By Joaquín Roy
MIAMI, May 13 2016 (IPS)

It was no news to observers, analysts and potential voters that Hillary Clinton would seek the Democratic nomination again to run for president of the United States in November 2016. This was not a surprise. But what only a bold analyst could have speculated is that Bill Clinton’s wife would end up facing off against such unlikely rivals.

On one hand, she would face novel competition in her party from another, very different, senator. Hillary would have to present herself as the candidate who truly represented the ideals of the Democratic Party, in contrast to Bernie Sanders, who declared himself a “socialist”. Although no one expects him to defeat her in the primaries, Sanders has put up an unexpectedly strong showing.

On the other hand, even more surprising and unusual was that Hillary would go up against a one-of-a-kind Republican candidate, who has triggered much consternation and extreme comments. If Donald Trump’s nomination is confirmed in Cleveland, it will go down in U.S. history as one of the strangest political races. Voters, observers and analysts are still wondering about the reasons underlying his spectacular ascent – which Clinton should worry about, if she means to defeat him.

The Sanders phenomenon can be explained to some extent using traditional analytical methods. The ideological inclinations of the senator from Vermont are not really that new. So far it has merely been a curious case of a political leader not afraid to use terminology outside of the grasp of most citizens and voters. It is not easy to translate what is known in Europe as “social democracy” into U.S. English. “Social Democrat” or “Democratic Socialist” are terms that don’t fit into the everyday vocabulary of people in the U.S. So to simplify, he opted for “Socialist”, which in the U.S. has more radical connotations, and which popular culture has turned into a synonym for “Communist”. This is the sense in which Sanders’ positions differ from Hillary’s.

His ideas have enjoyed a warm reception among young university graduates with less employable degrees, students struggling with the high cost of tuition, women of a certain cultural level, the unemployed, victims of the recession, people who have fallen out of the already shrunken middle class, and those disenchanted with the traditional propaganda of the political parties.

The case of Trump, meanwhile, has roots that go deep, far from the superficiality indicated by the things he says. The billionaire without experience in formal politics sends out a basic message, promising to make the United States “great” again. He plans a series of confrontations abroad, and not only on the economic front. But at the same time, his foreign policy stance is reminiscent of the most extreme form of isolationism that reigned in this country just before the times of crisis and armed conflict that the United States faced in the two world wars.

Trump alludes to a mythical country that actually only exists in the memory of people in the U.S. who are nostalgic about something they themselves never experienced and which is only sustained by high-flying speeches. It is an idyllic, basically Anglo-Protestant America which reluctantly accepted the necessary waves of immigration from the rest of the world. He uses the rhetoric needed to build a national identity in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.

Trump’s simple message focuses on calamities from outside: Companies abroad undermine U.S. industry by producing cheap merchandise that then floods the U.S. market, while undesirable undocumented immigrants steal local jobs. The remedy: high import duties and walls along the border.

As indicated in Sanders’ campaign speeches, the real enemy shared by the voters of Clinton and Trump is the rampant poverty and inequality plaguing what is still the most powerful country on earth. The citizens are losing confidence in the country and they feel let down by the lack of answers from the Washington establishment.

Hillary will have to clearly differentiate her message in the election campaign from these two visions of the United States. Sanders’ is the most grounded in reality; Trump’s is a fantasy. But both are real from an electoral standpoint.

Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Excerpt:

While political and media attention remains focused on the unprecedented support President Barack Obama received in Tuesday’s election from Latinos, one particular subset of those voters – one with potential foreign policy clout – is drawing intense interest.

Cuban Americans, for the last 50 years one of the most reliable constituencies for Republicans, particularly in the perennial “swing state” of Florida where most of them live, voted for the Democratic candidate in unprecedented numbers.

According to exit polls conducted by both Fox News and the Pew Hispanic Center, Obama beat Romney by a 49-47 percent margin among Cuban-American voters in what one close observer of Florida politics called a “historic demographic upset”.

A couple of other polls, including one conducted by the highly respected Miami-based Bendixen-Amandi International polling firm, found Romney prevailing over Obama among Cuban Americans, but only by a mere 52-48 percent margin.

“I think it has made clear that the Cuban-American community is no longer as monolithically Republican as many interested parties would like them to think,” Fernand Amandi, the firm’s managing partner, told IPS Friday.

“What it means is that this administration will have more room to maneouvre on Cuba policy than they ever thought they had,” said Geoffrey Thale, a Cuba specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

“U.S. policy for decades has been determined far more by political considerations about the vote in Florida than foreign policy considerations, particularly toward Latin America which has called consistently for an end to the U.S. embargo,” Thale told IPS. “So having more room in Florida means they have more flexibility in their policy if they choose to use it.”

Like others, Thale stressed that Obama was unlikely to take major new steps to warm relations, particularly so long as Alan Gross, a U.S. Agency for International Development contractor arrested in 2009 and sentenced to a 15-year prison term for crimes against the state, remains in jail.

But a greater opening toward Havana, including broadening current bilateral discussions and further relaxing curbs on travel to Cuba, could be in the offing.

While Florida remains the one state in the country whose electoral votes have not yet been cast due to the continuing counting of ballots there, virtually all political analysts say they believe it will end up in Obama’s column. He is currently leading the state by one percent, or about 50,000 votes.

If, as expected, he prevails, it will be largely due to the higher-than-anticipated Latino turnout which Obama won by a 60-39 percent margin, according to most exit polls. That margin was considerably less than the 71-27 percent spread in Obama’s favour for all U.S. Latino voters, who made up a record 10 percent of the nationwide electorate this year and almost twice much in Florida.

The largest group of Latin voters in Florida are of Cuban heritage – about one-third of all Latinos in the state – a clear explanation for why Obama did not score as well with Latinos there as in every other state in the country.

Still, the results in Florida stunned most observers who interpreted them as a confirmation of a generational shift in Cuban-American political attitudes.

“This is a generational phenomenon,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), a Washington think tank. “It reflects the passing of the old generation and the acceptance of new attitudes.”

“Young Cuban Americans are more open about dealing with Cuba and also have other issues that are important to them that Obama was able to capitalise on,” he told IPS, adding, however, that so long as Gross remains in prison, Obama is unlikely to do much more than he has already in terms of rolling back many of the restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba that were imposed during the George W. Bush administration.

While the Pew and Fox News polls showed Obama winning the Cuban-American vote, the Bendixen survey was more detailed and confirmed the generational divide. Cuban-born voters, it found, favoured Romney by 55 percent to 45 percent, but Cuban-American voters born in the U.S. voted for Obama by a 60-40 margin.

“The Cuban-American community is changing,” said Wayne Smith, a former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana who resigned to protest Ronald Reagan’s hard-line policies and has been working for three decades to promote educational and scientific exchanges between the two countries.

“The younger the community and the newer the immigrants, the more difficult it is for the old hard-liners to control,” Smith, who is based at the Center for International Policy, told IPS.

Indeed, as recently as 1988, 85 percent of Cuban Americans in Florida voted for the Republican presidential candidate – George H.W. Bush in that year.

