Air monitoring equipment near the beach on Grand Isle, Louisiana. Credit: US EPA photo by Eric Vance

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Dec 19 2012 (IPS)

With Barack Obama’s re-election last month as U.S. president, key environmental protections escaped a likely Republican chopping block, and new regulations are expected when his second term begins in January.

Environmentalists say the situation would be much different had former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the Republican nominee, been elected president. Romney had sworn to roll back many, if not all, of the regulations enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during Obama’s first term.

Asked which of those EPA rules Romney would have likely overturned, Jenna Garland, associate press secretary for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, responded: “All of them.”

Romney’s attitude towards the environment was perhaps epitomised during his speech accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention in August 2012.

Romney mocked Obama for wanting to address climate change warming: “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans. And to heal the planet,” Romney said, pausing to allow laughter from the audience.

“My promise is to help you and your family,” he said.

On Dec. 14, the EPA strengthened the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for fine particles, or soot pollution, to 12 microgrammes per cubic metre. The previous limit, which had been in place since 1997, was 15 microgrammes per cubic metre.

Sources of soot pollution include power plants, diesel trucks, and buses.

Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, executive director of the non-profit group GreenLaw, considers the rule to be the first environmental victory of Obama’s reelection.

“They (fine particles) are deadly. Any amount is bad. But this is a good step in the right direction,” Benfield told IPS.

Upon request by IPS, the EPA prepared a document outlining the agency’s major accomplishments for clean air and water covering the years 2009 to 2012.

“If Romney had been elected, he was on record during the campaign saying he would roll back critical clean air and clean water protections, and politicise public health by giving Congress more power over Clean Air and Clean Water Act standards. That would be one of the most damaging things we have seen for public health and environment in decades,” Garland said.

“For instance, certain (Republican) Congressional leaders have gone after… the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. Just recently, this is the first time the federal government has regulated one of the most potent neurotoxins known to man… Congressional leaders and Mitt Romney wanted to limit the EPA’s ability to regulate neurotoxins like mercury, even though courts including the Supreme Court have upheld the EPA’s right and duty to regulate,” she said.

The EPA proposed its new carbon pollution standard for new coal and gas plants on Apr. 13, 2012.

That rule is currently undergoing a one-year public comment period, and is expected to go into effect on or around Apr. 13, 2013. That too would have likely been cancelled under a Romney administration.

“This is really important because carbon pollution threatens our climate, it does threaten our health and well-being. This is a critical step, if we’re going to address carbon pollution head-on instead of always responding. It means coal plants will no longer have a blank cheque,” Garland said.

“Mitt Romney denies that human activity contributes to climate destruction,” she added.

Activists also pointed to Obama’s selection of Lisa Jackson as EPA administrator as a crucial part of his governance as it relates to the environment.

“A lot of it has to do with who gets appointed to the EPA, the overall tone over there. The overall climate of the EPA is definitely a lot more supportive of pro-environment issues,” Benfield said.

“Appointing the EPA administrator is pretty political. Mitt Romney could have easily appointed someone to the EPA who does not take seriously human health, and could have instructed that administrator not to enforce” various recent EPA standards, Garland said.

But Obama has his shortcomings on the environment too, said the activists.

“We certainly have our problems with the Obama Department of Energy supporting nuclear and so-called clean coal projects that aren’t doing so well,” Garland said, noting that, still, “under the Obama administration we have seen tremendous growth of renewable energy.”

Obama has supported so-called clean coal, something that environmental advocates warn does not exist; in addition to nuclear power.

Garland also criticised Obama for shelving a proposed ozone standard during his first term because, she believes, it was found to be too political. However, the ozone standard is something that she hopes will be revisited now that he was won reelection.

“We would like for Obama to be a lot stronger on these issues,” Benfield said.

“You have to look at the dynamics. He’s not perfect, a lot of environmentalists would like to see him be a lot stronger. A lot of us are hoping, it’s his second term and he’s not concerned about being elected, that he’ll be proactive, and now he’s looking at leaving his legacy. A second term is a time to reflect on his legacy. What does he want his legacy to be? And climate change has to be part of that, I’m hopeful,” Benfield said.

Sierra Club anticipates that several new EPA rules will come out over the next four years, including a NAAQS rule for sulfur dioxide; a carbon pollution rule for existing pollution sources; and a Clean Water Act standard to address toxic discharge from power plants in waterways.

Three-quarters of Christian evangelicals gave Republican challenger Mitt Romney their vote, but their numbers proved insufficient. Credit: Torres21/cc by 2.0

By Sarah McHaney
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2012 (IPS)

For decades, right-leaning white Christian evangelicals, currently at least 25 percent of the U.S. electorate, have been a significant and influential voting demographic.

During Tuesday’s highly anticipated presidential election, however, the evangelical movement suffered a huge loss of candidates and social reform propositions.

Eight years ago, the Christian right’s agenda and support helped sweep George W. Bush into a second term as president, and set in motion a series of state-level moves to ban same-sex marriage. But Tuesday, the electorate seems to have largely rejected this agenda.

Today, conservative evangelicals are forced to ask themselves whether their days of political influence are over.

“I don’t think the Christian right has declined in politics,” Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition, a conservative political organisation, told IPS. “Evangelicals turned out in record numbers and voted for Mitt Romney, but it just wasn’t enough.”

Indeed, Christian evangelicals did come out in force, and three-quarters of them gave Republican challenger Mitt Romney their vote. But their strengths proved insufficient.

Not only did Democrats maintain control of the White House and the U.S. Senate, but both Maryland and Maine voted in a popular election to allow same-sex marriage in their states. This was the first time in history a state had voted to allow same-sex marriage by a popular majority.

Tuesday night, as the polls were closing, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, posted on Twitter, “If the marriage votes in (four states) go as now trending, we are witnessing a fundamental moral realignment of the country.”

Wednesday morning, Mohler expressed the concerns felt by many evangelicals. “We are rightly and deeply concerned,” he wrote. “We must pray that God will change President Obama’s heart on a host of issues, ranging from the sanctity of unborn life to the integrity of marriage.”

Not all evangelicals, however, are in such despair over the election results.

“I think that the positions taken by young evangelicals on the issues of same-sex marriage and immigration are beginning to vary greatly from what their faith traditionally has held,” Kevin Wright, a pastor at Foundry United Methodist Church here in Washington, told IPS.

“It’s not that these young people have any less use for the Bible, but rather that they are adopting a fuller faith that embraces a personal relationship with Jesus as well as a corporate responsibility towards social justice,” he said.

Some pundits had predicted that Romney’s Mormon faith would hurt his chances with evangelical voters, but he received more evangelical votes than John McCain did in 2008. Comb agrees that Romney’s faith is not what lost him the election.

“I don’t think evangelicals voted for his religion, they voted for him. Romney had all of the credentials to lead our country,” she said.

Still, while religion may not have been directly responsible for Romney’s loss, the values he articulated may have, particularly among younger evangelicals.

“I don’t think the religious title mattered as much as the values articulated,” Tim King, director of communications for Sojourners, a national Christian organisation that focuses on social justice issues, told IPS. “Romney failed to articulate basic economic values – that we are a country that takes care of one another.”

Sojourners has taken a keen interest in the young evangelical vote in 2012. A survey it completed a month ago found that this demographic finds itself torn between the two political parties.

“I think young evangelicals are going to find themselves encouraged in some areas and disappointed in others,” King said. “Our survey found young evangelicals polling with Democrats on issues of immigration, same-sex marriage and domestic policies. Yet, they polled with Republicans on issues of foreign policy and abortion.”

This disconnect between young evangelicals and the evangelical leadership could be a contributing factor to the religious right’s decline in power.

“I do see the decline of the Christian right’s influence on America, and much of this has to do with dramatic changes in age dynamics,” Wright said.

Young evangelicals are connecting less and less with their religion’s leadership. Strong and often controversial positions on social issues such as abortion is one reason young evangelicals have begun to move away from the evangelical conservatives.

“Young people are leaving Christianity because of the types of things they are hearing from the mouths of the Christian right leaders and are no longer affiliating with a Christianity that maintains strict conservative politics,” King said.

For instance, conservative evangelicals took a big chance when they continued to support Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, both favourites of the religious right, after both made controversial comments about rape and abortion. The Republican Party asked each to withdraw from their races, but evangelical Christians maintained support for each candidate.

On Tuesday, both lost.

“We should never leave our core values, but we need to expand them and we need to talk more about economic issues and issues that affect the family on everyday values,” Combs cautioned.

“We have to begin reaching out to other demographics and engaging them in issues that affect their day to day life.”

The Republican Party and the Christian right alike need to expand their issues and reach out to non-traditional conservative demographics if they hope to continue political influence.

“They (the Christian right) are going to try and blame others for these election results, but the fact is the world is changing and they need to change with it,” King said.

Despite a bitterly and closely fought presidential campaign fuelled by record financial backing, analysts sifting through Tuesday’s national election results here are forecasting a period of introspection for the opposition Republican Party that could ease the gridlock that has gummed up Washington politics in recent years.

Of particular interest will be signs of accommodation ahead of critical negotiations, to start almost immediately, on how to deal with the country’s mounting debt. Without a broad deal between Democrats and Republicans, a series of tax increases and spending cuts are set to go into effect in January that economists are warning could send the fragile U.S. economic recovery back into recession.

President Barack Obama will now go into those negotiations significantly strengthened. On Tuesday, voters not only rewarded Obama with a larger than expected victory, but the president’s Democratic Party did far better than anticipated in races for the U.S. Senate, where Republicans had hoped to wrest control.

Many now suggest those hopes were dashed largely because of Republican overreach in nominating overly conservative candidates in key battleground races. More broadly, however, the surprisingly strong turnout for the Democratic Party is being seen as a repudiation of the grinding refusal by Republicans to work with President Obama on nearly any legislative issue over recent years.

“Republicans have been unwilling to compromise, and now we have to allow for a period in which Republicans have to find their party’s soul,” Isabel V. Sawhill, co-director of the Center on Children and Families, here in Washington, said Wednesday. “They’re a divided party right now, but there are still moderate Republicans – if not in the House, then out there in the country – who are not happy with where the Republicans are right now.”

Sawhill warns that this period of introspection will be “messy”, however, and will most likely start with a divisive blame game over the party’s poor electoral showing, which saw a surprising strengthening by Democrats in the Senate. Republicans continue to hold the House of Representatives, though, and have already begun staking out their positions ahead of the debt negotiations.

The conservative “Tea Party” faction of the Republican Party, initially a reaction to debt concerns but more recently seen as a new incarnation of the religious right, has gone on the offensive ahead of expected backlash that its influence had a negative impact on the Republican Party’s electoral chances. Two prominent Tea Party candidates were voted out of power on Tuesday, while a third is narrowly leading a race that may go to a recount.

Despite this poor showing, the Tea Party Patriots, the country’s largest such group, has launched an attack on the Republican establishment for “hand-picking a weak … elite candidate who failed to campaign forcefully on America’s founding principles – and lost.”

According to Jenny Beth Martin, the group’s national coordinator, the Tea Party will now renew its efforts. “Our work begins again today,” she said in a statement Wednesday. “We will turn our attention back to Congress, to fight the battles that lie ahead.”

