Why journalist Hisham Melhem, who followed US elections since Nixon

A week, as the saying goes, is a long time in politics. That is how US-based journalist and political commentator Hisham Melhem summed up the next eight days before America votes on Nov. 8 to elect either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton as president.
A veteran of American election reporting, the 66-year-old Melhem speaks from experience, having covered US politics since the days of Richard Nixon. He was in college when Nixon was president. “I am referring to 1972; he was forced to resign in 1973.”
In his own words, Melhem, an American of Lebanese descent, has been “in the business of reporting for the last 35 years” during which time he has witnessed the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
According to him, Reagan’s presidency was the most exciting.
“He was at the White House during the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The war in Afghanistan took place in the 1980s. The Iranian revolution occurred in 1979 and so did the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Makkah. The 1980s were important because of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It was during that period when the Arabs and Americans struck a grand alliance against the Soviet Union and Reagan’s policies ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Melhem said that the most exciting election campaign was that of Obama in 2008. “It was a historic election.” For him, the Carter-Reagan election in 1980 was “equally important” because of the situation with the American hostages in Iran.
Melhem said American election campaigns were “fun” to cover in the past. “They are very long and full of rituals. It takes more than a year to pick each party’s nominee and then there is a long campaign after each party’s convention,” he said. “I enjoyed reporting on the conventions because they are four full days of music, folklore, and theater as well as some serious, and some silly, stuff.”
He is not excited “at all” about the current election and described it as “the worst and the ugliest because of the phenomenon called Donald Trump.” He said there was great concern about this election among his friends and acquaintances.
“There are a lot of questions, such as what has happened to the American political system, and particularly to the Republican Party that ended up producing this phenomenon called Donald Trump,” he said.
Many people, including Melhem, believe that the Republicans have reaped what they have sown “by waging a cultural war, by rejecting Obama’s presidency and even its legitimacy, by never cooperating with him, by playing on the fears of those who were left behind by the changing nature of the American and the global economy.”
He said many Americans were dissatisfied and felt marginalized because of globalization.
“They have been left behind and are now watching in resentment and fear. For them, it is as if the modern world is a caravan that has passed them by, leaving them stranded behind. It is easy for some people to say, ‘Oh, these people are prejudiced and bigoted and racist.’ That may be true in some cases but many of those people have been genuine victims of globalization.”
He felt it is not good to criticize them and that it is a huge mistake to demonize them.
“I think the next president will need new and creative approaches in order to include the relatively large number of marginalized and alienated Americans,” said the veteran journalist.
He is baffled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s latest disclosures and Clinton’s thin lead in opinion polls.
“That a man as deeply flawed as Donald Trump, a man with no political experience, a man with a checkered history, a man known for his bigotry is still in the race is unbelievable,” he said.
What makes this election baffling, said Melhem, is the fact that Trump’s opponent is “a person who has been in public life for almost 30 years — former senator, former secretary of state, former first lady, with executive and legislative experience and knowledge of intricate domestic programs and complex international issues — and yet Clinton is ahead by only a few points; her lead over him should have been at least in double digits.”
On how Arabs and Muslims will vote on Nov. 8, Melhem said: “It is difficult to talk about an Arab vote in general. It is even more difficult, and probably impossible, to talk about a Muslim vote. There are Arab communities and there are Muslim communities. They don’t vote as a bloc.”
He went into some detail in order to explain his point.
“The Arabs are divided between Republicans and Democrats. Most of my Arab friends are Republicans. They may be Arabs in terms of cultural background and language, but they don’t have similar views on political issues. The Lebanese — who represent one of the largest Arab-American communities — are also divided among themselves. They don’t vote like the Yemeni community in Detroit or the Egyptian community or the new arrivals from the Maghreb (North Africa),” he said.
The same argument holds true for Muslims.
“You have almost one million Iranians in southern California. Obviously, they don’t vote in the same way as those from South Asia, such as Pakistanis or Afghans. In some places like Northern Virginia where I live, there is a concentration of Arab-American professionals, who work at the World Bank, at universities and hospitals, or have their own businesses in the Greater Washington area — they are mostly middle class and upper-middle class.
“They usually contribute financially to their chosen candidates. They can influence the elections of Senators and representatives in Congress. And when you add to this mix, the African-American Muslims, the picture becomes more complex, because members of that community have different outlooks on both national and international issues,” said Melhem.
The crowning glory for this former bureau chief of Al Arabiya TV Channel came in January 2009 when he was the first journalist in the world to get the first interview with President Obama.
“It was one week after he took office. I applied for the interview through some of my connections with his advisers after I heard that he was planning to address the Muslim world. This was before his famous Cairo speech. I truly believed that he would help in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict because, on his second day in office, he appointed George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy to revive peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians and to explore peace between Syria and Israel. It seemed as if he really wanted a new beginning with the Muslim world,” he said.
That optimism gave way to thorough disappointment because of Obama’s “timid” leadership.
“I became disenchanted with his policies. He did not stand up to Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies of building more settlements in the occupied territory. He did not deal creatively with the Arab uprising. He did not push for democracy as he claimed he would. He did not support the so-called Green Revolution of the Iranians in 2009 (when they took up cudgels against the regime). He left Iraq without leaving a residual force to prevent the country from collapsing. He did not stand up to Nuri Al-Maliki’s sectarian policies. He pursued the nuclear deal with Iran, which was fine, but he did not try to deter Tehran from pursuing destructive policies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. There is a long list of grievances,” said Melhem.
He summed up his disappointment with the most telling comment of the conversation. “Let me put it this way: Obama inherited a dysfunctional Middle East from George Bush and left a burning Middle East for his successor,” he said.
He agreed that the Arabs and Muslims were the ones mainly responsible for the problems in their countries, but added this caveat: “There is also an American responsibility. The American intervention in Libya helped overthrow Muammar Qaddafi but the US abandoned Libya and did not help the Libyan people in creating new, legitimate political structures.”
Which election does Melhem think was as close as this one? “Of course, in 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote and Bush became president because he won the vote in the electoral college. It was the closest in my lifetime and the closest in American history.”
According to him, if Clinton barely makes it on Nov. 8 and becomes the president and the Republicans maintain their control of both chambers in Congress — the Senate and the House of Representatives — they will exert a great deal of pressure on her.
“She will find that governing the country is practically impossible. It will be essentially a continuation of the way the Republicans have treated Obama. Congress will treat her the same way or even worse, and that will not be good for the country,” he added.
Asked what would surprise him on Nov. 8, Melhem quipped: “The election of Trump as the next president.”

Source: Arab News