Nothing in US Politics Bodes Well

The polls are saying that the Black businessman Herman Cain is ahead of all competitors for the Republican presidential nomination. However, the media agrees with the pillars of the party that the former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, will be the Republican candidate against Barack Obama, who is trying to win a second term. Perhaps because I have been away, I missed a new poll of Republicans, but I did read two this month. The first was by ABC, showing Cain with 31 percent support among party members, compared to 15 percent for Romney. The second was by The Wall Street Journal and NBC, showing Cain with 27 percent, followed by Romney (23) and Texas Governor Rick Perry (16). The Republican primaries begin in about three months, and we should expect that many things will change; new elements will enter, pushing up some candidates and moving others down, before one of them is eventually selected. However, I will venture to say that the winner will not be Michelle Bachman, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum or Ron Paul. They are remaining in the television debates but their role is over, or nearly so. It would require a miracle of Biblical proportions to see one of them win, and the time of miracles is over. Cain's current lead over the other candidates is due to his good performances in television debates. He chose to confront the problem of racism and the "color" of the candidate instead of ignoring the matter, like Barack Obama did in his 2008 campaign. He likes controversy, as we have seen in his cigarette and smoking ads. He began as a Democrat but then became an independent, and finally a Republican in 1996, when he supported the campaign of his friend, Jack Kemp, for vice-president. He now attacks the automatic attachment of many Black Americans to the Democratic Party, and says they are not trying to improve themselves. I almost agree with the experts that Cain will not be the Black Republican candidate against the Black Democratic candidate next year. His political career is very limited, to the degree that he did not participate in the 1960s as a student in the Civil Rights movement, even though he studied at a Black college. He later worked as an assistant pastor at a Black Baptist church, and made his money as the CEO of Godfather's Pizza. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, remains the establishment candidate for the Republicans. He feels so confident of his lead over Perry that he no longer attacks him, but has come to focus on President Obama. This has led his Perry's supporters to dig up the man's past. They accused him of flip-flopping on the issues, on things like social security, taxes, and China's currency (the US accused China of keeping the value of its currency deliberately low). I gambled by eliminating some of the candidates' chances for victory, and once again I will gamble, by expecting that the policy of any Republican presidential candidate will be a total commitment to Israel, going farther than what we now see from the Obama administration. I am talking specifically about US foreign aid; all of the Republican candidates are against it, at a time of continuing financial crisis. I bet that the Republicans will reduce it to some states and halt it entirely to others. However, the wealthy Israel will continue to receive US assistance and Congress might even raise the amount, as it did recently with certain items. Representative Ron Paul said that foreign assistance is unconstitutional, and Texas Governor Perry asked that funding for the United Nations be stopped, i.e. paying America's share of the UN budget, even though the US benefits from the presence of the UN in New York four times more than it pays to the UN. Romney has exhibited the flip-flopping of which he has been accused; in a recent speech, he called for the US to use hard and soft power in its foreign policy, but called for an end to assistance, and blamed China. Successive US administrations claim that they are offering foreign assistance to promote freedom and democracy. However, I say that Washington is supporting its interests, even by helping dictatorial regimes against their peoples. Since 1945, there have been a few dozen wars led by the US around the world, and a democratic regime has not been established in any of the countries attacked by the US. I say that nothing in US politics bodes well for Arabs and Muslims, whether the resident of the White House is a Democrat or a Republican.