Until now, the high-water mark for a Democrat was Bill Clinton, who won 35 percent of the Cuban-American vote in 1996 and subsequently moved to ease rules governing travel and remittances to Cuba. He also punched a big hole in the trade embargo by permitting agricultural exports to the island for the first time.

In 2000, however, Vice President Al Gore won only 25 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Florida, compared to George W. Bush’s 75 percent. Eight years later, Obama equaled Clinton’s performance, as the generational shift appeared to take firmer hold.

But this year’s Democratic tally of 48-49 percent far exceeded expectations.

While anti-Castro hardliners in the House of Representatives, most prominently Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz Balart, held their seats on Tuesday, Joe Garcia soundly defeated another hard-line incumbent, Rep. David Rivera, to become the first Cuban-American Democrat who explicitly favours better ties with Havana in Congress.

Another hard-line incumbent whose district includes the “Little Havana” section of Miami also fell to a pro-engagement Cuban-American Democrat in the state legislature.

Requests for comment by Ros-Lehtinen’s office and the anti-Castro lobby group, Vision Americas, went unanswered.

If Gross is returned to the U.S. – a major “if” given Havana’s insistence to date that he be exchanged for four Cubans still imprisoned here on controversial espionage charges, following the three-year probation of one in October 2011 – Obama is still likely to act cautiously, according to both Thale and Shifter.

Not only is Cuba not seen by the administration as a high foreign policy priority compared to the Middle East or Asia, but also because of the ability of anti-Castro hard-liners in the Senate, especially New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez (who could become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee if John Kerry becomes secretary of state), Florida Republican Marco Rubio, and newly elected Texas Republican Ted Cruz, to hold up unrelated ambassadorial appointments and use other procedural manoeuvres to frustrate Obama’s policies.

Still, the fact that Latin American countries have become increasingly insistent that Washington’s embargo constitutes a major impediment to improved hemispheric ties – Cuba will chair the two-year-old Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) next year – will likely affect Obama’s calculus.

Cuba’s key mediating role to end the four-decade-old civil war in Colombia, on which Washington has spent some eight billion dollars over the past decade, could also provide an external push toward normalisation, according to Thale.

“There’s more pull from the region and there’s less resistance for improving ties,” he said.

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

Obama drew overwhelming support from both ethnic minorities and women. Credit: oporder/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 9 2012 (IPS)

Twenty years ago, Democratic pol James Carville immortalised the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid” in explaining how former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton would unseat President George H. W. Bush, who was riding high off his smashing military victory in the first Gulf War.

Now, 20 years later, pros in both parties appear to agree that “It was the demographics, stupid” that best explained how President Barack Obama defeated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, despite four years of hard economic times and a nearly eight-percent unemployment rate.

Demographics has become almost a cliché in the 48 hours since Romney went down to defeat despite the support of nearly 60 percent of white voters.

“It’s a changing country,” observed the wildly successful right-wing talk-show host, Bill O’Reilly, soon after the major television networks concluded that Obama had won the electoral vote by a landslide, even as the popular vote gave him a victory of only about three percent.

“The demographics are changing; It’s not a traditional America anymore,” O’Reilly told his FoxNews viewers ruefully. “…Whereby 20 years ago, President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney, the white establishment is now the minority.”

In fact, the “traditional America” of an overwhelmingly white, patriarchal society that has effectively dominated the country from its independence nearly 240 years ago through at least the era of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s is long gone.

And both minorities and women, combined with the so-called Millennium Generation of 18 to 29-year-olds whose attitudes are far more tolerant of “untraditional” people and lifestyles than any that preceded it, proved the point quite convincingly on election night this year.

Sixty percent of white voters, combined with just a smattering of minority votes, would have clinched any presidential election until the end of the Reagan era. Indeed, when Bush Sr. received the same percentage of white votes as Romney, he won the 1988 election by eight percentage points despite receiving only 30 percent of Hispanic and 12 percent of African American votes.

But given both the increase in the size of minority populations and their increased turnout at the voting booths – as well as the growing identification of women with the Democratic Party – those days are now gone, and this election hammered that truth home like no other.

In many respects, it’s just a matter of mathematics. In 1988, non-Latino white voters constituted 85 percent of the electorate. By 2008, when Obama defeated Sen. John McCain, that percentage was down to 74 percent. It fell again this year – to only 71 percent.

And that trend will inevitably continue, much to the distress of most Republican leaders who fear that, absent a major and convincing effort to woo ethnic and religious minority voters, their party will lose and lose again, at least at the national level.

“If you’re not going to be competitive with Latinos, with African Americans, with Native Americans, with Asian Americans, you’re not going to be a successful party,” noted former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich this week.

He lost the party’s nomination to Romney in the primary campaign in part due to his support for more liberal immigration policies than those endorsed by Romney and the party’s right-wing and “Tea Party” activist core.

Unsurprisingly, African Americans, who make up about 12 percent of eligible voters, cast their ballots overwhelmingly for the biracial Obama, although, at 93 percent, that was two percentage points less than in 2008.

More shocking to the Republicans, however, was how Latinos, the country’s largest ethnic minority, voted. Just over two percent of the electorate in 1992, Latinos accounted for 10 percent of all voters in this election, and they voted by a whopping 71-27 percent majority for Obama.

While Republicans were concerned that their tough immigration stance would hurt them with Latinos, they consoled themselves that the “traditional values” of the party, combined with the dismal economy, would permit them to increase their share of the Latino vote above the 31 percent received by McCain four years ago.

That calculation, however, was not borne out. Romney received only 27 percent of the Latino vote, compared to Obama’s 71 percent.

Moreover, the greater Latino turnout magnified the loss and, according to most political analysts, probably made the difference in such key swing states as Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, and Florida – which Obama appears poised to win officially – where they make up 17 percent of the electorate.

Republicans also underestimated their losses among the country’s fastest-growing minority – Asian Americans – who, while constituting only about three percent of the total electorate, were a key constituency in the swing state of Virginia.

As a whole, the group has historically been divided politically by national origin, with Japanese and Southeast Asian Americans tending to vote more Republican. In 1992, 55 percent of Asian Americans voted for Bush Sr.

But, with the arrival of new immigrants – the Asian-American population grew at a rate of nearly 50 percent in the past decade –and the increasingly right-wing trajectory of the Republican Party, Asian Americans have moved into the Democratic column.

In 2000, 54 percent voted for Vice President Al Gore; eight years later, 62 percent for Obama. This year, however, Asians surpassed Latinos in support for the president, voting 73-26 percent, or three-to-one, in his favour.

All of these statistics paint a very gloomy picture for a Republican Party that, in the aftermath of its defeat – it unexpectedly lost, in addition to the White House, two seats in the Senate and at least seven in the House of Representatives – is turning into a circular firing squad, with the Tea Party and Christian Right claiming that Romney was too moderate and more establishment politicians insisting that he was not moderate enough.

