Ayoon Wa Azan (One More Factor Will Influence the Vote)

Two days ago, Mitt Romney won the Republican presidential primaries in two states and the capital, Washington DC. It seems now that he will win the Republican nomination in the GOP convention in Florida scheduled for August 27, 2012. Nevertheless, I find that Barack Obama remains ahead of Romney and all his other rivals. On the eve of the last primaries, Gallop conducted a poll that showed Obama ahead of Romney, 51 to 42 percent. I noticed in the latest poll that it has shown that Obama is among women ahead of Romney 54 to 36 percent. In reality, there is a poll conducted every day, so I went back to what I had gathered last month. I have in front of me a poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC, showing a majority complaining of Obama’s economic performance against the backdrop of gasoline prices, which exceeded four dollars per gallon. Thus, the poll said that 66 percent of Americans are against his position on gasoline prices compared with 26 percent who are in favor. As a result, the popularity of Obama among the voters is on par with that of Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, the Republican contenders for the presidency. However, a previous survey by Pew showed that Obama was ahead of Romney 54 to 42 percent, and of Santorum 57 to 39 percent. Then in what is the most important indicator of the President’s performance, the poll showed that 50 percent are satisfied with the work of the President, compared to 41 percent who are not. Therefore, 59 percent of U.S. voters expect him to win the elections come November. As regards Gallup, a previous poll it conducted around the same time showed that 49 percent favor the President while 43 percent do not. In another article I wrote on the U.S. elections, I ventured to say that Barack Obama would probably win a second term. I adduced two reasons that remain strongly valid: First of all, the U.S. economy is improving, as we have seen with the new jobs being added month after month, following the sharp rise in unemployment in George W. Bush’s last year in the White House, or 2009. The second is the weak level of his potential Republican rival for the White House, whether it will be Mitt Romney, a Mormon, or Rick Santorum, a Catholic. In other words, both belong to two religious minorities in a country where the majority of the population is Protestant. More importantly, the primaries confirmed Romney’s lack of any charisma or vision, and his special ability to say the wrong thing, at the wrong time and the wrong place. The unemployed will probably never forgive him for saying he is happy to fire staff, and in fact his track record proves that he did. Furthermore, the primaries have shown that voters in the southern states do not trust him, as he lost in a sudden manner in both Alabama and Mississippi. On the other hand, Santorum claims to be unrelenting in his principles and positions, while his opponents counter this by saying that he is stubborn. In addition, Santorum intimidates women voters with his traditional beliefs about women’s role in society and his opposition to birth control. This is despite the fact that he has a bitter experience with this issue. In 2006, he scored a record defeat in the elections for the Senate in Pennsylvania, after he insisted on the eve of the vote on releasing a book entitled “It Takes a Family’, in which he attacked liberals and accused feminists of being radicals, alienating a large segment of the voters in the process. Today, there are those who remember that Santorum had supported the policies of George W. Bush with alacrity, so much so that his opponents claim that he supported 98 percent of Bush’s decisions. The primaries in Pennsylvania are scheduled for the 24th of April, so if Santorum loses his home state, then he will be effectively out of the race. In addition to the above, one more factor remains, a factor that hugely influences the results of the presidential elections, without altering them enough to completely tip the balance in favor of the Republican Party. That factor is money. There is something called a ‘Super PAC”, or political action committee. Super PACs have millions of dollars, sometimes hundreds of millions, to fund the contenders’ campaigns. Some of the richest of these PACs are financed by Jewish Americans, such as the Koch brothers, who I read have allocated $ 200 million, and Sheldon Adelson, the gambling casino mogul from Texas, who pledged to divert his millions from Newt Gingrich to the successful GOP candidate. There is also the American Crossroads PAC which alone has a budget of $ 240 million. I hope that the Arab reader will take note of the source of this money, which Obama cannot match – without this meaning that he is penniless, however.