Stymie as strategy

“No consensus between the parties is in sight after the election, and polarisation has been exacerbated, not diminished,” Thomas Mann, a noted congressional scholar with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, told journalists Wednesday morning.

“Nonetheless, the president has some opportunities for breaking through the gridlock … party because some Senate Republicans are tired of simply obstructing whatever the president proposes.”

Mann noted that “voters have done their job by … punishing the Republicans for their reckless obstruction.”

Not only have voters spoken relatively clearly, but far more of the country likewise reportedly supports President Obama’s agenda. As noted in a new article by Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank, “the country is nowhere near as closely divided as the popular vote indicates … non-voters, who were about 43 percent of the electorate in 2008, favor Obama by a margin of about 2.5 to one.”

Yet first scared of Obama’s sudden rise to power and second angered over his forceful passage of health-care reform, Republican leaders in both wings of the U.S. Congress in recent years have made stymieing legislative progress – and blaming Obama for the deadlock – a central political strategy.

While the election results will be widely seen as a mandate for the president and a repudiation of Republican stonewalling, initial public reactions by the Republican leadership suggested a doubling down.

Following the election results, Senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell, seen as the architect of the “no cooperation” tactic, warned President Obama that he would need to move towards Republican positioning if he hoped to get any major legislation passed during his second term.

John Boehner, the leader of the House of Representatives, likewise noted Tuesday night that the House had been “the primary line of defence” against government spending and forcefully highlighted that voters had “responded by renewing our House Republican majority”.

Reflection and recalibration

Still, there are already signs of softening and self-reflection on the right, and by Wednesday afternoon Boehner was already sounding a far more cautious note. In a major address on his positions ahead of the debt negotiations, he called for Democrats and Republicans to find “the common ground that has eluded us”.

“My message today is not one of confrontation,” Boehner said. “I’m not suggesting we compromise on principles, but rather that we commit to creating an atmosphere in which we can find common ground – and seize it.”

The chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senator John Cornyn, has gone still farther.

“It’s clear that with our losses … we have a period of reflection and recalibration ahead for the Republican Party,” he stated immediately after the election results were announced.” While some will want to blame one wing of the party over the other, the reality is candidates from all corners of (the party) lost tonight. Clearly we have work to do in the weeks and months ahead.”

According to some, part of that work needs to include a rethink on today’s political infrastructure in the United States, particularly the “primary” process that selects candidates in the first place, which may be forcing Republicans towards more extreme positions.

“In the U.S. today, polarisation is structural,” Jonathan Rauch, a guest scholar with the Brookings Institution, said Wednesday. “Members of Congress are worried about their own campaigns over national issues – no one gets punished for standing their ground, they get punished for compromise. I think we have to start talking about changing the primary process, because without moderate candidates there will be no moderate voters.”

U.S. President Barack Obama has won a second term as president. Credit: ljlphotography/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 7 2012 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama won a second term Tuesday night with a majority of the electoral vote. He appeared assured of surpassing his Republican challenger, Governor Mitt Romney, in the national popular vote once the solidly Democratic West Coast states had weighed in.

While votes were still being counted in much of the country, all of the major television and cable networks called the race on the basis of the running vote count, exit polls and statistical projections based on past voting records in counties across the country.

In the Congressional races, the Democrats appear to have picked up one or two seats in the Senate, increasing their narrow majority. The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is likely to emerge more or less unchanged with a relatively firm Republican majority.

As a result, the balance of power between the two parties will not be seriously affected, although some commentators noted that the defeat of at least two key Republican Senate candidates identified with the far-right Tea Party could push the Republicans toward the centre in much the same way that Romney himself pivoted to the middle during the general election campaign after catering to the party’s right-wing core in the primary campaign.

Romney conceded the election in a phone call to Obama shortly before 1 a.m. Eastern Time and then spoke to his supporters in Boston in which he called for unity. Obama was expected to appear shortly afterward.

As expected, Romney swept the almost all of the southern states, although two of the region’s three critical “swing states” – Virginia and Florida – leaned towards Obama. Romney also took all of the mid-western farm states, with the exception of Iowa, one of nine swing states nationwide where the president won by a clear margin. Romney also won in all of the Rocky Mountain states except New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado.

Obama, on the other hand, swept the Northeast – including traditionally Republican New Hampshire, another swing state – and the industrial states of the mid-Atlantic and the upper Midwestern states from Minnesota to Maine and Maryland, including what was considered the most important swing state of all, Ohio.

Most analysts credited Obama’s victory in Ohio to his campaign’s incessant attacks on Romney’s opposition to the “bailout” of automobile companies after the 2008 financial crisis. One of every eight jobs in Ohio depends on the auto industry.

Obama also swept the West Coast states, including California, the country’s most populous state by far. With the exception of North Carolina, Obama appeared by shortly after midnight to have won all of the so-called swing states.

Remarkably, the Republicans failed to carry either Massachusetts, Romney’s home state, or Wisconsin, the home state of his vice-presidential running-mate, Representative Paul Ryan. Indeed, while Ryan served to solidify the support of the party’s right-wing base, his radically anti-government economic views and strong opposition to abortion probably backfired, particularly among women voters.

Early exit polls indicate that a greater majority (55 percent) of women voted for Obama than they did in 2008, confirming a serious gender gap that has bedeviled Republicans for well over a decade.

But if the women’s vote made a big difference in states where the vote was close, minority voters – especially African Americans and Latinos – were even more important. Consistent with the Obama’s so-called ground game, turnout for both groups may have reached unprecedented highs, according to early reports.

Obama reportedly received 75 percent of the Latino vote. As many as 25 percent more Latinos voted this year than four years ago, and Latino organisations claimed that the results should send immigration reform to the top of Obama’s and Congress’s legislative agenda next year.

“The Democrats want it and the Republicans now need it,” agreed David Gergen, a CNN analyst who served as a top political adviser to former presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

While Latinos may have cast critical votes in the Southwest and mid-Atlantic states, African-Americans helped move the northern industrial states, especially in the so-called Rust Belt, solidly into Obama’s column. Exit polls indicated that Obama won at least 95 percent of the African-American vote.

Although Jewish voters make up only about 2.5 percent of the total, their disproportionately greater numbers in the swing states of Florida, Virginia and Ohio were considered critical to both parties, which went to great lengths to court them.

According to exit polls, 70 percent of Jewish voters opted for Obama – down only four percent in 2008 despite Romney’s repeated complaints that Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus” and a six-million-dollar ad campaign funded by multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson aimed at persuading Jews to vote Republican.

To the surprise of many observers who believed that the intensity of support for Obama among the youth had declined markedly compared to 2008, younger voters (aged 18 to 29) increased their turnout from 18 percent to 19 percent in this election. They voted for Obama by a 60-36 percent margin.

Romney won 58 percent of the white vote, according to CNN exit polls, while Obama took 40 percent. In 2008, Obama won 43 percent of the white vote, but the increase in minority votes appear to have made up for most of the difference. Whites currently make up about 72 percent of the electorate – two percent less than in 2008.

A number of issues were also on state ballots this election. Majorities of voters in several states approved the legalisation of gay marriage, the first time voters – as opposed to the courts – have done so.

A few weeks ago, President Barack Obama was seen as certain to collect the majority of women’s votes in the Nov. 6 presidential election. Four days before the election, however, the women’s vote is thought to be divided equally between Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

A poll released last week by the Associated Press-GfK found women are split right down the middle, with each candidate receiving 47 percent of the vote. These numbers mirror the tightness of the popular vote overall and are a significant turnaround from a month ago, when the same poll showed Obama with a 16-point lead among women voters.

“Presidential races always tighten towards the end as local trends come to the national level – this is not a surprise,” Judy Lloyd, executive editor of Thoughtfulwomen.org and an appointee for former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, told IPS.

Even so, Obama does appear to have suffered a dramatic loss in his lead with women voters. According to many analysts, the shift could be due to women focusing on the economy rather than on the “women’s issues” for which Obama has been fighting, such as equal pay in the workplace or funding for family planning.

The fight for the women vote has grown more heated as each candidate vies for women’s attention by criticising his opponent’s policies.

“The Obama campaign has engaged in a despicable game of gender politics and fear-mongering this election in an effort to shore up a critical Democratic constituency – single women.” Sabrina Schaeffer, executive director of Independent Women’s Forum, a group with “a mission to expand the conservative coalition”, told IPS. “But it’s clear the War on Women rhetoric has failed.”

Such rhetoric refers to the Obama campaign’s claim that Republican policies run counter to women on issues that are critical to them.

According to the AP-GfK poll, Obama’s rhetoric may not be bringing him female votes, but he is still seen as the better candidate for women’s issues. Of likely voters polled, 53 percent think Obama is making the right decisions on issues directly affecting women, compared to 40 percent who think Romney is doing so.

Even so, it now appears many women are not basing their vote on women’s issues.

“The economy is undoubtedly the number one issue for women going into this election,” Lloyd told IPS.

During the second presidential debate on Oct. 16, each candidate was asked what he would do to achieve equal pay for men and women in the workplace. This is a significant economic issue, as women currently make less than three-quarters what men typically make for the same job.

Obama immediately referenced the first bill he signed as president, a law that makes the pursuit of wage discrimination claims easier.

Romney cited his record of hiring women as part of his cabinet while he was governor of Massachusetts. But he also said that the priority should be getting women into the workplace in the first place.

Indeed, the question many women voters seem to be asking themselves is simply who will create a better economy for them and their families.

“As for women’s issues, although I’m retired, I understand that women need jobs, and Romney is the best hope for restoring the economy,” Judy Smith, a retired voter in the state of Virginia, told IPS.

Yet Romney’s specific plans on how to strengthen the economy also worry many women who work and benefit from government programmes he plans to end.

“Many of Romney’s budget policies are job killers for women, such as his plan to slash funding for social programmes that disproportionately serve and employ women,” wrote Terri O’Neill, president of the National Organisation of Women, a group of feminist activists, after the second debate.

Beyond the economy

Although the economy is front and centre for many as the Americans head to the polls, some voters, particularly young ones, are looking beyond the country’s dire financial state to changes in social and foreign policies that could be a large part of their adult lives.

“I realise that the economy is a disaster and we need to get to a balanced budget. However, I can’t justify solving this problem by voting for someone who would take us backwards in terms of social policies,” Taylor Dempsey, 22, a New York state voter and Peace Corps volunteer, told IPS.

Feminists disagree that the economy is even the central issue for the presidential race.

“The issues women are voting on are the big health care issues,” Eleanor Smeal, the president and founder of Feminist Majority Foundation, told IPS. “They are voting for the right to birth control, to affordable health care, and health care coverage throughout their retirement.”

“The gender gap is alive and well, and Romney has chosen to be against us women on the issues that are most important to us,” Smeal continued.

Obama has worked hard throughout his administration and campaigns to appeal directly to women voters on  issues he thinks drive their vote. Yet many women voters are frustrated with the Obama campaign’s isolation of women from men on voter’s issues.

“I am frustrated by what I perceive to be the Obama campaign’s pandering to women on a very narrow range of women’s health issues, and I do not appreciate the assumption that women vote solely on such issues,” Julissa Milligan, a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told IPS.

