.  If you're in the area, do come, it's going to be a great evening; a really memorable 'gig'. You can book tickets here.

why rick perry might be the making of mitt

Do they call each other to coordinate wardrobes?

Ever since Perry entered the race I've had a feeling that, despite appearances, his participation might actually be good for Mitt Romney. But I wasn't sure why I thought that until reading the commentaries on last night's debate, especially this one from the National Journal:

Before Perry entered the race last month, Romney had shied from engaging with his Republican rivals, choosing to stay above the fray. Perry’s surge in the polls made it impossible for him to continue that strategy. Polls show Perry drawing support not just in the demographics he was expected to win--evangelicals and tea party adherents--but among groups that had been considered Romney's sweet spot: college-educated suburbanites. And just as Hillary Rodham Clinton forced Barack Obama to become a better candidate in their drawn-out battle for the Democratic nomination in 2008, Perry seems to be helping Romney to find his audience.

For years now, Romney has been explaining which side he was on. Is he for abortion or against it? Is he for the individual mandate in health insurance or against it? Even Romney himself didn’t seem sure. The new Romney is willing to displease: Before a tea party audience at the debate, he defended the existence of the Federal Reserve. In recent months, he acknowledged climate change and refused to sign an antiabortion pledge that he said went too far.

Exactly. Romney's biggest problem is that he tends to try and be all things to all people; as a result he has an authenticity problem. Politics aside, many GOP voters just don't respect him. Perry is the anti-Romney; he is authentic all right - people know where he stands - but he runs the risk of appearing to be too extreme to make a potential president. The key point is this: because Perry is so single-minded and aggressive and such a powerful threat to Romney, he is forcing the former front-runner to define himself more, to punch back and toughen up. Even those who don't agree with Romney's positions will respond positively to that.

It could be that Perry's demagoguery sweeps all before him, but if it doesn't, Romney will emerge a much stronger candidate than he was before Perry entered.

the value of recklessness

Tonight's US Open final will feature the two best players in the world - and no Roger Federer, something that The Fed himself can't quite get over. Here he is after losing to Djokovic in the semi-final:

"It's awkward having to explain this loss," a tetchy Federer said, "because I feel like I should be doing the other press conference."

He went on to be quite mean-spirited about the manner in which Djokovic beat him. (It's notable that Federer - of whom I'm a huge fan - won his reputation for being a gentleman during the years he was winning everything; now that he's losing more often, an interestingly bitchy side of his personality is coming to the fore). The key turning point in the match came down to a fascinating quirk of sports psychology - although top athletes are the ones who care most about winning, sometimes they can perform better at the precise moment they decide not to care.

Federer's beef with Djokovic turned on the match point that the latter saved by making an extraordinary forehand shot that he seemed to hit without really thinking it would go in - and yet somehow it did. From the Guardian's report:

Asked about the quite remarkable forehand winner Djokovic hit to save match point, Federer reckoned the Serb did not look at that point like someone "who believes much anymore in winning. To lose against someone like that, it's very disappointing, because you feel like he was mentally out of it already. Just gets the lucky shot at the end, and off you go." ...

Federer was reluctant to give him credit even for that courage in a crisis, preferring to regard it as desperate. "Confidence? Are you kidding me?" he said when it was put to him the cross-court forehand off his first serve...was either a function of luck or confidence. "I mean, please. Some players grow up and play like that – being down 5-2 in the third, and they all just start slapping shots. I never played that way. I believe hard work's going to pay off, because early on maybe I didn't always work at my hardest. For me, this is very hard to understand. How can you play a shot like that on match point? Maybe he's been doing it for 20 years, so for him it was very normal. You've got to ask him."

Well, they did ask him. Here's what Djokovic said about it:

"Yeah, I tend to do that on match points," he said, reminded that it was exactly what he did to Federer last year. "It kinda works."

