The U.S midterm elections on the second of November are expected to set a record for election campaign spending, estimated to reach 3.7 billion dollars, and even surpass 4 billion dollars. This will make the previous record, which is 2.8 billion dollars in 2006, look modest in comparison. This is not to mention that the entire British legislative elections cost 120 million dollars. A billion dollars has already been spent on the campaigns of both the Democrats and the Republicans. This explosion in spending cannot be assessed in isolation from the Supreme Court's decision this year to abolish the spending cap on electoral campaigns by companies, trade unions, lobbyists and special interest groups that oppose reforming the banking system, and want to repeal the healthcare plan bill that President Obama managed to extract from Congress. I read that these interest groups have spent 300 million dollars so far on their selected candidates and the issues of the latter. The Supreme Court is too conservative, and there are members of Congress who want to cancel its decision. However, this will not happen before the end of the midterm elections, and it will be money, and not U.S democracy that will decide the form of both houses of Congress, as a result. The Republicans are behaving as though they are on their way to win. However, I find this difficult because there is a large Democratic majority in both the Senate and the House. So perhaps the numbers and figures will guide us with respect to the outcome of these elections. The competition is over one third of the seats in the Senate, which comprises, specifically this year, 36 seats out of one hundred, including 17 held by Democrats. I find it impossible for the Republicans to go from the 41 seats they currently hold, to the 51 seats that give them a simple majority. There are four Democratic seats that are threatened in Arkansas, Delaware, Indiana and North Dakota. There are other seats that are less threatened in California, Colorado, Illinois and Pennsylvania. However, the Republicans also face the risk of losing their seats in Missouri, Kentucky and Ohio. In other words, the numbers and estimates do not indicate that the Republicans will win. In the House of Representatives, all 435 seats are up for grabs. The Democrats currently hold 255 of them, against 179 seats for the Republications; this means that a change of 39 seats for the Republicans' favor will give them a simple majority of 218 seats. This is not impossible, but it is extremely difficult. The history of the House of Representatives since World War II shows that the highest turnover from one party to another was 54 seats in 1946 and 1994. Nevertheless, the Republicans claim that they will snatch 80 seats and perhaps even one hundred seats from the Democrats. This is wishful thinking, because such a coup has not happened before, and there is no reason for it to happen today. I pause here to remind the readers of something we all saw, when President George Bush Sr., who won the Kuwait liberation war and in whose term communism collapsed, lost the presidency after one term to Bill Clinton who made his campaign slogan “It's the economy, stupid”. People vote with their pockets, not with their hearts or minds. The U.S economy is in the worst possible shape since decades, and I believe it to be the single most important issue in the midterm elections. While George W. Bush lost all the wars he had waged and ruined the U.S economy, unleashing a global financial crisis, the Republicans still have the audacity to accuse Barack Obama of being behind the financial crisis and to ask the voters to punish him. They apparently think that the voters have begun to forget Bush and his eight bleak years in the White House. While the American voters are not the Einsteins of this age, I presume that they have not yet forgotten what they personally witnessed only two years ago. At any rate, I want to conclude with the other kind of audacity that interests the Arab reader: the advocates of Israel are actively lobbying for the candidates who place the interests of Israel before those of their country. There are many of these in the Congress (but at least the Likudnik Arlen Specter will not return to the Senate after losing in the Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania). One example before I run out of space, involves the Emergency Committee for Israel, led by William Kristol and Liz Cheney, which aims at protecting Israel from the campaigns to delegitimize the Hebrew State. The committee began supporting the Likudnik candidates in the media and through advertisements, including Representative Pat Toomey against the Democratic Representative Joe Sestak in the battle for a seat in the Senate for Pennsylvania. Why? Because Sestak does not support Israel enough and because he is in favor of the two-state solution. This made the Likudniks and neocons forget that he is a former navy admiral with a huge track-record in the service of his country. Today, he finds himself facing a candidate whose sole qualification is that he supports Israel. These are the elections of money, special and foreign interests, not democratic elections. [email protected]