The debate on whether the party must change its substantive positions on issues – notably immigration – in order to win over minorities or whether it should merely soften its tone – by, for example, explicitly disowning racist messages that have become commonplace on right-wing radio and television talk shows – is also underway.

But the party faces a serious challenge, according to Matt Barreto, a pollster of Latino Decisions.

“There’s this combination: the Asian vote is high, and each year it is going to add another percent. The Latino vote is growing fast. And as long as the African American vote continues to turn out at high rates, in that next election in 2016, it may be down to like 69 percent white voters,” he told Southern California Public Radio Thursday.

“At that point, if they don’t make increases among blacks and Latinos and Asians, then the Republican Party is not going to win another national election.”

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

A child holds a sign at a rally for immigration reform. Credit: Progress Ohio/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2012 (IPS)

In the aftermath of a surprisingly lopsided victory for President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party and for progressive causes more broadly, one of the key discussions taking place here is over the suddenly increased prospects for comprehensive immigration reform, long an issue so divisive that few politicians have been willing to tackle it.

“Coming out of this election, there is now increased debate in political circles on how to create a pragmatic immigration system, with Republicans and conservatives engaging in this debate to a degree our country has never seen,” Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum, the largest such group in the country, said while speaking with journalists on Thursday.

The reasons for this sudden rise in immigration’s profile are twofold, though they are based on the same general issue: that President Obama’s slim re-election majority was given a critical boost by the Latino vote, nearly three-quarters of which supported the president. Latinos, meanwhile, are the country’s fastest-growing demographic.

First, then, Latino voices have quickly begun demanding that President Obama now move towards rewarding their support by making immigration reform one of his top legislative priorities, which he has already indicated he will do.

“As a result (of the election), the mandate for President Obama, along with the newly elected members of Congress, should be clear: voters want an immigration system that treats aspiring citizens with dignity, and provides a roadmap for those living and working here to integrate fully into society,” Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, said in a statement, noting that Latinos “will no longer tolerate the status quo of record deportations and aggressive detention policies”.

Second, and of paramount importance, as the Republican Party begins a painful process of introspection over its losses, there is a growing consensus among all but the most conservative parts of the party that it needs to overhaul its hard line on immigration reform – and that the next few months will offer an unusually strong opportunity to come together with the Democrats to do so.

“On immigration reform, if ever there is a time to be hopeful that it will happen, it is now,” Allie Devine, a lobbyist for the Kansas Business Coalition, told journalists on Thursday. “This is a social and moral issue, but it is also very much a monetary issue that needs to be addressed.”

The nationalist far right in U.S. politics, including the so-called Tea Party faction, has become increasingly mobilised against immigration in recent years, exacerbated in part by the downturn in the economy. While frustrating for pro-business and law enforcement elements within the Republican Party, this has also stymied broader efforts at forging a legislative “path to citizenship” for immigrants, with extreme conservatives refusing to negotiate until the entire U.S.-Mexico border is fenced and “secured”.

The federal government has previously made half-hearted attempts to overhaul its complex mishmash of immigration policies, which has resulted in some 12 million undocumented workers living within the United States. President Obama urged Democrats in the Congress to introduce initial legislation in 2009, but on political pushback the attempt was dropped.

Eventually, the legislative drive was overshadowed by the bruising partisan fight over health care reform. At the time, Obama’s chief of staff referred to immigration reform as the “third rail of American politics”, a reference to the dangerous electrified track that powers a subway – and that everyone is urged not to touch.

Just three months ahead of the election, Obama did eventually sign a minor but lauded executive order that halted deportation of certain children of illegal immigrants. But in late October, he stated unequivocally that, if elected, “I’m confident we’ll get done … immigration reform”, listing it as his second priority after the looming debt negotiations.

He reiterated this stance in his re-election acceptance speech early Wednesday morning, noting that “fixing the immigration system” would be an immediate concern.

Bible, badge, business

It remains unclear exactly how the Republicans will respond. After all, despite Republican losses in the White House and Senate races, the party picked up seats in the particularly partisan House of Representatives.

Still, many are interpreting the election results as a clear indication that U.S. voters want to see greater cooperation – and progress – on key issues, including immigration. That should embolden many members of Congress that their jobs won’t be on the line if they choose to support broad reform.

“In the last election, many Republican officials felt incorrectly that they needed to pander to the base of the party – to the loud, shrill, anti-immigration people out there – and I’m excited now that there is this open opportunity to do something about it,” Mark Shurtleff, the Republican attorney-general for the state of Utah, said Tuesday.

“I’m very concerned – we have to reconsider who the Republican base is and how to define the soul of the Republican Party. Moderates within the party need to come back to this discussion and reject the extreme rightwing partisan ranting that does not represent the majority of Republicans.”

Law-enforcement officials such as Shurtleff and business advocates such as Devine make up two parts of a three-pronged strategy now being pushed by those looking to capitalise on the strengthened environment for immigration reform.

“The only way that immigration reform is going to pass is if those who hold the Bible, those who wear a badge and those who own a business exert grassroots pressure. But that pressure has begun to build,” the National Immigration Forum’s Noorani says.

While Congress is out of session until next week, Noorani says that initial meetings are already being set up. Further, during the first week of December, a two-day national strategy meeting will also bring together Republicans from across the ideological spectrum to come up with a more unified stance on the issue of immigration reform.

And while nearly all involved are now hoping that the new dynamics will allow for enough consensus to arrive at a comprehensive reforms package, most say a gradual approach would still be acceptable.

“Comprehensive reform is the utopia, but we can go piecemeal,” the Reverend Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, told reporters Thursday. “The critical issue is getting some sort of legislation through that sends a message that lets people know that they can come out of the shadows – something to deal with the fear and angst that immigrants suffer from in this country.”

Several critical issues of unfinished business in the Middle East face President Barack Obama as he begins his second term. Washington must become more engaged come January because these issues will directly impact regional stability and security and U.S. interests and personnel in the region.

The issues include the Syrian uprising and increasing atrocities by extremist elements within the uprising, the Arab Spring and the future of democratic transitions, the growing influence of radical Salafi “jihadism” across the Arab world, Bahrain, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Pakistan, and Guantanamo and global terrorism.

The Obama administration’s engagement in these issues in the past year has been marginal and uneven, influenced largely by domestic politics and to some degree the ghost of Libya. Washington’s public support for democracy following the start of the Arab Spring was welcomed in the region, especially as dictators in Tunisia and Egypt fell precipitously.

The U.S. image became more tarnished, however, as repression escalated in Bahrain against the Shia majority and as Assad’s killing machine became more vicious, and Syria descended into a civil war.

Washington’s benign response to repression and torture in Bahrain, according to advocates of this policy, is justified by the presence of the U.S. Fifth Fleet and the special relationship with Saudi Arabia. Yet, the U.S. and its Western allies have not used their significant leverage in either country to advance democracy. Nor has the Fleet deterred the Al Khalifa regime from repressing the pro-democracy movement.

The ghost of Libya and the U.S. presidential election also drove Obama’s hesitancy to act against the Syrian dictator. During the foreign policy presidential debate before the U.S. elections, President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney argued lamely that Syria was different from Libya, and therefore the U.S. military even under the NATO umbrella should not be used against Assad.