When people discuss Federer's decline it's invariably in terms of his age - he's 30. What's interesting about his form, though, isn't so much that he's slowing down physically - he had match points in the fifth set of this match and played some brilliant tennis during it - but that he's lost the mental edge that enabled him to steamroller opponents on the crucial points. He's become a choker. As the neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer has discussed, choking usually results from over-thinking about a shot that should be peformed unthinkingly, thus losing the fluidity of movement needed for great play.

Perhaps the reason Federer is so exercised about Djokovic's forehand winner is that his opponent was clearly doing the complete opposite to him - he was deliberately under-thinking his shot in order to give himself the kind of liberating looseness that might just produce magic. Djokovic was being strategically careless. And guess what - it kinda worked.

UPDATE: Nate Silver has done a fascinating statistical analysis of Federer's chances of winning another Grand Slam.

time shares

Discover magazine has a fascinating list of ten things science tells us about time. I think this is the most beautiful one:

10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.”

bolton bows out

Finally, after a long period of agonising indecision that held literally nobody enthralled, John Bolton, former Bushie and sub-neo-con, has taken my advice and decided not to run for president. In other news, I have decided not to enter next year's World Chess Championship.

Lest you think I am being too flippant about this momentous development, I would you ask everyone to take a moment to consider its impact on the moustachioed community. An enterprising journalist from Yahoo News called Chris Moody has asked Rick Perlut from the American Mustache Institute - which works to protect "the rights of, and fighting discrimination against, mustached Americans by promoting the growth, care, and culture of the mustache" - about Bolton's announcement:

PERLUT: As there has not been a major party Mustached American presidential candidate since Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, clearly, the Mustached American community is hungry to see one of our own in the Oval Office. Mr. Bolton's decision to decline candidacy was unfortunate, but we hope there are other young Mustached Americans out there with the dreams of leading our great nation sometime in the near future.

Would his candidacy have been a step forward for mustache advocates? 

PERLUT: Bolton's candidacy would have been a boost to the Mustached American community without question. The last Mustached American President of the United States was William Howard Taft. So indeed, it's been a long time coming and there has been reticence amongst our people to take that leap. That being said, we are hopeful Michelle Bachmann's bleached upper lip gets some attention.

one of these men will be president in 2013

Separated at birth? (Photo: AP)

The US economy, as the astute NYT commentator David Leonhardt notes, really does seem to be tumbling back into recession. The nightmare scenario for Obama is coming true. My scary headline is only slightly over-emphatic.

There's plenty of reaction on the debate here and here. In short, the two front-runners, Romney and Perry, did well. Romney is very practiced at this now and has become a subtle, assured performer. Perry was slightly more uncertain, as you would expect, but didn't make any major gaffes. He did, however, expose a major strategic vulnerability by repeating and intensifying his opposition to the social security programme that millions of Americans rely on in their retirement. It's fighting talk that will fire up his core conservative vote but at the expense of his electability in the general - and thus, arguably, in the primaries too. Perry is shaping up to be Barry Goldwater, and Republicans old enough will recall that Goldwater didn't do too well.

But back to the general election, and to Obama's challenge. How will he run? Obviously, the hopey-changey thing isn't likely to fly. Healthcare is still unpopular. And although, in a sane and rational world, he should be able to run on "things coulda been a lot worse", he won't get much credit for his administration's handling of the economy. Unusually for a Democrat president, national security may be Obama's strongest suit, having kept American safe from new attacks, seen off its number one enemy, and toppled Gaddafi. And yet, this election won't be about national security unless something awful happens and the country feels threatened again. This election will be about who can fix the economy, and generate new jobs.

Obama and his team now know that there is highly unlikely to be much enthusiasm for him outside his core constituencies, come the election. So their only hope is to win by painting the alternative as much worse. If there is a glimmer of hope for Obama from recent polls, it's that 70% of voters still find him likeable. That is something - and, given the difficulty of running on his record, it may be all he has.

What this all means is that there is a great and probably irresistible incentive for Obama to run a very personal, character-destroying campaign against his opponent. We can expect that just as soon as the likely Republican nominee emerges, he will get swiftboated. And the swiftboating won't stop until November 2012. This is going be a very fierce, and very close, fight.