Despite Romney’s attempt to keep the conversation focused on the economy and job creation, his Republican colleagues around the country continue to stoke controversy on women’s issues.

When asked about his “no exceptions” stance on abortion last month, Representative Todd Akin, the Republican Senate nominee in Missouri, said that “legitimate rape” rarely causes pregnancy.

During a debate last week, Richard Mourdock, the Republican Senate nominee in Indiana, said in defence of his opposition to abortion, “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

While Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, have distanced themselves from these comments, they continue to support their fellow Republicans’ candidacy.

With four days left before votes are cast, candidates have no more time to waste on issues that won’t drive people to the ballot box.

“The fact is, women voters today know that there is a lot of good news for women and girls in the United States today, and they want a president who wants to help grow our economy, not play gender politics,” said Schaeffer.

Just over a week before the United States votes in a highly anticipated and historically tight presidential election, a new poll released Monday finds that interest by Latino voters has strengthened significantly over the past two months, and that turnout among Hispanics could be higher than the records set in 2008.

According to the latest impreMedia-Latino Decisions poll of registered Hispanic voters, 45 percent say they are more excited about the current election than they were for the 2008 election, when Barack Obama was elected. That number has gone up by eight percent over the past 10 weeks, when the poll was first taken.

Further, a full 87 percent of respondents say they would most likely be voting when national polling sites open on Nov. 6, with eight percent having already taken advantage of the early voting options made available in certain states. During the last presidential election, 84 percent of registered Latino voters cast ballots – far higher than the U.S. national turnout, of 57 percent, that same year.

The high levels of interest mean that Latinos will further cement the community’s importance in the current and, particularly, future election. Hispanics make up one of the single fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. population, with around 50,000 Latino youths currently becoming eligible to vote every month.

To date, they have tended to vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party. The prospect has reportedly led to existential debates within the Republican Party, which has seen its voter base – which skews older and whiter than the Democratic base – continue to shrink as a percentage of the overall voting public.

“The polls show that this year we can anticipate record participation among Latino voters,” Monica Lozano, the head of impreMedia, said Monday in a statement. “It looks like the ‘sleeping giant’ has woken up.”

The new numbers will receive particular scrutiny given the general lack of Spanish-language polling that has taken place during the campaign season, despite a massive amount of polling figures coming out on a daily basis.

In mid-October, the widely watched pollster Nate Silver suggested that the relative lack of Spanish-language respondents could increase Barack Obama’s figures by around a dozen percentage points, including in some of the most strongly contested “swing” states, such as Florida and Colorado, that will eventually decide the election.

Indeed, the strong new numbers will be particularly welcomed by Obama’s campaign, which has made the Latino vote a central pillar of its strategy. In an initially off-the-record interview released last week, Obama stated, “Since this is off the record, I will just be very blunt. Should I win a second term, a big reason … is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community.”

The president also noted that this “alienation” of Latinos by Republicans is a “relatively new phenomenon”. This is seen as referring to a host of new and pending laws enforcing voter identification requirements that many have suggested would impact particularly on Latino and other minority voters – typically strongholds for the Democratic Party.

According to a new report released last week by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), “More than 100 years of virtually unchecked discrimination at the polls against Latino U.S. citizens” is now being compounded by a “significant added obstruction in the form of restrictive state voting laws … (that) will have a worse effect on the Latino electorate than on all voters.”

NALEO suggests that these new policies could negatively impact on around 219,000 Latino voters across the country this election, a number it calls a “conservative estimate”. Indeed, after the U.S. courts recently halted proceedings in several states planning to institute new voter ID laws, the report suggests that number would have been closer to 835,000.

Notably, a Republican state official has been caught on tape stating that such legislation was being enacted specifically in order to help the Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s chances of election.

While the presidential race is currently considered a statistical dead heat, Romney appears to hold a slight edge in the national popular vote, while Obama is seen as up in the critical state-by-state “electoral college”.

Three-quarters for Obama

According to the new findings, around 73 percent of Latino voters say they trust the Obama administration more on issues of righting the economy, compared to just 18 percent that back Romney, almost identical to the numbers that say they will vote one way or another. This spread, the Latino Decisions analysis states, “matches the largest gap among Latinos this year”.

Still, many Latinos have considered Obama’s tenure as president to be a letdown, at least in contrast to the high expectations that met his election. Despite high hopes by immigration activists, for instance, Obama was only able to institute a limited piece of favourable legislation – an executive order deferring deportation for certain children of illegal migrants – in August of this year.

The move, though widely lauded by the Latino community and others, was quickly characterised as pandering to Hispanic voters in the context of a tight election year. Beyond this, Obama’s initial pledges of a massive overhaul of U.S. immigration law became one of the more high-profile casualties of the president’s politically costly focus on health-care reform.

Still, according to the new poll, Latino voters are planning to turn out in large numbers in support of Obama. While Romney had initially hoped to build on George W. Bush’s inroads into the Hispanic vote, Romney’s strategy of focusing on jobs and the economy – mirroring his broader campaign – rather than on immigration now looks to have been fairly unsuccessful.

Campaign observers are quick to note, however, that this does not mean that the Latino vote should be seen as monolithic, or that, as one Romney spokesperson noted last week, Obama should be able to take Hispanic voters for granted.

“While Obama has maintained a large lead among Latinos throughout the campaign, the data shows that over one-third of Latino voters are not sure that things will actually improve under a second Obama term,” Matt Barreto, a co-founder of Latino Decisions, said Monday in introducing the new polling data.

On the election’s most significant issue, the still-stuttering U.S. economy, Barreto notes that most Latino voters blame political gridlock in Congress. Over 40 percent of respondents believe that neither Obama nor Romney will be able to forge cooperation in Washington.

“In the final week of this campaign, the candidates need to connect with Latino voters,” Barreto says, “and explain how they will somehow be able to break the impasse in Congress and get things done.”

With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney virtually tied with Election Day less than two weeks away, Muslim voters could play an unexpected critical role in deciding the outcome Nov. 6.

A poll of 500 registered Muslim voters released here Wednesday found that more than two-thirds (68 percent) currently plan to vote for Obama and only seven percent for Romney. But a surprisingly large 25 percent said they were still undecided between the two main party candidates.

And tens of thousands of those undecided voters are disproportionately concentrated in three “swing” states – Ohio, Virginia and Florida – where the candidates are focusing their campaigns in the last two weeks.

“The Muslim vote could be decisive in several battleground states,” said Naeem Baig, chairman of the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections (AMT), which co-sponsored the survey and whose political arm is expected to formally endorse candidates before the election.

The poll, which was conducted during the first two weeks of October, also found large majorities of respondents who said that the U.S. should support rebels in Syria (68 percent) and that Washington was right to intervene with NATO in last year’s revolt against the Qadhafi regime in Libya (76 percent).

Respondents were roughly evenly divided on whether the U.S. has provided sufficient support to the uprisings in the Middle East, known as the Arab Spring.

Precisely how many Muslim citizens there are in the United States – and hence how many Muslim voters – has been a matter of considerable debate. The U.S. Census is forbidden to ask residents their religious affiliation.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), another co-sponsor of the survey and an 18-year-old grassroots organisation that has become one of the country’s most active national Muslim groups, estimates a total U.S. Muslim population at between six and seven million, or about the same as the total number of U.S. Jews.

The Pew Research Center, on the other hand, last year estimated the total number of Muslim Americans at 2.75 million, of whom about one million were children and hence ineligible to vote. It found that more than 60 percent of U.S. Muslims are immigrants, and, of those, more than 70 percent are citizens.

Most native-born Muslims are African Americans, who, together with Arabs, Iranians, and South Asian comprise roughly 80 percent of the total U.S. Muslim population.

CAIR estimates the total number of registered Muslim voters at at least one million. Ohio, according to CAIR’s estimates has around 50,000 registered Muslim voters; Virginia, around 60,000; and Florida, between 70,000 and 80,000.

Historically, Muslim Americans have been split in their voting behaviour, but in the 2000 election 72 percent voted for George W. Bush primarily because his campaign met at length with Muslim organisations and, during a key debate with then-Vice President Al Gore, the former president spoke out against the use of secret evidence in deportation hearings and racial profiling. Four national Muslim organisations eventually endorsed his candidacy.

But, disillusioned with his administration’s harsh response to 9/11, including the detention of hundreds of Muslim men, the passage of the so-called Patriot Act, as well as the war in Iraq, U.S. Muslims abandoned Bush.

In the 2004 election, 93 percent of Muslims voted for the Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry; another five percent for third-party candidate Ralph Nader, and only one percent for Bush, according to surveys conducted at the time.

The Democratic shift continued in 2008 when nearly 90 percent of Muslim voters cast their ballots for Obama and only two percent for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain.

Whether that level of support will be retained for Obama, however, is unclear, according to CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, who said Muslims were in some respects disappointed by Obama’s inability or failure to fully follow through on some of his campaign pledges to amend or rescind the more onerous provisions of the Patriot Act and close the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba.

Like the general public, he noted, Muslims have also been disappointed by the president’s performance on the economy and reducing unemployment.

In addition, noted Oussama Jammal, who chairs a public affairs committee of the the Muslim American Society (MAS), noted that Obama’s greater use of drones to strike suspected Al-Qaeda and other Islamist militants in Pakistan “is not selling well in the (Muslim) South Asian community”.

Revelations regarding “unprecedented surveillance” of mosques and the use of agents provocateurs by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have also hurt Muslim confidence in Obama, according to Baig.

The 500-person sample on which the poll was based was drawn from a data base of nearly 500,000 Muslim American voters that was, in turn, developed by matching state voter-registration records with a list of some 45,000 traditionally Muslim first and last names prevalent in a variety of the world’s Muslim-majority ethnic groups.

Respondents included 314 men and 186 women across the country. Twenty-six percent of respondents were born in the U.S.; while 71 percent were not. (Three percent declined to answer the question.) Ninety-three percent said they had lived in the U.S. 10 years or more.

Of the total sample, 43 percent said they were of South or Southeast Asian ancestry; 21 percent, Arab; eight percent, European; and six percent from Iran and Africa each, an indication that African American Muslims, who are estimated to comprise about 30 of all Muslim Americans, may have been under-represented.

Half of respondents said they attend a mosque at least once a month.

The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus five percent.

In addition to its findings about presidential preferences, the poll found that a whopping 91 percent of respondents intend to vote in this year’s election. In the last presidential election in 2008, only about 57 percent of eligible voters cast ballots.

It also found that the percentage of those who considered themselves closer to the Democratic Party grew from 42 percent in 2006 to 66 percent today, while affiliation with the Republican Party remained roughly the same at between eight and nine percent since 2008. Fifty-one percent of respondents said they considered the Republican Party, several of whose presidential candidates during the primary campaign made blatant Islamophobic remarks, hostile to Muslims.

Asked how important they considered 16 current foreign and domestic issues education, jobs and the economy, health policy, and civil rights were called “very important” by four out of five respondents. Seventy-one percent said they considered “terrorism and national security” in the same category, while two-thirds of respondents named the “possibility of war with Iran”.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

The figures signify the number of times each country was mentioned in the Oct. 22 presidential debate. Credit: Zachary Fleischmann/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 23 2012 (IPS)

U.S. strategy in the Greater Middle East, which has dominated foreign policy-making since the 9/11 attacks more than 11 years ago, similarly dominated the third and last debate between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney Monday night.