The fate of emerging Arab democracies and the legitimate aspirations of millions of Arab youth, which the U.S. and many countries worldwide have endorsed, should not be held hostage to political expediency or become a casualty of electoral politics.

U.S. prestige and Obama’s credibility at home and abroad will be tested by whether Washington stands with the peoples of the region against their entrenched dictators, regardless of the so-called Libyan model. Calls for justice and dignity in the Arab uprisings signaled a historic moment that resonated across the globe. The U.S. should embrace this moment and place itself on the right side of history.

President Obama was hailed across the Arab Muslim world in June 2009 when he called for engaging credible indigenous communities on the basis of common interests and mutual respect. A retreat from those ideals would be disastrous for the U.S. and its allies, especially as regime remnants and radical Salafis endeavour to derail the democratic process.

An autocratic tribal ruler in Manama, who has just revoked the citizenship of 31 Bahraini nationals, or a brutal dictator in Damascus should not turn the clock back on the moral inroads that Washington made in the region in the post-Bush era.

The unfolding of events at a dizzying speed and increasing threats to U.S. interests and personnel demand serious attempts to address theses critical issues. In his second-term, President Obama cannot remain oblivious to rising sectarianism, growing Salafi extremism, continued repression, and suppression of minorities and women.

On day one after taking office, the president must turn his full attention to Syria.

Assad must be forced out, and soon. Over 25,000 Syrians have been killed since the uprising began in early 2011, and equal numbers have been “disappeared” by the regime. Hundreds of thousands have become refugees. Atrocities committed by the regime and by some of the rebels are inflicting untold suffering on innocent civilians in Syria.

The Syrian uprising, like those in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, started peacefully. Regime intransigence and repression, however, forced the uprising to become violent. Lawlessness and the porous borders have opened Syria to radical “jihadists” from neighbouring Arab countries.

Whereas, the uprising was initially non-ideological and non-religious, the incoming “jihadists” are Sunni Salafis bent on fighting a religious war against an “infidel” dictator. These “jihadists” have exploited the factionalism of the opposition for their intolerant religious extremism.

They also gained acceptance by the poorly armed rebels because they brought in weapons and money from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and elsewhere. The rise of violent “jihadism” in Syria had been a direct consequence of continued regime intransigence.

A prolonged proxy war between Iran, which supports Assad, and Saudi Arabia, which supports the uprising, over Syria and a resurgent radical Salafi “jihad” within the insurgency cannot be good for regional stability and for the international community.

How to speed up Assad’s exit? Short of putting boots on the ground, Washington and its NATO allies, especially the UK, France, and Turkey, should declare a no-fly zone and provide the Free Syrian Army with adequate anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to fight the regime’s military machine. NATO should seek the consent of Arab and Asian countries for the Syria initiative, including patrolling the no-fly zone.

Media reports reveal that Turkey, with U.S. approval, has deployed Patriot missiles close to the Syrian border. This action seems to signal Turkey’s intention to create and possibly defend a no-fly zone. President Obama and other NATO leaders should vigorously push this action forward.

Syrian refugees cannot spend another winter in tents and under intolerable conditions.

NATO partners also should help streamline the opposition groups and recognise whatever group emerges as a legitimate political representative of Syria. Admittedly, factionalism among the rebel groups on the ground and within the Syrian National Council outside the country is a major impediment to diplomatic recognition and international action.

Once a unified leadership emerges, NATO should provide it with logistics, intelligence, and command and control training. Furthermore, Washington and London should put the Assad regime on notice that attacking Syria’s neighbours or using chemical and biological weapons in any form against any target will result in a massive military response.

Lakhdar Brahimi’s U.N.-Arab mission to Syria has failed to persuade Assad to stop the killing, and any talk of a temporary ceasefire is no more than wishful thinking. Russian and Chinese obduracy in the U.N. Security Council on Syria justifies an immediate and more robust NATO action against the regime. The Syrian dictator has already rejected British Prime Minister David Cameron’s offer for a safe passage out of Syria.

It’s morally reprehensible for the international community to remain insensitive to the continued atrocities against the Syrian people, whether by the regime or the opposition. Moral platitudes no longer cut it.

Once the regime is toppled, the international community should help the post-Assad government with economic recovery and empower the Syrian business community and entrepreneurial civil society to start creating jobs. When that happens, the “Arab Spring” would rightfully claim its fifth trophy.

*Emile Nakhleh is former director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program at CIA and author of A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim world.

Obama will be constrained by certain political realities, most notably the fact Republicans will still hold a solid majority in the House of Representatives and 45 seats in the Senate, enabling them to effectively block any legislation to which they are strongly opposed. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2012 (IPS)

With President Barack Obama winning re-election, foreign policy analysts here are pondering whether his victory will translate into major changes from the rather cautious approach he followed overseas in his first term.

For now, speculation is focused primarily on the Middle East, the region that has dominated the international agenda since 9/11, much to the frustration of those in the Obama administration who are hoping to accelerate Washington’s “pivot” to the Asia/Pacific, especially in light of growing tensions between China and Japan and the ongoing political transition in Beijing.

Others are hoping that Obama will be willing to invest a fair amount of whatever additional political capital he gained from his victory on reviving international efforts to curb global warming, a challenge that thrust itself back into public consciousness here with hurricane-force winds as “Super-Storm Sandy” tore up much of the northeastern coast, including lower Manhattan.

Indeed, long-frustrated environmental groups seized on Obama’s allusion to the “destructive power of a warming planet” in his Chicago victory speech early Wednesday’s morning as a hopeful sign that the president, who hardly mentioned the problem during the campaign for fear of key coal-producing swing states, notably Ohio, may make climate change one of his “legacy” issues.

“President Obama’s legacy will be shaped by his ability to take on big challenges, including climate change, clean energy, environmental protection, and sustainability,” said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute (WRI).

As with climate change and other issues with major domestic implications, however, Obama will be constrained by certain political realities, most notably the fact Republicans will still hold a solid majority in the House of Representatives and 45 seats in the Senate, enabling them to effectively block any legislation to which they are strongly opposed.

“You’ve had an election that more or less preserves the status quo in the House,” noted Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “At a time when Obama’s top priority is getting the economy going, I’m not sure we’ll see a major initiative on climate change.”

And, while Obama won a sturdy majority of the electoral vote, his margin in the national vote is unlikely to exceed three percent when all the votes are counted. As a result, the institutional and partisan balance of power remains much the same as before the election.

Moreover, the fact that foreign policy did not play much of a role in a campaign dominated by the economy – only five percent of voters told pollsters as they left the voting booth that foreign affairs was the most important issue facing the country – suggests that Obama cannot claim a clear mandate for major policy changes.

Still, the fact that his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, dropped his earlier hawkish, neo-conservative rhetoric as the election approached and essentially embraced Obama’s general policy approach, including even in the Middle East, in the closing weeks of the campaign was taken by some as a green light, if not a mandate, to pursue the president’s instincts.

