17 months separate us from the U.S. presidential elections, those of the House of Representatives, as well as a third of the Senate's seats. However, elections in America are an industry, and they never stop, not even for a day. Since there are elections every two years (in the midterm elections, all seats in the House are up for grabs, as well as a third of the Senate's seats), the voting day is barely over when work begins for the next one. The U.S. elections take place on the first Tuesday of November, and so will be held on 06/11 next year. The competition among the Republican aspirants to the White House has intensified. Last month, I had written my first article about the upcoming elections, which I concluded by saying “and I will no doubt return to this subject in the future”. Indeed, I am returning today to this subject, much earlier than I anticipated, because of recent development and changes. I had already said that good fortune has returned to Barack Obama, as the killing of Osama bin Laden boosted his popularity greatly in every single public opinion poll, while there are indications that the economy has improved following the crisis of 2008, further benefiting the president. However, this month had barely started and people began to forget the killing of al-Qaeda's leader, and newly released figures showed that the economy's ability to create new jobs has slumped, compared to the previous few months, when a marked increase in the number of new jobs was recorded. Perhaps the Arab reader will be shocked if I say that people, especially Americans, think with their pockets, and that the 'Cause', the Arab uprisings, China and other issues, are all together combined less important than the state of the country's economy. We have an example that the readers know about this. In his singular term after 1988, George Bush led an international alliance that liberated Kuwait, and during his tenure, the communist bloc collapsed after a Cold War that lasted 70 years. However, the Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton, from the second poorest state in the country, came to lead a campaign with the slogan of "It's the economy, stupid". He was chosen by the Americans as President, while bearing in mind that the economy had begun to improve in Bush's last year in office, and even Clinton himself admitted that after he won. Today, I do not know what the U.S. economy will be like in 17 months, or which Republican will be Obama's rival. I do not have a crystal ball, and I do not want to rely on intuition, since we have seen how George W. Bush's intuition ended up with America losing all its wars and having its economy fatally wounded. What I know is that Obama will win if the economy is doing well, or if the Republicans choose an unfit presidential candidate, and there indeed are many such candidates in the arena today. Since I wrote my previous article about the upcoming elections, Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who is of Syrian extraction, declared that he will not run in the battle for the Republican nomination, at the request of his wife and four daughters, who have a veto right as he said. Perhaps this was true, and perhaps the reason is because he and his wife Cheri had divorced. She married another, got divorced, and then remarried him, and maybe he does not want to have all this come out in the open again. Or perhaps the reason is that he passed many right-wing laws, including one that denied many women healthcare benefits, and turned a significant proportion of the electorate against him. Other proposed names include Haley Barbour, the Governor of Mississippi, who refused to run in the elections, and said that he does not feel ‘fire in his gut' to pursue the post of President. Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, also withdrew, preferring to keep his television show on the Fox Network. Today, I note down the names of some candidates who chose to run in the elections, and others whose names were proposed. I intend to elaborate with more detail tomorrow. The most popular candidate is Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts. There are many former governors in the arena. There is Jon Huntsman, former Governor of Utah, and also a former ambassador to China. Besides, there is Rick Santorum, former Governor of Pennsylvania, as well as Tim Pawlenty, former Governor of Minnesota, and Sarah Palin, the former Governor of Alaska, who ran in the McCain campaign. There are also Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, Rep. Ron Paul, and Rep. Michele Bachmann. I shall continue tomorrow. [email protected]