The biggest surprise of the debate, which was supposed to be devoted exclusively to foreign policy and national security, was how much Romney agreed with Obama’s approach to the region.

His apparent embrace of the president’s policies appeared consistent with his recent efforts to reassure centrist voters that he is not as far right in his views as his primary campaign or his choice for vice president, Rep. Joe Ryan, would suggest.

The focus on the Greater Middle East, which took up roughly two-thirds of the 90-minute debate, reflected a number of factors in addition to the perception that the region is the main source of threats to U.S. security, a notion that Romney tried hard to foster during the debate.

“It’s partly because all candidates have to pander to Israel’s supporters here in the United States, but also four decades of misconduct have made the U.S. deeply unpopular in much of the Arab and Islamic world,” Stephen Walt, a Harvard international relations professor who blogs on foreignpolicy.com, told IPS.

“Add to that the mess Obama inherited from (George W.) Bush, and you can see why both candidates had to keep talking about the region,” he said.

But the region’s domination in the debate also came largely at the expense of other key regions, countries and global issues – testimony to the degree to which Bush’s legacy, particularly from his first term when neo-conservatives and other hawks ruled the foreign-policy roost, continues to define Washington’s relationship to the world.

Of all the countries cited by the moderator and the two candidates, China was the only one outside the Middle East that evoked any substantial discussion, albeit limited to trade and currency issues.

Romney re-iterated his pledge to label Beijing a “currency manipulator” on his first day in office, while Obama for the first time described Beijing as an “adversary” as well as a “partner” – a reflection of how China-bashing has become a predictable feature of presidential races since the end of the Cold War.

With the exception of one very short reference (by Romney) to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and another to trade with Latin America, Washington’s southern neighbours were completely ignored by the two candidates, as was Canada and all of sub-Saharan Africa, except Somalia and Mali where Romney charged that “al Qaeda-type individuals” had taken over the northern part of the country.

Not even the long-running financial crisis in the European Union (EU) – arguably, one of the greatest threats to U.S. national security and economic recovery – came up, although Romney warned several times that the U.S. could become “Greece” if it fails to tackle its debt problems.

Similarly, the big emerging democracies, including India, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia – all of which have been wooed by the Obama administration – went entirely unmentioned, although at least one commentator, Tanvi Madan, head of the Indian Project at the Brookings Institution, said Indians should “breathe a sigh of relief” over its omission since it signaled a lack of controversy over Washington’s relations with New Delhi.

Another key emerging democracy, Turkey, was mentioned several times, but only in relation to the civil war in Syria.

And climate change or global warming, which has been considered a national-security threat by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon for almost a decade, was a no-show at the debate.

“There was no serious discussion of climate change, the Euro crisis, the failed drug war, or the long-term strategic consequences of drone wars, cyberwar, and an increasingly ineffective set of global institutions,” noted Walt.

“Neither candidate offered a convincing diagnosis of the challenges we face in a globalised world, or the best way for the U.S. to advance its interests and values in a world it no longer dominates.”

Romney, whose top foreign-policy advisers include key neo-conservatives who were major promoters of Bush’s misadventures in the region, spent much of the debate repeatedly assuring the audience that he would be the un-Bush when it came to foreign policy.

“We don’t want another Iraq,” he said at one point in an apparent endorsement of Obama’s drone strategy. “We don’t want another Afghanistan. That’s not the right course for us.”

“I want to see peace,” he asserted somewhat awkwardly as he began his summation, suggesting that it was a talking point his coaches told him he must impress upon his audience before he left the hall in Boca Raton, Florida.

“Romney clearly decided he needed to head off perceptions of himself as a throwback to George W. Bush-era foreign policy adventurism, repeatedly stressing his desire for a peaceful world,” wrote Greg Sargent, a Washington Post blogger.

So strongly did he affirm most of Obama’s policies that, for those who hadn’t been paying close attention to Romney’s previous stands, the president’s charge that his rival’s foreign policy was “wrong and reckless” must have sounded somewhat puzzling.

As Obama was forced to remind the audience repeatedly, Romney’s positions on these issues have been “all over the map” since he launched his candidacy more than two years ago.

“I found it confusing, because he has spent much of the campaign season in some ways recycling Bush’s foreign policy, and, at least for one night, he seemed to throw the neo-cons under the bus,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Whether it was accepting the withdrawal timetable in Afghanistan, walking back a more aggressive stance on Syria, or basically agreeing with Obama’s approach on Iran, he seems to be stepping away from a lot of the positions he was taking just a few weeks ago,” he noted. “At this point, it’s impossible for voters to actually know what he thinks because he spent most of the campaign embracing a platform that was much further to the right.”

That Obama, who took the offensive from the outset and retained it for the next 90 minutes, won the debate was conceded by virtually all but the most partisan Republican commentators, with some analysts calling the president’s performance as decisive a victory as that which Romney achieved in the first debate earlier this month and which reversed his then-fading fortunes.

A CBS/Knowledge Networks poll of undecided voters taken immediately after the debate found that 53 percent of respondents thought Obama had won; only 23 percent saw Romney as the victor.

Whether that will be sufficient to reverse Romney’s recent gains in the polls – national surveys currently show a virtual tie among likely voters – remains to be seen.

Foreign policy remains a relatively minor issue in the minds of the vast majority of voters concerned mostly about the economy and jobs – one reason why, at every opportunity, Romney Monday tried, with some success, to steer the debate back toward those problems.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tours flooded areas in Burlington, North Dakota in June 2011. Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo by Patrick Moes

By Becky Bergdahl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 23 2012 (IPS)

The United States endured its hottest summer in history this year, with droughts and wildfires ravaging the country. And according to a new report from the global reinsurance giant Munich Re, insurance losses related to extreme weather have nearly quadrupled in the U.S. since 1980.

So one might expect that climate change would be a hot topic in the debates being held ahead of the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 6.

But during the four nationally televised debates held so far – three presidential and one vice presidential – neither Democratic incumbent Barack Obama nor his Republican challenger Mitt Romney has even mentioned the subject of climate change.

“It is a missed opportunity to talk about one of the most serious challenges that we face,” Bob Deans, senior advisor for the Natural Resources Defence Council Action Fund, told IPS.

“According to a new survey from Texas University, 73 percent of the (U.S.) public believe that climate change is happening. In a recent Yale study, 70 percent say so. The surveys were made in September. So, what we see is that seven in 10 Americans notice this problem,” Deans said.

He cited the recent report from Munich Re, which found that natural disasters have increased more in North America than in any other region of the world since 1980. Insured losses from weather catastrophes in North America between 1980 and 2011 totaled 510 billion dollars, according to Munich Re.

This shows that climate change is just not an environmental issue – it is also a financial issue, Deans said.

“As people see the increase of extreme weather, people are getting the message that this is a serious economic issue, not just a question for tree huggers.

“Rising sea levels can mean that homes are at risk, and if your home is at risk, you cannot get a mortgage on the house. And look at the corn farmers that have not had a good crop in years. We see families that have had a farm for hundreds of years, and now they cannot do it anymore,” Deans said.

During the public debates, including one focused on U.S. foreign policy Monday evening, both Romney and Obama have mentioned the need to bring down high gasoline prices. Both were silent, however, on the question of lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

“It is becoming increasingly obvious that Obama and Romney are no different when it comes to their miscalculation that any mention of climate is a political liability,” Kyle Ash, climate campaigner at Greenpeace USA, told IPS.

“Despite recent polling showing the vast majority of the public are very concerned with climate change, both candidates prefer to pander to fossil fuel interests that invest against climate solutions,” he said.

“The biggest difference between Obama and Romney derives from the Republican campaign platform that denies climate change. However, both candidates have run administrations implementing climate pollution policies.”

Ash said that in the bigger picture, Obama and Romney risk losing votes if they keep ignoring the issue of global warming.

“Hundreds of thousands of Americans have already petitioned Obama and Romney to discuss their views on climate policy, since it is such a dire and pressing issue for the economy and even for our basic way of life,” Ash said.

In a bid to mobilise citizen action and pressure policymakers, the climate action group 350.org has launched a new campaign called Do The Math Tour, which kicks off on Nov. 7, the day after the presidential election, and involves events in 20 cities.

It has the support of celebrities such as author/activist Naomi Klein and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu.

“If we are going to stand up to fossil fuel companies, we need a movement. They have all the money, so we need to try something different. This tour is designed to help grow a movement strong enough to win,” Daniel Kessler, media campaigner at 350.org, told IPS.

“It is simple math. We can burn 565 more gigatonnes of carbon and stay below two Celsius degrees of warming. Anything more than that risks catastrophe for life on Earth. The only problem? Fossil fuel corporations now have 2,795 gigatonnes in their reserves, five times the safe amount. And they are planning to burn it all, unless we rise up to stop them.”

Kessler also said that even though neither major candidate is speaking out enough about climate change, he believes there is still a clear difference between Obama and Romney.

“It looks as if (a) President Romney would be a disaster for both the environment and the climate. Romney has said that he wants to strip the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) of its authority to regulate carbon emissions, end tax credits for renewable energy, and preserve massive subsidies for oil and coal companies, who are already among the most profitable companies in the world,” Kessler said.

“President Obama’s policies are not strong enough to meet the challenge of global warming, but he has fought to protect the EPA, raised auto mileage standards, and made the single largest investment in world history in clean energy, with the stimulus.”

Neither the Obama nor the Romney campaign responded to IPS requests for comment on the issue.

But Scott McLarty, media coordinator for the Green Party, said, “The topic of climate change has been completely ignored by president Obama and Romney in the public debates.

“However, in the alternative debates, the Green Party candidate Jill Stein has spoken about climate change several times. And she will continue to talk about it,” McLarty told IPS.

On the eve of Monday’s foreign policy debate between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the electorate appears increasingly disillusioned with the so-called Arab Spring, according to a new survey released by the Pew Research Center here.

A majority (57 percent) of the more than 1,500 respondents said they do not believe that recent changes in the political leadership of Arab countries will “lead to lasting improvements” for the region, while only 14 percent – down from 24 percent 18 months ago – said they believe the changes will be “good for the United States”.

Nearly three out of four voters said the changes will either be “bad” for Washington (36 percent) or won’t have much of an effect either way (38 percent).

Both positions could favour Romney and the Republicans who, since last month’s killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three of his staff in Benghazi, have argued that Obama’s policy toward the Arab world is unraveling.

Friday’s killing in Beirut of Lebanon’s top intelligence officer and at least seven other people could add to that perception, as Col. Wissam al-Hassan was aligned with the “March 14” coalition, a Sunni-led faction with close ties to Washington and strongly opposed to the Al-Assad regime in Syria.

The poll, which was conducted Oct. 4-7, also found a somewhat tougher position toward both Iran’s nuclear programme and on China’s trade policies.

Monday’s debate, the third and last in a series between the two candidates before the Nov. 6 election, is not expected to draw the huge television audiences – over 65 million people – of the last two, due to the relative lack of interest in foreign policy compared to domestic issues, especially the economy.