“The election campaign, and not only the outcome, should be seen as the rout of the neo-conservatism of the disastrous 2001-2006 period of the Bush administration and the consolidation of a broad, bipartisan foreign policy consensus,” wrote Middle East analyst and occasional White House adviser Marc Lynch on his foreignpolicy.com blog Wednesday.

He predicted that what he called Obama’s “caution and pragmatism” in the region, particularly with respect to generally supporting democratic transitions, seeking ways to convene Israelis and Palestinians, engaging moderate Islamists, and pursuing Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, is unlikely to change, although he suggested that bolder approaches in some areas were called for.

In particular, the administration should begin “serious efforts at real talks with Iran” on its nuclear programme and “be prepared to take yes for an answer,” he wrote, echoing a consensus among realists in the foreign policy establishment that Obama will have greater flexibility to strike a deal with Tehran now than at any time in the last two years.

Reports of back-channel talks between the U.S. and Iran in preparation for a new round of negotiations between Tehran and the so-called P5+1 powers after the election have been circulating for two weeks.

Lynch also called for Washington to get behind a major push to unify the two main Palestinian factions and “encourage the renewal of a peace camp in the upcoming Israeli election” in hopes reviving serious efforts to achieve a two-state solution – a recommendation that also been urged by many analysts disappointed by Obama’s failure over the last two years to apply real pressure on Israel to halt the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Since 2010, Obama and his fellow Democrats have avoided confronting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who made little secret of his support for Romney – on either issue in major part because they felt their re-election chances depended heavily on the neutrality, if not the goodwill of the powerful Israel lobby.

Remarkably, however, those fears appear to have proved largely unfounded. Despite the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars in swing states on ads by the hard-line neo-conservative Republican Jewish Coalition and the Emergency Committee for Israel, as well as repeated charges by Romney that Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus,” 70 percent of Jewish voters opted for the president – a result that suggested that at least those hard-line neo-conservative elements of the lobby most closely tied to Netanyahu and the settler movement were not nearly as powerful as generally believed.

If so, Obama may have more room for manoeuvre on both Israel-Palestine and Iran, if he chooses to exercise it, than he himself previously thought.

Indeed, the election results were greeted with some considerable anxiety by Netanyahu’s supporters both here and in Israel.

“(R)emember that Obama is deeply committed to three things: global nuclear disarmament, rapprochement with the Islamic world, and Palestinian statehood,” wrote David Weinberg Wednesday in Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper funded by U.S. casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a major Netanyahu backer who also funded the election ads against Obama.

“I believe that he will forcefully act to progress on all three fronts, and this could bring him into conflict with Israel,” he added. “So start filling your sandbags. We’re in for a rough ride.”

Moreover, surveys of Jewish voters nationwide and in the swing states of Ohio and Florida commissioned by J Street, a “pro-peace” Zionist group, found that Obama’s tally among Jewish voters was only four percent less than in 2008 – roughly the same proportionate loss he suffered among virtually all demographic groups, except Latinos, who increased their support for the president significantly compared to four years ago.

The surveys also found overwhelming (79 percent) support for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, 76 percent support for an active U.S. role in negotiating a settlement, as well as a significant plurality for continuing diplomacy with Iran.

Still Kupchan believes Obama is unlikely to aggressively challenge Netanyahu, especially on the Israel-Palestinian issue.

“I think the chances of a major push on the peace process are slim,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That would happen only if there is an opening of sorts in the region or if it comes primarily from within Israel and a shift in the electoral landscape there that gives it Netanyahu an incentive to do something bold.”

But he, too, predicted that Obama will try harder to reach some agreement with Iran in the coming months while continuing to resist intervention – especially military intervention – amid the continuing turmoil in the Arab world.

“The one place you’ll see a growing footprint and presence and growing activism,” he said, will be in Asia, especially if “things heat up more over territorial disputes between China and its neighbours. And the new Chinese leadership may pursue a more confrontational stance which could in turn invite an American response in kind.”

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

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.”

Close-up of cluster of female cannabis plant. Credit: Bokske/cc by 3.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Nov 7 2012 (IPS)

In addition to the victories of the Democratic Party in retaining the presidency and the U.S. Senate, and of the Republican Party in retaining the U.S. House, there were major issue-related victories in Tuesday’s election whose common threads are personal liberty and human rights.

Chief among these was the approval of state-level referendums for the complete legalisation of marijuana and in support of same-sex marriage.

Comparisons to  alcohol prohibition

Colorado and Washington made history by being the first two states to completely legalise marijuana since the prohibition of marijuana began in the U.S. in 1937.

In Colorado, voters approved Amendment 64, with 55 percent of voters in favour. In Washington, voters approved Initiative Measure No. 202, with 55 percent of voters in favour.

Both measures legalise up to one ounce of marijuana for personal use for adults 21 and over, and allow for marijuana to be taxed and regulated in the same manner as alcohol.

Colorado’s measure allows for the licensing of cultivation and product-manufacturing facilities.

Colorado estimates the measure will raise between four million and 22 million dollars in sales tax revenue and licensing fees annually for the state. The first 40 million dollars of any such funds each year will now go towards school construction.

Oregon voters, however, rejected a similar measure, with only 44 percent in favour.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts became the eighteenth U.S. state, in addition to the District of Columbia, to allow medical marijuana.

Arkansas voters, however, narrowly rejected a similar medical marijuana measure, with only 48 percent in favour. Had the measure passed, Arkansas would have been the first state in the U.S. South to allow for medical marijuana.

The victories in Colorado and Washington are “very similar to when New York repealed their state alcohol prohibition and they did that prior to the federal government lifting their prohibition as well,” Robert Capecchi, legislative policy analyst with the Marijuana Policy Project, told IPS.

Capecchi attributed the shift in public opinion to “a shift in the electorate”, noting that older voters tend to oppose marijuana legalisation. “Older voters, and not to put it too darkly, but they die off,” Capecchi said.

“We got lots of support from younger voters and we’ve seen the Baby Boom generation as well, they’ve grown up with it in the 1960s, 1970s. In the grand scheme of things, people are deciding marijuana is not as injurious as federal and state governments want them to believe. It’s safer than alcohol. You cannot overdose on marijuana,” he said.

“The first states to change their laws are always the hardest. Now we’ve got two states whose voters have pretty overwhelmingly supported reform. I think a lot of other states will see that and have the political courage to change their laws as well,” Capecchi said.

One possibility might be that newly-reelected President Barack Obama will instruct the U.S. Department of Justice to enjoin Colorado and Washington from implementing the distribution components of its legislation.

However, if that happens, individuals in Colorado and Washington will still be protected from civil or criminal penalties under their respective state laws for possessing up to an ounce of marijuana. The vast majority of marijuana-related prosecutions occur at the state, not the federal level, meaning that most citizens of Colorado and Washington will be protected.

The 18 states with medical marijuana now include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.

Fourteen states also have decriminalised marijuana, which means marijuana possession in those states still carries of a civil penalty, not a criminal penalty.