“While foreign affairs had had a higher profile recently, this is a campaign dominated by domestic issues,” according to Pew’s director, Andrew Kohut, who noted that only seven percent of respondents in another recent Pew poll cited foreign policy as a major priority compared to 41 percent when George W. Bush ran for re-election in 2004.

“The public is decidedly more isolationist than in some time,” he said, in part as a result of a lessening of “concern about terrorism as a national-security threat.”

The new poll got considerable media attention when it was released here Thursday because it showed Romney cutting deeply into the long-held lead sustained by Obama over many months in surveys that asked which candidate they trusted most to conduct the nation’s foreign policy.

In early September, a Bloomberg poll found that Obama led Romney by a 53-38 percent margin on this question, but Thursday’s Pew poll found that margin reduced to 47-43 percent in Obama’s favour. While Republicans leapt on the poll as evidence that their recent attacks on Obama’s Middle East policy – focused primarily on his administration’s alleged failure to respond to requests by its embassy in Tripoli for enhanced security – were drawing blood.

But Kohout suggested Friday that Romney’s gains were probably due more to Obama’s poor performance in the first debate, which took place Oct. 3, the day before Pew began polling, than to disillusionment with Obama’s foreign policy.

Noting that Obama is generally seen has having won the second debate Tuesday. “On the next poll, I expect Obama to do better on foreign policy,” he said, noting that polls over the past year have found consistently found foreign policy to be Obama’s strongest suit.

Monday’s debate is expected to centre on a number of key issues, particularly U.S. policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan and, to a somewhat lesser extent, on the most effective approach toward China, especially its trade and monetary policies about which Romney has been particularly hawkish on the campaign trail.

NATO and Russia under President Vladimir Putin, which Romney has called Washington’s “Number one geo-political foe”, are also expected to get some attention, possibly along with climate change which has been almost entirely ignored by both candidates in the campaign so far.

The main findings of the new poll include strong skepticism over whether the leadership changes in the Middle East will benefit either the local population or the U.S. Asked which was more important in the region – democratic governments and less stability or stable governments with less democracy, a 54 percent majority opted for the latter.

On Iran, the public appears to be somewhat more hawkish than 10 months ago. Asked whether, with respect to Iran’s nuclear programme, it was more important to “take a firm stand” against it or “to avoid military conflict with Iran, 56 percent opted for a “firm stand” – which, however, did not explicitly mention a military attack – six percent more than when the same question was asked last January.

Respondents were split equally over on the question of whether Obama or Romney, who is perceived as taking a more hawkish line on Iran, would be best in dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme.

Romney, who has promised to declare China as a “currency manipulator” on his first day in office and presumably follow up with sanctions, got his greatest support on the question of who would best deal with China’s trade policies. Forty-nine percent cited Romney compared to 40 percent for Obama whose “China-bashing has been somewhat more restrained during the campaign.

Indeed, the campaign appears to have contributed to a generally more hawkish attitude toward Beijing on economic issues. In March 2011, 53 percent of respondents said “building a stronger relationship” with China was more important than “getting tougher” with it on economic issues. Those figures are now practically reversed, with 49 percent favouring the second option and only 40 percent the first.

On the other hand, Obama’s main advantage was in dealing with political instability the Middle East by a 47-42 percent margin.

That may reflect popular support for what Republicans mock as Obama’s alleged preference for “leading from behind” in the region. Only 23 percent of respondents said they believe the U.S. should be “more involved” in fostering leadership changes in the Middle East, while a whopping 63 percent – including 53 percent of Republicans – said they believe Washington should be “less involved”.

Romney has generally favoured somewhat more interventionist policies in the region, notably with respect to arming rebels in the civil war in Syria.

On Israel, a plurality believes that current U.S. support for the Jewish state is “about right” as opposed to 22 percent who believe that Washington is too supportive, and 25 percent who think it has not been supportive enough.

The poll confirmed a major partisan divide on this question: 46 percent of Republicans believe U.S. policy has not been sufficiently supportive. “White evangelicals are extremely committed to Israel,” noted Kohout, who added that they form about 40 percent of the Republican base.

As in other recent surveys, the latest poll found major differences between the so-called millennial general – adults under age 30, and other age groups. On the question of Iran’s nuclear programme, for example, a 49 percent plurality of millennials preferred to “avoid military conflict”, while only 24 percent of those 65 and older take that position.

Similarly, on economic policy toward China, 70 percent of millennials favour stronger relations with Beijing instead of “getting tougher”. Only 41 percent of those 65 and older agreed.

“[The millennials] have a very different worldview,” said Kohout. “This is a much more liberal, Democratically disposed generation.”

A major challenge faced by the Obama campaign is to get millennials to the polls, as their abstention rate has been significantly higher than any other age group.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

The attacks on U.S. embassies in Libya and Egypt last month shocked and scared Americans, but the majority of Americans nevertheless recognise that the violence was the work of extremist minorities and not the majority of the population, according to a new poll.

The poll, conducted by the University of Maryland, was released on Monday during an event at the Brookings Institute, an influential think tank in Washington, DC. It examined how American public opinion towards Arabs and Islam has changed after the recent attacks in Libya and Egypt.

These attacks were triggered by an American-made video insulting Islam, entitled “Innocence of Muslims”. The situation has called into question longstanding U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and public opinion in the United States towards Arabs and Islam.

The poll attempted to gauge the American public’s early impressions of these events to see how or if American diplomatic efforts in the region need to change.

The report found that Americans are less impressed by arguments previously used to support aid to Egypt, with 61 percent unconvinced that the United States should provide aid to Egypt to help its emerging democracy through the ongoing transition. A larger majority, 74 percent, said it is unwise for the United States to give large amounts of aid to Egypt during difficult domestic economic times.

Earlier this year, U.S. President Barack Obama promised one billion dollars in debt relief aid to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. 450 million dollars of this package is currently being blocked in the U.S. Congress, where it needs to receive a majority vote before the money can reach Egypt.

On Monday, William Gallston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and former policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton, commented, “These findings show that Americans are more concerned about nation building at home rather than abroad for now.” The report concluded that there is support to decrease aid given to Egypt, but not for stopping aid completely.

A partisan divide on foreign policy issues was obvious in the poll’s responses. When asked about giving aid to Egypt, many of those who self-identified as Republicans wanted aid decreased (44 percent) or stopped altogether (41 percent). Democrats, on the other hand, were torn between maintaining aid at current levels or decreasing it. Only 15 percent of Democrats suggested stopping aid altogether. These statistics make proposing foreign policy that can garner bipartisan support a challenge for either presidential candidate.

The same divide was also apparent when Americans were asked about Israeli-Iranian relations. A clear majority of Americans think that an Israeli attack on part of Iran’s nuclear programme will result in higher oil prices and increase the likelihood of an Iranian attack on U.S. bases.

Most Americans wanted to take a neutral stand in the matter, but more than a third of Democrats polled wanted to discourage Israel from attacking and only 3 percent of Democrats wanted to encourage Israel to attack. Yet Republicans were split equally between encouraging or discouraging Israel from attacking.

During a widely anticipated speech focused on foreign policy on Monday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney accused President Obama of putting “daylight” between the United States and Israel. Romney vowed to strengthen that relationship once again and stand by America’s “closest ally in that region”.

Although the report showed that Americans mostly see the violent events in Egypt and Libya as tied to extremist minorities, it also found that a large majority of Americans, 75 percent, hold an unfavourable view of Libya and smaller majority, 54 percent, hold an unfavourable view of Egypt. The majority of Americans polled thought that neither country’s government had tried to protect American diplomats and their staff.

Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief of the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya News Channel, commented that this negative public opinion is mutual. “There is still a widely negative view of the U.S in the Middle East. The majority of the population continues to see the U.S. as the omnipresent power in the region,” Melhem said on Monday at the Brookings Institute. He pointed to “the legacy that the U.S supported autocratic regimes, which had a negative impact on the people”.

Melhem added that this was not always the case. “When I was growing up in Lebanon we had a very positive view of the U.S. It is not in our genes to be anti-American. There are specific political and economic reasons for this change in perspective.”

Despite these shared unfavourable views, the majority of Americans continue to see U.S. involvement in the Middle East as a top priority. The poll revealed that most Americans want President Obama to become more directly involved in the current uprising in Syria.

The poll found was very little support for arming the rebels and almost no support for sending troops to the region, but a majority of those polled supported both increasing diplomatic and economic sanctions on Syria and enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria.

Gallston, the Brookings senior fellow, noted that these statistics “show a public precedent for a somewhat stronger stand in Syria than the U.S. government has currently adopted”. President Obama has shown reluctance in becoming more deeply involved with the conflict in Syria.

In his speech on Monday, Romney suggested a firmer stance than President Obama’s. “Iran is sending arms to Assad because they know his downfall would be a strategic defeat for them,” he said. “We should be working no less vigorously with our international partners to support the many Syrians who would deliver that defeat to Iran.”

Mitt Romney campaigning in Ashland, Virginia. Credit: tvnewsbadge/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 8 2012 (IPS)

In what was billed as a major foreign policy address, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney Monday assailed Barack Obama for “passivity” in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, arguing that it was “time to change course” in the Middle East, in particular.

Dispensing with some of the neo-conservative rhetoric he has used in the past, he nonetheless argued that the “risk of conflict in the region is higher now than when (Obama) took office” and that Washington should tie itself ever more closely to Israel.

“I will re-affirm our historic ties to Israel and our abiding commitment to its security – the world must never see any daylight between our two nations,” he told cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, adding that Washington must “also make clear to Iran through actions – not just words – that their (sic) nuclear pursuit will not be tolerated.”

As he has in the past, he also called for building up the U.S. Navy, pressing Washington’s NATO allies to increase their military budgets in the face of a Vladimir Putin-led Russia, and ensuring that Syrian rebels “who share our values …obtain the arms they need to defeat (President Bashar Al-) Assad’s tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets.”

Independent analysts described the speech as an effort to move to the centre on foreign-policy issues, much as he did on economic issues during his debate with Obama last week. As a result, they said, his specific policy prescriptions did not differ much, if at all, from those pursued by the current administration.

“In a speech where he attempted to be more centrist, he ended up articulating positions that sound like those of Obama,” noted Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who teaches at Georgetown University.

Indeed, in both tone and policy, the speech marked a compromise between his neo-conservative and aggressive nationalist advisers on the one hand, and his more-realist aides on the other.

Absent from the speech altogether, for example, was any reference to making the 21st century “an American Century”, a neo-conservative mantra since the mid-1990s that Romney used repeatedly in his one major foreign-policy address during the Republican primary campaign almost exactly one year ago.

The latest speech comes at a critical moment in the presidential campaign. While Romney was lagging badly in the polls in late September, his strong performance in last week’s debate against a surprisingly listless Obama last week has revived his prospects.

While Obama had been leading by about four percentage points nationwide before the debate, the margin has since fallen to only two percentage points, while on-line bettors at the intrade website have lowered the chances of an Obama’s victory from nearly 80 percent to 64 percent.

Obama’s seeming passivity during the debate may have played a role in the Romney campaign’s decision to deliver a foreign-policy address if for no other reason than that it highlighted the argument that many Republican foreign-policy critics, especially the neo-conservatives, have been building over the past year: that the president’s policies in the Middle East, in particular, have been too passive, and that “leading from behind” – a phrase used by an anonymous White House official quoted in “The New Yorker” magazine 18 months ago to describe Obama’s low-profile but critical support for the rebellion against Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi – was unacceptable amid what Romney described Monday as the world’s “longing for American leadership”.