Going forward, MPP is continuing to push towards its 25 by 2014 plan, which is to have medical marijuana in at least half of U.S. states by 2014.

Next year, MPP plans to focus on promoting legislative initiatives to provide for legalisation of marijuana in Rhode Island; to decriminalise marijuana in Vermont; and to provide for medical marijuana in Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, and New York.

A “slam-dunk” for gay rights

Also during Tuesday’s election, Maine, Maryland and Washington became the first three states to pass ballot initiatives approving same-sex marriage. And Minnesota rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

“This is a slam dunk for the LGBT movement, for marriage equality. We had four significant measures on ballots in four states across the country, and we won every single one of them. They mean different things, but the reality is we won every single one of them,” Darlene Nipper, deputy executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, told IPS.

“This is such a historic moment – I don’t think we can fully grasp the impact right now. The ballot measures is just one aspect. There’s the most pro-LGBT president reelected, we’ve got the first lesbian [U.S.] senator in Tammy Baldwin,” Nipper said, referring to the newly reelected Democrat from Wisconsin.

Maine, Maryland, and Washington are the first states to use the ballot initiative process to affirmatively approve of same-sex marriage.

Maine voters approved Question 1, with 53 percent in favour. The question asked voters, “Do you want to allow the State of Maine to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples?”

Maryland voters approved Question 6, with 52 percent in favour. And Washington approved Referendum 74, with 52 percent in favour. Unlike in Maine, the referendums in both Maryland and Washington were to affirm previous legislative approval of same-sex marriage.

Maine, Maryland, and Washington now join six other states – Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont – in allowing same-sex couples to marry. In those states, same-sex marriage has become legal as a result of court rulings or legislative action.

A small number of states in the United States have a peculiar power. As swing states, they are extremely influential in the outcome of the presidential election. As presidential candidates focus intensely on these states, some argue that this imbalance and several other factors threaten to undermine the country’s democracy.

Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup poll, explained to IPS what impact several aspects of America’s voting system have on elections and democracy. In addition to being in charge of America’s longest-running monitor of public opinion, he is also vice president of the National Council on Public Polls and the author of the book “Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People”.

Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup poll. Photo courtesy of Gallup.

“It all depends on the composition of the states. They vary a lot in their culture. We have a group of Democratic states, and a group of Republican states. And we have a small group that is an even mixture of the two,” Newport told IPS. “These are the battleground states that the political campaigns are paying attention to.”

The states that are considered swing states, or states where no party has overwhelming support, can differ from election to election. This year, most political scientists and polling institutes identify nine of them: North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Virginia and Nevada.

“They can change from time to time. But Florida and Ohio have always been considered swing states,” Newport noted.

Another state considered a swing state by some pollsters today is Pennsylvania. The state has voted for a Democratic president since 1988, but a recent poll from Susquehanna Polling & Research shows that the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is tightening there.

“The two campaigns have been buying a lot of advertisement in Pennsylvania. The campaigners must think it is possible that it is becoming a swing state,” Newport explained.

Some see the presidential candidates’ intense focus on swing states as a problem that in the long run could weaken American democracy, as residents of different states are not equally encouraged to engage in politics and told to go vote with the same fervour.

“If you live in, for example, New York, which is overwhelmingly Democratic, you do not see the campaigns at all,” Newport said.

According to Newport, one way to change this problem would be switching from the current electoral college system to a direct popular vote.

Under the current electoral college system, voters in each of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, do not vote directly for a president. Instead, voters in each state cast ballots to select electors pledged to a presidential candidate. The electors in a state, whose numbers depend on the state’s representation in Congress, then formally elect the president.

All states except from Maine and Nebraska use a winner-take-all formula for this, so that the presidential candidate that wins a majority receives all of a state’s electoral votes. Critics argue that this system is undemocratic.

“The American public think that it would be better to switch to a direct popular vote,” Newport said. “We have done several polls, and the public always answered that we should go for a popular vote.”

If the president of the United States were elected by a direct popular vote, the population as a whole could be said to have a stronger voice. Now, a few swing states can be said to have disproportionate influence.

“For example, the campaigns are spending a lot of time in New Hampshire now. They would probably ignore New Hampshire if we would have a popular vote, since it is a small state,” Newport said. “The electoral college system would work well if the public would be evenly distributed between states. But this is not the case. We have very populated states, and less populated states.”

Switching to a direct popular vote would mean having to change the Constitution, however. “It is complex to change the Constitution. It is unlikely that it will happen – it takes too much effort,” Newport predicted.

As a result, swing states will probably continue to decide the outcome of the elections, just as Southern states will probably continue to vote Republican, while Northeast states will probably continue to vote Democrat.

“It is a historical pattern. It is just like Finland is different from Spain in Europe. The Southern states are very religious, they have had slavery, they have the highest number of black residents, they are poorer. They are totally different from the North,” Newport said.

“Politics is driven a lot by religion here, not economy. You are likely to think that poor people would vote Democrat. But here, if you are religious, you vote for the Republicans… It is an interesting system here in the U.S. It is the way they set it up years ago.”

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.

While religious coalitions in the United States have remained generally stable during the 2008 and 2012 president election campaigns, new research released here on Tuesday suggests far more complexity among what is often called the U.S. “values voter”.

Marchers in San Francisco rally of marriage equality. The new survey shows widely divergent views among Catholics, including those who according to demographics would be considered more conservative. Credit: bastique/cc by 2.0

It also alludes to potential demographic and political changes on the horizon.

“Over past the decade, the media made much of ‘values voters’, as though there is a particular kind of values, generally conservative,” Michele Dillon, chair of the Sociology Department at the University of New Hampshire,” said at the unveiling of the 2012 American Values Survey.

“But what we see here… is that for most people religious values are not on the tops of their minds. Even when they are, most voters are not single-issue voters – they care about a number of things simultaneously.”

Interestingly, defining those values appears to fall more to political than to religious leaders, and thus could shift more easily with the evolution of political trends.

“One big thing the survey does is to look at religious churn in American public life – a remarkable amount of switching has gone on, and seemingly stable coalitions are only masking significant movement under the surface,” Robert P. Jones, the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, which put out the survey, said Tuesday.

Jones said there are “very stark divisions” between the religious coalitions that make up Barack Obama’s political base versus that of his opponent, the Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

Indeed, Romney’s religious coalition includes twice as many white Christians – 80 versus 40 percent – as Obama’s. Romney supporters also skew far older than Obama’s.

At the other end of the spectrum are religiously unaffiliated voters, one of the single fastest-growing portions of the U.S. populace and also one that is more likely to be younger. Voters self-identified in this way show lopsided support for Obama over Romney, with nearly three-quarters saying they support the president.

“The Republican religious coalition is relatively homogenous,” E.J. Dionne, Jr., a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, a think tank here, says. “On the other hand, the Democratic coalition includes the most and the least religious groups in the country – African Americans and those who are secular and religious unaffiliated. That explains a lot about how these issues are discussed within the Democratic Party.”