Indeed, in the wake of last month’s siege of the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other embassy staffers in Benghazi, Romney’s vice presidential running-mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, and other surrogates have tried to link recent displays of anti-U.S. sentiment and Islamic militancy in the region to disasters, notably the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, that plagued – and perhaps ultimately doomed – former President Jimmy Carter’s re-election bid in 1980.

While Romney did not refer to that period, he argued that last month’s violence in the Middle East demonstrated “how the threats we face have grown so much worse” as the “struggle between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair” in the region has intensified. “And the fault lines of this struggle can be seen clearly in Benghazi itself.”

Recalling the U.S. response to a similar struggle in Europe after World War II and invoking then-Secretary of State George Marshall (without, however, referring to the Marshall Plan that poured U.S. aid and investment into Western Europe), Romney argued that Washington should lead now as it did then.

“Unfortunately, this president’s policies have not been equal to our best examples of world leadership,” he said, adding, “…it is the responsibility of our president to use America’s great power to shape history – not to lead from behind, leaving our destiny at the mercy of events.

“Unfortunately, that is exactly where we find ourselves in the Middle East under President Obama,” he said. “…We cannot support our friends and defeat our enemies in the Middle East when our words are not backed up by deeds, …and the perception of our strategy is not one of partnership, but of passivity.

“It is clear that the risk of conflict in the region is higher now than when the President took office,” he claimed, citing the killings in Benghazi, the Syrian civil war, “violent extremists on the march,” and tensions surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme.

On specific policy recommendations, however, Romney failed to substantially distinguish his own from Obama’s. Indeed, in contrast to recently disclosed off-the-record remarks to funders in which he indicated that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was likely unresolvable, he said he would “recommit” the U.S. to the creation of a “democratic, prosperous Palestinian state”, arguing that “only a new president” can make that possible.

On Egypt, he promised to condition aid to the government on democratic reform and maintaining the peace treaty with Israel; on Libya, he said he would pursue those responsible for the murders of U.S. diplomats.

On Iran, he promised to impose new sanctions and tighten existing ones, as well as build up U.S. military forces in the Gulf; on Afghanistan, he said he would weigh the advice of his military commanders on the pace of withdrawal before the end of 2014.

On Syria, he promised to work with Washington’s partners to “identify and organise” opposition elements that “share our values” and ensure they get the weapons needed to defeat Assad. In each case, he suggested that Obama’s policies were less forceful but did not explain how.

“On matters from Syria to Afghanistan to sanctions on Iran, the speech is essentially a description of current U.S. policies,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East analyst now at Georgetown University. “One struggles to discern how a Romney policy would work differently.”

Pillar was especially critical of Romney’s assertion that the risk of conflict in Middle East was greater than in 2009, “given that Obama ended U.S. involvement in the one war in the Middle East in which the United States was directly participating, and given that the current greatest risk of war comes from the Israeli prime minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) with whom Romney says we should have no daylight between us.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

When he was elected in 2008, Barack Obama won 80 percent of the minority vote. Credit: Matt Lemon/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 25 2012 (IPS)

With just six weeks left before the U.S. presidential polls, analysts on Tuesday suggested that recent demographic changes in the United States, particularly through immigration, have made it more difficult than ever for a Republican candidate to vie for president.

The current challenger, Mitt Romney, does not appear to be making up nearly enough lost ground to take the election.

According to some scholars and poll-watchers, the trend is not only complicating Republican hopes for the 2012 polls, but could continue to do so in coming years unless the party undertakes a significant reappraisal of its social and economic policy approaches.

Romney now needs “outlandishly large margins to be competitive – and he’s not anywhere close”, Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said Tuesday, unveiling a new report.

Today, most polls show Obama leading Romney by three or four percentage points, including in almost all of the critical “swing” states where neither candidate’s lead is decisive. For Republicans, the difficulty stems from two subsections of the U.S. voting public, both of which have been turning against the party in recent years: minority voters and white college-educated voters, particularly women.

When he was elected in 2008, Barack Obama won 80 percent of the minority vote and 52 percent of college-educated white women. According to recent polls, Obama’s current lead in these demographics remains almost identical.

Over the past three decades, the minority voting share has doubled, to 26 percent; the number of college-educated whites has also gone up, while the number of non-college-educated whites has come down – all factors in the Democrats’ favour. Indeed, just since 2008 the number of eligible minority voters has grown by three percent, while white voters have dropped by three percent.

Because of these changes, if Obama again gets 80 percent of the minority vote – which now looks likely – Romney would have to double the share of the white vote that John McCain, the Republican challenger in 2008, received.

Certain state polls today even have Romney winning by 20 points or more, but Teixeira’s research suggests that this still wouldn’t be enough. “Nowhere do you see these outsized margins that he really needs to win the election, given how Obama appears to be holding his support among minority voters and even then some among white college-graduate voters.”

In fact, if Obama is able to match the 80 percent non-white vote again this year, he would need just 40 percent of the white vote to win the election.

“The math that gives you at this point is that Romney would have to win two-thirds of all other votes to get a national majority,” Ronald Brownstein, political director at Atlantic Media, said Tuesday. “Now, he can do that – Republicans were in that neighbourhood in 2010. But two-thirds of all other voters were what (President Ronald) Reagan won in 1984 during the most decisive landslide in modern American history. So that’s a steep hill.”

Despite the mounting criticisms of the Romney campaign, Romney is not doing poorly among his primary demographic, but this may not be helpful enough. Indeed, Brownstein suggests that Romney could do as well among whites as any Republican challenger ever – in the 56-to-61 percent range – but still lose, due to demographic changes that only look set to continue.

Existential paralysis

“The existing (Republican) coalition is so dependent on a part of the country that is incredibly uncomfortable with demographic change,” Brownstein says. “They’re paralysed, for instance, between an intellectual understanding that they have to reach out to Hispanics and the difficulty that they’re finding (in trying to doing so).”

Immigration is seen as a “gateway” issue for many immigrants, meaning that even if Romney’s platform were to appeal to some, he is not being heard by those voters. This is due to his adoption, spurred by some of the most conservative wings of the Republican Party, of what some have described as a “radical” immigration-related agenda.

“What the Republican Party has done is lurch to the right,” says Frank Sherry, executive director of America’s Voice and a longtime expert on the Hispanic community. “This has hurt badly with Hispanics.”

And while Hispanic voters get much of the attention in today’s U.S. political analysis, the broader immigration story looks equally problematic for the Republicans.

Asian Americans, for instance, recently surpassed Hispanics as the country’s fastest-growing minority population, expanding at a rate of 46 percent over the past decade. Ahead of the 2008 elections, some 600,000 Asian Americans registered to vote for the first time, while similar figures are expected this time around.

“Perhaps the most important sociological and political development in the past two decades has been the massive shift in the voting allegiances of the Asian American population,” Karthick Ramakrishnan, director of the National Asian American Survey, said Tuesday elsewhere in Washington, launching a uniquely detailed report on the Asian American community.

“Asian Americans went from voting less than a third for the Democratic presidential candidate in 1992 to almost two-thirds in 2008.”

Further, the report finds abnormally high support among Asian Americans, compared to the rest of the population, for issues that are generally seen as Democratic strongholds, including on the environment, affirmative action, undocumented immigration and health-care reform.

The question, then, is when the Republican Party will respond to what could quickly be becoming an existential problem.

The situation “should precipitate a conversation in the party”, Brownstein says. “One Romney advisor said to me, ‘This is the last time anyone will try to do this,’ meaning assemble a national majority almost entirely on the back of white votes.”

Tuesday’s attacks by alleged radical Islamists on key U.S. diplomatic posts in Libya and Egypt propelled foreign policy, however briefly, to the centre of the presidential race that has been dominated to date by the state of the economy.

Pointing to the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other U.S. officials in the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, President Barack Obama pledged that “justice will be done” against the attackers, while his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney assailed the administration for the second day in a row for allegedly “apolog(ising) for our values”.

He was referring to a statement issued Tuesday by the U.S. embassy in Cairo when it was under siege by several hundred protesters that denounced a privately produced video-tape that mocked the Prophet Muhammad and that apparently triggered the demonstrations in the Egyptian capital.

The video-tape, whose production was claimed by an obscure Israeli-American real estate investor whose actual identity became a source of much speculation here Wednesday, was promoted by Terry Jones, a Florida pastor whose past threats to burn Qurans had provoked riots in Afghanistan and other Islamic countries in 2010 and 2011, and by a prominent anti-Muslim U.S. Copt, Morris Sadek.

“America will not tolerate attacks against our citizens and against our embassies,” Romney said Wednesday during a press conference in Florida. “We’ll defend, also, our constitutional rights of speech and assembly and religion.

“Apology for America’s values is never the right course,” he stressed, adding that U.S. “leadership” was needed “to ensure that the Arab Spring does not become an Arab Winter”.

For his part, Obama himself repeated that his administration “reject(ed) all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others” but, speaking of the attack on the Benghazi consulate, emphasised “there is absolutely no justification (for) this type of senseless violence. None.”

He also stressed that Washington would remain engaged in Libya whose security forces, he said, had tried to repel the fatal attack by an alleged Al-Qaeda-affiliated group, Ansar Al-Sharia, and helped some of the diplomats to safety. “(T)his attack will not break the bonds between the United States and Libya,” he declared.

The embassy assaults took place on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and also came amidst growing tensions between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the latter’s increasingly hostile demands that Washington issue an ultimatum to Iran over its nuclear programme. They confirm that, to the extent foreign policy will play any role in the Nov. 6 election, the events in the Middle East are likely to be the focal point.

Romney and the Republicans have long charged that Obama has shown insufficient leadership in the region, both with respect to influencing the outcome of the “Arab Spring” – which they have mocked as “leading from behind” – and to failing to adequately support Israel in its confrontation with Iran, or, in the campaign shorthand, “throwing Israel under the bus”.

At the same time, however, polls have shown consistently that a majority of the electorate has more confidence in Obama as the steward of U.S. foreign policy and national security than in Romney.

More comprehensive surveys, such as one issued earlier this week by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, also suggest that Obama’s more cautious and less militaristic approach to the Middle East specifically and overseas developments more generally enjoys broad public support, as opposed to the more interventionist policies advocated by neo-conservatives and other hawks who dominate Romney’s foreign-policy team.

Until now, and particularly since his gaffe-ridden trip to Britain, Israel and Poland in July, Romney has shown some reluctance to make foreign policy a major issue in the race, preferring instead to dwell on the alleged shortcomings in the president’s economic record.

But that appeared to change Tuesday, when he declared that the Cairo embassy’s denunciation of the video was “disgraceful”, and his main foreign-policy spokesman, Richard Williamson, described the assaults as “part of a broader scheme of the president’s failure to be an effective leader for U.S. interests in the U.S.”

At the time, no one knew about the fate of Stevens, a career foreign-service officer who had served as Washington’s chief contact to the U.S.-backed insurgency that ousted long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi last year, and his colleagues.