Pro-social justice

Catholics, meanwhile, have fallen between these coalitions. For this reason, this group has also been strongly targeted by both parties, with commentators widely referring to the “Catholic vote” and the assumption that Catholics will tend to support the more conservative Republican Party.

In fact, the new survey shows widely divergent views among Catholics, including those who according to demographics would be considered more conservative.

“Over the last decade, Catholics in the United States have engaged in a vigorous debate on which aspects of Catholic teaching should be given priority in public debate – social justice versus gay marriage and abortion,” Dionne says.

“Very strikingly, 60 percent of Catholics said that in its public statements the Catholic Church should focus more on social justice and the obligation to help the poor – even if doing so meant focusing less on issues like abortion. This included a majority of those who attend church at least once a week.”

Likewise, more than twice as many respondents – 63 versus 32 percent – say that government policies aimed at helping the poor serve as a crucial safety net versus “creating a culture of dependency”.

Interestingly, the subsection of Catholics that appears to skew more conservative on these issues as a bloc are Hispanics, which make up almost a third of U.S. Catholics and constitute another extremely fast-growing populace. Yet support for Obama among Hispanics remains extremely high, at around 70 percent.

Anecdotally at least, issues related to social justice and safety nets would tend to be aligned more with the Democratic rather than Republican Party. Yet some caution reading too much into the future implications of these coalitions.

“The two fastest increasing populations are Hispanic Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated, both of which lean democratic. While this could be part of an emerging majority, is this necessarily good news for democrats?” asks John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, based here.

“In fact, there are lower levels of political engagement among Hispanics and the religiously unaffiliated, and with young people generally. So it’s not clear that their growth in numerical terms translates into votes.”

Nonetheless, the broader implications of the new survey’s findings are clear, Sides says.

“Many facts in this report suggest that people don’t think about politics religiously, that people don’t necessarily translate their religious precepts into political choices,” he says, pointing to the social justice findings as well as separate data suggesting that large numbers of Catholics accept issues such as abortion and contraception, despite the Catholic Church’s strong positions on these matters.

“Americans are much more divided by party than they are by religion – that’s why evangelicals have embraced Romney, a Mormon. So how much political persuasion is really going on in the pews? It’s pretty clear that oftentimes those messages aren’t getting through – political leaders seem to be doing a better job of providing certain lessons than religious leaders.”

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.

People lining up for food has become a common sight in many major U.S. cities. Credit: Jeffrey Beall/cc by 2.0

By Malgorzata Stawecka
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 2012 (IPS)

Against the backdrop of a spreading global economic crisis, exacerbated by changing climate patterns, the global aim of guaranteeing food security for all by 2015 appears to be far from being achieved.

As delegates and activists are addressing the lingering issues of world hunger, malnutrition and poverty on the occasion of World Food Day Tuesday, homelessness and hunger are spreading fast and affecting millions of people across the globe, with far reaching implications in the United States.

In the world’s wealthiest nation, rising unemployment compounded by unprecedented high food prices are contributing to worsening living conditions. Persistent poverty and growing inequalities rather than scarcity of food is the main cause of hunger in the U.S., many analysts say.

According to the United States Census Bureau, since the global economic recession, the number of U.S. citizens who suffer from food insecurity nearly reached a staggering 50 million as of 2010, which represents the highest level ever recorded since the office began monitoring poverty rates more than 50 years ago.

In states such as Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, North Carolina, New Mexico and South Carolina, food insecurity rates are far above the national average.

Moreover, according to the latest figures, 20.5 million U.S. citizens live in extreme poverty. This means their family’s cash income is less than half of the federal poverty line, which corresponds to about 10,000 dollars a year for a family of four.

According to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) ‘Household Food Security in the United States in 2010’ report, the prevalence of food insecurity varied considerably among households with different demographic and economic characteristics.

Rates of food insecurity are substantially higher than the national average for households with incomes near or below the federal poverty line or households with children.

“Food insecurity is more common in large cities and rural areas than in suburban areas and other outlying areas around large cities,” the report states.

An especially vulnerable group is children, with as many as 17 million children nationwide who are currently struggling with food insecurity. According to several studies, one in four children in the country lacks consistent access to nutritious food to ensure a healthy life. In 2010, the poverty rate increased for children under age 18 from 20.7 to 22 percent.

“Generally we’ve seen a lot of kids here over the last years,” the chief operating officer of the food programme at the Jan Hus Presbyterian Church in New York, Francis S. Rocco, told IPS.

“Financial crisis has a great impact and most have spent a couple of thousand dollars per month on food since the crisis began. But there is no reason that anyone can starve. This is so-called social injustice that we refuse to confront,” he added.

For over 20 years, the Presbyterian Church has provided homeless people with food, clothing and other services. People who have a home are assisted with food once a month.

The church gets 60 to 100 people seeking help on a daily basis.

Indeed, one of the most direct ways to cope with growing hunger in the U.S. is through national nutrition programmes.

More than 46 million U.S. citizens currently rely on the federally-funded food and nutrition assistance programmes to help meet their nutritional needs, with senior citizens, families with children and minority groups among others.

According to USDA statistics, a record 44 million people, or one out of seven U.S. citizens, are currently participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Enrollment rates have particularly risen during economic distress, with current high unemployment which stands at 7,8 percent, as of September 2012.

Formerly known as the Food Stamp Program and administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, SNAP is government’s largest nutritional programme and is broadly available to almost all households with low incomes, with a particular focus on families with children, elderly people and people with disabilities.

Low-income pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding women, along with infants and children up to age five who are at nutrition risk can benefit from Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known by its acronym WIC, which provides nutritious foods, nutrition education as well as other health and social services.

WIC participants receive checks or vouchers to purchase nutritious foods each month, ranging from infant cereal, iron-fortified adult cereal to vitamin C-rich fruit and other high-nutritional food products.

Moreover, many U.S. citizens are relying on several government-affiliated food banks and other food pantries and soup kitchens and faith-based communities spread all over the country.

“There is a limited amount of help here. There are people that sleep on the street here at night,” a Presbyterian Church social worker told IPS.

“We receive people who are not working, who are not enough educated to find a work here, we have a class of people who are drugs or alcohol addicted. There are social services in New York City as well as human resources administration, but you’re limited in what you can do until people want to claw out of this cesspool and help themselves. If you have drug or alcohol problems you can’t think straight and your existence is from one day to another,” he added.

“You know where I’m sleeping? I’m sleeping in the front of the church,” a food programme recipient at Jan Hus Presbyterian Church told IPS.

Asked if the city should do more to help its citizens, he said, “There is enough food, but they should give us more shelter, more houses, places to stay at, not in the streets of Manhattan.”

Food-stamp spending is the USDA’s biggest annual expense, which has more than doubled in the last four years, reaching 75.7 billion dollars in 2011.

Ahead of the Nov. 6 elections, Republicans have criticised the high cost of the programme, proposing a new budget plan sponsored by Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican party’s vice-presidential nominee, that intents to cut food stamp funding by 33 billion dollars over 10 years.