After it became known, both Democrats and some Republicans blasted Romney’s statement as a blatant attempt to inject politics into a national tragedy, but the candidate doubled down on the issue Wednesday, winning praise from Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, an influential leader of the neo-conservative faction of the party.

“Romney is right to bring home the weakness of the Obama administration,” he wrote, adding that he should use this as the moment to focus his campaign more on foreign-policy issues.

But some independent analysts said they thought Romney had miscalculated. “I think it will backfire,” said Stephen Clemons, an influential analyst at The Atlantic magazine, “both because it will be seen as using an assassination of an ambassador for political purposes and because this incident will remind many people that there are real costs to the kind of interventionism that Romney and the neo-con crowd are promoting.”

Indeed, the reaction by some Congressional Republicans to the attacks was precisely to reduce U.S. engagement in both Egypt and Libya. Several were quoted in the press as calling for sharp reductions in economic and military to both countries.

And at least one right-wing commentator, the National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson, who is normally aligned with neo-conservatives, said the incidents should make Washington more cautious about any intervention in Syria or supporting popular forces in the region.

Indeed, a number of Middle East experts worried that Washington could overreact. “It would be a tragic mistake to allow the images from Cairo and Benghazi to undermine American support for the changes in the Arab world,” wrote Marc Lynch, a regional specialist at George Washington University, on his blog on foreignpolicy.com.

“The aspirations for democratic change of many millions of Arab citizens must not be delegitimated by the violent acts of a small group of radicals.”

Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations also stressed that the two incidents should be seen as quite separate. The siege in Cairo, she said, capped several days of denunciations of the media by religious leaders and some media organisations of the video, while the Benghazi attackers were heavily armed and completely overwhelmed the local security forces.

The administration, she said, had already sent surveillance drones over Benghazi to seek out possible Ansar camps, and she expected U.S. officials work closely with the government in Tripoli to apprehend or confront the perpetrators.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

President Barack Obama reacts after recognising actress Sissy Spacek in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 29, 2012. The president happened upon Spacek while greeting people following a stop in the town. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 8 2012 (IPS)

With their respective party nomination conventions behind them, both President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney travelled to the tiny northeastern state of New Hampshire Friday, one of at most a dozen “swing” states whose voters are likely to decide the winner in the Nov. 6 election.

Despite persistent high levels of unemployment and some 60 percent of the electorate telling pollsters that the country is headed “in the wrong direction”, most political analysts believe that Obama enters the final 60 days of the race with a leg up over his challenger.

The latest Gallup poll, released just hours after Obama’s acceptance speech Thursday night at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina – another key swing state – showed Obama with a 48-45 percent lead over Romney and with a 52-percent overall job approval rating, his highest since June 2011, when he was still basking in the afterglow of the successful U.S. commando raid that killed Al-Qaeda’s chief, Osama bin Laden – an event to which many speakers referred repeatedly during the proceedings.

Gallup suggested in its analysis that Obama appeared likely to benefit from a bigger post-convention “bounce” in the polls than Romney received after the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, the week before. Indeed, Romney’s “bounce” coming off the convention was virtually non-existent, according to the polls.

Because the president is not elected by the popular vote, however, both political experts and the two campaigns are focused much more on the swing states – those that are considered neither solidly Republican (red) nor Democratic (blue) – that will decide outcome.

Instead of a direct popular vote, the president and vice president are actually elected by an “electoral college” in which each state is allocated a certain number of votes based on their representation in the U.S. Congress.

Almost all states use a “winner-take-all” formula in which whatever candidate wins a majority of the state’s vote receives all of that state’s electoral votes. To win, a candidate must receive a total of at least 271 electoral votes in the electoral college.

Thus, the country’s most populous state, California, has 55 electoral votes all of which will, as appears virtually certain given California’s strongly Democratic electorate, be cast in Obama’s favour. The second-most populous state, Texas, has 38 electoral votes all of which, given the state’s strongly Republican cast, will almost certainly go to Romney.

According to most political analysts, including Republicans, Obama enjoys a significant advantage in the electoral contest.

Current polling shows Romney and his running-mate, Wisconsin Rep. Joe Ryan, with a decisive lead in more states, especially in the Midwest and the Southeast, than Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. But the combined electoral votes of those solidly Republican states come to less than those – including California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Washington State – where the Democratic ticket is considered sure to win.

Different analysts disagree on precisely what constitutes a decisive lead. CNN, for example, currently estimates 237 electoral votes are either solidly in or leaning strongly toward Obama’s column, compared to 191 in Romney’s. Estimates by the Congressional Quarterly a week ago yielded a closer result – 201-191.

Analysts likewise disagree on how many toss-up, or swing, states remain. Going into this week’s Democratic convention, CNN named seven states – Florida, Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, and Nevada as true toss-ups. It found four other states – North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, and Arizona – “leaning” to the Republican ticket, and four more – New Mexico, Wisconsin (despite Ryan’s candidacy), Michigan, and Pennsylvania – “leaning” toward Obama.

If the leaning states fell into their respective columns, Obama would lead Romney by a 247-206 margin and put him within relatively easy striking distance of the magic 271 electoral votes needed to win.

The fact that Obama swept all seven of the remaining toss-up states in 2008 is seen here as making Romney’s task considerably more difficult, particularly given the growing voting strength of Latinos – whose appeals for immigration reform were soundly rebuffed at the Republican convention – in Nevada and Colorado – and concerns among the substantial numbers of retired and elderly voters in Florida about what the Republicans intend to do about the Social Security and Medicare programmes.

In addition, the commitment of former President Bill Clinton – the only living national politician with a 70-percent approval rating whose rousing nomination speech for Obama Thursday fired up the convention in Charlotte and drew rave reviews from all but the most right-wing commentators – to play an active role in the campaign, especially in the industrial swing states, could help shore up support for Obama among white male – especially blue-collar — voters who, of all demographic groups, are seen as most susceptible to Romney’s appeals.

Indeed, those who are actually betting money on the race give Obama much better odder than the polls would suggest. As of Friday, Intrade, the main U.S. on-line betting site, is giving Obama a 59-percent chance of winning, up from a mid-June low of around 54 percent.

The New York Times’ polling guru, Nate Silver, who pays closest attention to state polling, rates Obama’s chances of winning even higher. While Obama will win 51.3 percent of the popular vote Nov 6, Silver estimated Friday, the electoral margin is likely be 313-225 margin. Based on his statistical methods, Silver, the accuracy of whose predictions in the 2008 election persuaded the Times to hire him, is currently estimating Obama’s chances of winning at 77.3 percent.

Of course, all of these predictions could still be upset by a number of intervening factors, such as a sharp rise in unemployment, which is still running at more than eight percent, or a major international crisis, although Obama appears far more eager to inject foreign-policy issues into the campaign than Romney whose failure to praise the U.S. military in his nomination acceptance speech in Tampa was widely criticised, even by fellow-Republicans.

Given the overriding public concern about the direction of the economy and the fate of the middle class four years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, most other issues, except health care, are likely to be pushed to the margins.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

The ambitions of a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran, as harboured by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak, have been defeated by internal opposition, a growing number of observers have come to believe in the wake of dramatic opposing statements by prominent Israeli leaders, including President Shimon Peres.

The picture emerging is one of the prime and defence ministers’ isolation in advocating for unilateral Israeli action. It has been known for some time that the chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Benny Gantz, and Tamir Pardo, the head of the Mossad, or the Israeli intelligence agency, both oppose a strike on Iran.

This knowledge in itself is unusual. While such sentiments can be leaked, both Gantz and Pardo have been clear in media interviews that they do not share Netanyahu and Barak’s assessments regarding the immediacy of the Iranian threat or the utility of a military strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. It is worth noting that both Gantz and Pardo were appointed by the current government.

Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, writing in the daily Yediot Ahoronoth on Aug. 10, listed not only Gantz and Pardo among current military leaders opposing an Israeli attack on Iran, but also Air Force chief Amir Eshel, Military Intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi and General Security Services (Shin Bet) director Yoram Cohen, in what amounts to a consensus among Israel’s top defence and intelligence leaders.

Public disagreement

But it was statements by Peres and by the former IDF Director of Military Intelligence General Uri Saguy that exposed the extent of Netanyahu and Barak’s isolation and criticised Israeli’s leaders on points rarely raised in public.

Peres told Israel’s Channel 2: “It is now clear to us that we cannot go it alone. We can forestall (Iran’s nuclear progress); therefore it’s clear to us that we have to work together with…America.”

“Iran is a global threat, to the U.S. and Israel alike,” he said, adding that he was convinced that the U.S. would take action when necessary.

Peres’s statements were widely interpreted as criticism of Netanyahu’s and Barak’s ongoing attempts to pressure President Obama to attack Iran and the perception that Netanyahu was working to unseat Obama in favour of Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who is on much friendlier terms with Netanyahu.

There was also a widespread belief that Peres was warning that the tactics Netanyahu and Barak were employing with the U.S. threaten to harm the “special relationship” between the two countries.

While Israelis value their freedom to act on their own, they also recognise the need for U.S. support, as the United States is the only major power that has consistently supported controversial Israeli policies and actions. The idea that the Israeli government may be directly interfering with U.S. politics is an extremely unpopular one in Israel.

Diminished credibility

For his part, General Saguy cast doubt on the ability of Netanyahu and Barak to lead the country under dire circumstances. A reporter who interviewed Saguy for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz described his views of both.

“Saguy does not trust (Netanyahu) because he has not seen him make…one single important decision. He does not trust Barak because he’s seen the results of many important decisions the minister has made, as chief of staff, prime minister and defence minister,” the reporter wrote.

This view from a highly respected Israeli military leader seriously undermines the credibility of Israel’s two leading decision-makers with regard to military action. Combined with the military and intelligence consensus, the public statements suggest the possibility of an open revolt against the current leadership if Barak and Netanyahu try to move forward with an attack on Iran.

Netanyahu, however, sharply criticised Peres for “overstepping” his role as president, a largely ceremonial office in Israel. That sharp retort, as well as Netanyahu’s continued campaign among important Israeli party leaders, such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual head of the Shas party, could indicate that he has not yet given up on finding a way to attack Iran.

It is widely believed that at least part of the Israeli strategy in beating the war drums on Iran is to pressure the Obama administration into acting against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Netanyahu surely fears that if Israel is no longer believed to be seriously considering a unilateral strike, the urgency in Washington, already far less than he would like it to be, will diminish considerably.

Challenges for Obama

Obama’s position on Iran has been remarkably consistent: pursue sanctions and diplomatic engagement in the hope that Iran will agree to the monitoring of its nuclear program to ensure that weapons are not being developed. Obama has also pledged that all options, including a military one, remain open to prevent Iran from obtaining such a weapon.

An Israeli strike could put Obama in a very difficult position: he could either risk staying out of a conflict not of his making, which would surely set Israel’s supporters in the United States ablaze in opposition to him, or he could support, either directly or indirectly, the Israeli war effort, which would make it easy to cast him to blame when oil prices skyrocket as a result.

With the Israeli threat diminished, at least for the moment, Obama can continue to pursue his approach to Iran with a reasonable level of confidence that this will not hurt his chances of re-election in November. That surely does not please Netanyahu, but unless the situation changes in Israel, he will find it very difficult to raise this issue again before the election.

With less than three months to go before the U.S. presidential election, over the weekend Barack Obama’s Republican challenger for the presidency, Mitt Romney, finally announced his vice-presidential running mate, a young member of Congress named Paul Ryan.

Paul Ryan speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington D.C. on Feb. 10, 2011. Credit: Gage Skidmore/CC BY 3.0

At the announcement, on Saturday, Ryan promised that he and Romney wouldn’t “duck the tough issues”, but some have since pointed out that the Republican ticket is now characterised by a notable lack of foreign policy experience. Romney made his mark as a financier and one-term governor, while Ryan is a congressman known for his hawkish views on domestic fiscal constraint.

“This makes this year’s GOP ticket something fairly unprecedented in modern presidential politics: a pair in which neither the (vice-presidential) nor the presidential nominee has any substantial foreign policy experience on their resume,” associate editor Joshua Keating wrote on ForeignPolicy.com following the Ryan announcement.

Indeed, while Obama weathered similar criticism during his run in 2008, his choice of vice president – Joseph Biden – brought a seasoned foreign policy expert onto the ticket. The two previous U.S. presidents, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, both of whom lacked foreign policy experience, followed similar routes.

The move comes just weeks after Romney made his international debut as presidential contender, in a three-country trip beset by missteps and widely derided as amateurish.

“Whatever impact the pick has on Romney’s campaign, one thing is clear: the GOP ticket is not running on foreign policy this year,” Keating notes.

The decision to downplay foreign policy may eventually prove to be politically savvy, given a recent national poll that found that just four percent of U.S. citizens considered the issue to be of particular importance in the upcoming election. Yet it leaves unattended a significant hole in the national and international understanding of how this potential commander in chief would act in office.

Neoconservative win?

Throughout the first half of this year, Romney fought a long and brutal battle to win the Republican nomination, which is set to become official at the party’s convention later this month.

Yet despite being the only remaining contender for the position, Romney had failed to excite broad swaths of the Republican Party, including both its intellectual elite and its socially and fiscally conservative grassroots.

While the latter remained suspicious of the candidate’s adherence to conservative values, the former became increasingly vocal over Romney’s failure to detail his vision for a United States under his presidency.

The choice of Ryan, a 42-year-old, seven-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives, appears aimed at cooling both concerns.

Not only is Ryan a beloved figure among members of the conservative so-called Tea Party movement – which has gained particularly strength in recent years around calls to massively cut back on the size of the U.S. government and its debt – but he is most well known for being an ideologue on fiscal issues.

The choice of Ryan as a running mate has now received glowing praise from notable Republican corners, including the Foreign Policy Initiative and the American Enterprise Institute, both prominent neoconservative think tanks here.

Currently, Ryan chairs the House Budget Committee, a position from which he played a significant part in fashioning what are today seen as his signature legislative proposals, the Republican Party’s budget proposals for 2012 and 2013. These are most well known for moving to severely cut and partially privatise some of the United States’ most important health-related social safety nets, aimed at slicing away some 5.3 trillion dollars of spending over a decade.

While he was president, George W. Bush is reported to have called Ryan’s proposals too extreme, in part for the latter’s suggestion that the U.S. move towards privatising social security. More recently, Barack Obama has likened the Ryan plan to “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that would create a fight between rich and poor.

For many political pundits, the vice-presidential pick now inevitably binds Romney to Ryan’s budget proposals, at least in spirit.

Certainly that has been President Obama’s latest campaign approach. In the swing state of Iowa on Monday, the president called Ryan “an articulate spokesman for Governor Romney’s vision”, though some analysts suggest that dynamic could be the other way around.

Cutting diplomacy

To date, Paul Ryan is known almost exclusively for his stance on U.S. domestic issues, but he has weighed in on subjects of international interest.

On issues of human rights, for instance, he has been relatively more outspoken than some Republicans. A socially conservative, devout Catholic, on Saturday he stated, “Our rights come from nature and God, not government.”

Of particular interest is the most recent of the Ryan budgets, released in March, a 99-page document called “The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal”. Although concerned primarily with cutting the United States’ federal budget, the proposal maintains that national security should be the government’s foremost priority.

How exactly to attain that security, however, appears in part to be ideologically driven.

In his only major foreign policy-focused speech, in mid-2011, Ryan painted himself as a firm believer in U.S. exceptionalism and, more recently, as a proponent of military intervention. According to media reports, he is currently being advised by Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative former advisor to George W. Bush.

The Ryan budget would allow U.S. military spending to grow by some 90 billion dollars over the coming decade while, at the same time, drastically reducing other overseas tools.

According to a May 2012 report released by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank here, Ryan’s budget would cut around 31.6 billion dollars from the foreign affairs accounts in four years, including slashing budgets for the State Department and USAID, the foreign-development office.

“By any reasonable estimation, such an approach would decimate our nation’s ability to effectively advance our interests overseas,” the report warns, “and such budget calculations cannot be justified based on a deliberate analysis of our needs and foreign policy priorities as a nation.”

Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defence currently with CAP, told IPS: “Ryan’s budget undermines our national security by providing funds to the military that it leaders say are unnecessary, while taking away money from diplomacy and development activities which can prevent crises.”

Romney accused Obama of abandoning U.S. allies, particularly Israel. Credit: Mark Taylor/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jul 25 2012 (IPS)

Reprising the neo-conservative rhetoric of the primary election campaign, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney Tuesday harshly criticised Barack Obama’s foreign policy but offered few clues as to specific changes he would make if he defeats the president in November.

Speaking before the traditionally hawkish Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), Romney accused Obama of “abandon(ing)” U.S. allies, particularly Israel, and described the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran as “the most severe security threat facing America and our friends”.

He also called the alleged leaking by the administration of details of highly secret operations, such as last year’s killing by U.S. Special Forces of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, “contemptible” and charged that Obama was putting the country in danger by pursuing “radical cuts in the military”.

“The president’s policies have made it harder to recover from the deepest recession in 70 years, exposed the military to cuts that no one can justify, compromised our national-security secrets, and, in dealing with other nations, given trust where it is not earned, insult where it is not deserved, and apology where it is not due,” Romney asserted in what was one of his biggest applause lines.

But critics said they were struck by the absence of specifics and, in some cases, the failure to draw clear differences between him and the president on specific policy issues.

“Both Republicans and Democrats have been waiting for this speech for a long time, calling on him to be policy-specific,” noted Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, a think tank close to the Democratic Party. “What he offered was a lot of neo-conservative rhetoric and still few or no policy specifics.”

The speech, delivered on the eve of what is almost certain to be his campaign’s only overseas trip, comes amidst growing speculation over which faction in the Republican Party foreign policy establishment enjoys greater influence over a presidential candidate whose international expertise has been limited largely to his overseas financial investments and running the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

While Republican realists, such as former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and George Shultz, are listed among his senior advisers, the most active members of his foreign policy team are identified more with the party’s staunchly pro-Israel neo-conservative and aggressive nationalist wing that dominated George W. Bush’s first term in office.

Judging from the rhetorical flourishes, tone, and some of the policy positions, especially regarding Israel and Iran, it appears clear that the more-hawkish wing of the party remains dominant, with some commentators noting that the speech appeared directed more at the party’s right-wing base than at independents who are likely to decide the election outcome.

Indeed, toward the beginning of his remarks, he reprised the main theme of the major foreign policy address he delivered at a military academy last October in the heat of the primary campaign: “This century must be an American Century,” in which “…we have the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world.”

The “American Century” phrase, which he repeated seven times, harks back to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a mainly neo-conservative group whose charter members in 1997 included, among others, Bush’s future vice president, Dick Cheney, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Middle East aide Elliott Abrams, as well as its two co-founders, Robert Kagan and William Kristol.

While PNAC, which played a key role in mobilising support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, faded away by 2005, Kagan and Kristol created a new group, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) shortly after Obama’s inauguration, and at least two of its five directors – former Pentagon undersecretary Eric Edelman and the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Dan Senor – have taken prominent public roles in the Romney campaign.

Similarly, the choice of Romney’s foreign destinations over the next week – Britain, Poland, and Israel, where he will celebrate the breaking of the fast for Tisha B’Av, the day commemorating the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem, at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house – also suggested a strong neo-conservative influence.

In Poland, he will meet with the leader of the Solidarity movement, former President Lech Walesa, long a neo-conservative favourite for his hostility to both the Soviet Union and Russia.

In his remarks Tuesday, Romney said that he would not attack Obama’s policy during his trip abroad but decried what he called the administration’s “shabby treatment” of Israel, accusing Obama of joining “the chorus of accusations, threats and insults at the United Nations” inflicted on the Jewish state.

He assailed Obama’s “re-set” with Russia, noting that Moscow rewarded the gesture by defending Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

Remarkably, however, he had nothing more to say about what policies he would pursue with Russia, which he described as the U.S.’s “number one geo-political foe” only three months ago. Nor did he say anything more about Syria, currently the hottest foreign policy topic in Washington, with FPI and other neo-conservatives arguing with growing urgency for the U.S. to intervene militarily.

On the other hand, Romney focused a lot of his rhetorical fire on Iran, which he described as a “catastrophic threat”, insisting “(t)here is no greater danger in the world today than the prospect of the ayatollahs in Tehran possessing nuclear weapons capability.”

But, aside from calling for full enforcement of sanctions “without exception”, his policy recommendations regarding negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme appeared somewhat ambiguous.

“Negotiations must secure full and unhindered access for inspections,” he said, adding that “(t)here must be a full suspension of any enrichment, period.”

Both the notion of future inspections and the use of the word “suspension”, as opposed to permanent abandonment, to describe an acceptable negotiated outcome suggested that Romney may be open to a settlement that would not preclude limited future enrichment – a position consistent with that of the Obama administration.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Romney said, the U.S. “cannot be neutral in the outcome there”, adding, “We must clearly stand for the values of representative government, economic opportunity, and human rights. And we must stand against the extension of Iranian or jihadist influence.”

But the only specific example he cited was Egypt, which he described as “at the centre of this historical drama”. He said he would condition U.S. assistance on the country’s commitment to representative government and peace with Israel and throughout the region. He did not explain, however, how this differs from current U.S. policy.

He criticised China’s alleged disregard for the rights of its people, as well as its trade and currency policies, but noted that “it is in our mutual interest for China to be a partner for a stable and secure world.” One commentator, Daniel Drezner of foreignpolicy.com, noted that the latter phrase was “the nicest thing Romney has said about China during the campaign.”

While he did not repeat his threat to declare China a currency manipulator on his first day on his office, he stressed that “the cheating must finally be brought to a stop. President Obama hasn’t done it and won’t do it. I will,” he said.

Besides U.S. policy toward the civil war in Syria, Hurlburt noted, Romney failed to address several key foreign policy issues, including the ongoing European economic crisis and Obama’s “pivot” of U.S. global strategy from the Greater Middle East to the Asia/Pacific region. “These are major challenges,” she said, “and he had nothing to say about them.”

Africa went entirely unmentioned, and his only nod to Latin America was a reference to the Middle East – mocking Obama’s recent assertion that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had not had a serious national security impact on the U.S. “In my view, inviting (Lebanon’s) Hezbollah into our hemisphere is severe, serious, and a threat,” he said.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.