Campaigning in Ohio last week, Ryan reportedly stopped at an empty soup kitchen where volunteers had finished serving food and washed clean pots and pans, prompting the president of the charity to tell the Washington Post, “He did nothing. He just came in here to get his picture taken at the dining hall.”

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.

In the wake of the epidemic of home foreclosures, banking scandals and resulting massive financial regulation overhaul two years ago known as the Dodd-Frank legislation, the U.S. government created a new federal agency to protect consumers from being taken advantage of by banks and other institutions.

Robert Moses, 92, faces foreclosure on his home. He recently participated in an Occupy movement rally in San Francisco demanding justice for mortgage and debt holders. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

Known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), it’s operated for a year now, with mixed results, according to civil society groups that follow the issue.

“Obviously, the agency’s been stifled somewhat by Congress,” Jamie Court, president of the non-profit California-based group Consumer Watchdog, told IPS. “Given the scrutiny they face, and the budget limitations, they’ve done a good job of starting to break new ground on mortgage regulations and financial services regulations, disclosure for consumers.”

Republicans, particularly in the U.S. House of Representatives, have been vehemently opposed to the CFPB.

“It’s a very tough job in this political and budgetary climate. They’ve done a good job of letting the public know their doors are open. The question is, how responsive they are to petitions from the public, and how much can they do as quickly as possible?” Court said.

“They have a good staff that understands consumer protection. The real fate of the agency will be determined by the (November U.S. presidential) election. The election is really a mandate for this agency to go forward or not,” he said.

Republican nominee Mitt Romney opposes the CFPB, while President Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, supports it.

The CFPB is “pretty much what Obama got for the consumer out of financial reform, which was too little. It’s the first time we have a federal agency that’s there to protect consumer, not the bank, not the investor,” Court said.

Over the past weekend, the agency announced its second enforcement action in conjunction with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), ordering Discover Bank to refund approximately 200 million dollars to more than 3.5 million consumers and pay a 14-million-dollar civil penalty.

At issue were “deceptive telemarketing and sales tactics used by Discover to mislead consumers into paying for various credit card ‘add-on products’ – payment protection, credit score tracking, identity theft protection, and wallet protection,” according to an agency press release.

According to the CFPB, Discover Bank, one of the largest credit card issuers in the U.S., misled customers about whether there was a cost for the products, enrolled customers without their consent, and failed to tell customers about some of the eligibility requirements associated with payment protection benefits.

In a similar case of “deceptive marketing tactics”, on Jul. 18, the agency announced its first enforcement action, requiring Capital One Bank to refund approximately 140 million dollars to two million customers and pay an additional 25-million-dollar civil penalty.

On Aug. 10, the agency proposed two new rules that will protect families who take out mortgages for their homes. These proposed rules are currently subject to a public comment period before final action will be taken.

The agency has also been collecting hundreds of comments from U.S. consumers regarding various complaints each week, and is encouraging consumers to submit complaints to the agency, including on its website.

“They’re being judicious in what they’re setting out to do. They’re not being a lightening rod for controversy – they’re doing sensible things on a sensible timeline. We’re very pleased by their agenda,” Linda Sherry, director of national priorities for Consumer Action, a San Francisco-based national consumer education and advocacy group, told IPS.

One of the benefits of the CFPB is that it gives U.S. consumers a single place to seek help with complaints regarding banking products and other financial products, Sherry said.

Previously, there were “too many cooks in the kitchen”, she said.

“This brings everything under the same roof. It’s easier for consumers to know who to go to for help. Beforehand, there were seven different agencies engaged in regulating the banking system,” she said.

Those agencies included the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, FDIC, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), National Credit Union Administration, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and Office of Thrift Supervision.

The FTC, for example, would look for trends in the credit industry and credit reporting industry, sometimes bringing legal actions in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Justice. However, they would not respond to individual complaints.

“As far as banking complaints, any banks that were national banks were (previously only) regulated by the OCC. They had robust consumer complaint unit. However, what would come back to us many times, they (a consumer) would submit a complaint, it would be sent for review and it would come back,” Sherry said.

“The OCC would write a letter saying, ‘The bank doesn’t see there’s a problem. We can’t do anything,’” she said.

“Financial services are key to a person’s well-being, livelihood, and prosperity. We want to keep people from being ripped off. That’s why we’re very pleased to have a new national consumer watchdog on the beat,” she said.

Court believes that the CFPB should be acting more aggressively.

“It also has to start banning certain types of products because they’re dangerous. There are some obscene interest rates on credit cards being charged, also payday lending, a lot of toxic financial products. They’re going to be asked to deal with these by petition,” Court said.

“The real test of the agency will be what it does when presented with toxic products,” Court said.

Court applauded the recent enforcement actions against Citibank and Discover Bank. “It’s a great example. An agency can step in and get 200 million dollars back to consumers’ pockets. Before that you had to file a class action lawsuit,” he said.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who came up with the idea for the agency, and who worked with interest groups and the U.S. Congress to bring the agency into fruition, also praised the Discover Bank action.

“I’m proud the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is standing up for working families by holding major credit card companies accountable for deceptive practices,” Warren, who is currently the Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, said in a statement sent to IPS.

“The new consumer agency is a strong advocate for hardworking men and women here in Massachusetts and across the country. The CFPB has been hard at work reducing the fine print in credit card agreements and assisting with consumer complaints… These actions will help protect families from financial tricks and traps and create a level playing field,” Warren said.

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.

The colours are retired during a ceremony marking the end of the U.S. mission in Iraq in Baghdad on Dec. 15, 2011. Credit: U.S. Defence Department photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo.

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 10 2012 (IPS)

Disillusioned by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. public is becoming increasingly comfortable with a more modest and less militarised global role for the nation, according to the latest in a biennial series of major surveys.

That attitude is particularly pronounced in the so-called Millennial Generation, citizens between the ages of 18 and 29, according to the poll. They are generally much less worried about international terrorism, immigration, and the rise of China and are far less supportive of an activist U.S. approach to foreign affairs than older groups, it found.

Political independents, who will likely play a decisive role in the outcome of November’s presidential election, also tend more than either Republicans or Democrats to oppose interventionist policies in world affairs, according to the survey, which was released at the Wilson Center for International Scholars here Monday by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA).

The survey results suggest that more aggressive and militaristic policies adopted by Republicans at their convention last month may be out of step with both independents and younger voters.

“If you read the whole report,” noted Daniel Drezner, an international relations professor who blogs at foreignpolicy.com, “what’s striking is how much the majority view on foreign policy jibes with what the Obama administration has been doing in the world: military retrenchment from the Middle East, a reliance on diplomacy and sanctions to deal with rogue states, a refocusing on East Asia, and prudent cuts in defence spending.”

For the first time since the Council posed the question in 1994, a majority of its nearly 1,900 adult respondents said they believe that Asia is more important to the United States than Europe.

Reflecting perhaps the so-called “pivot” by the administration of President Barack Obama from the Middle East to Asia, 52 percent of respondents said Asia was more important, a 10-percent increase over the Council’s 2010 survey result. The Pew Research Center found a similar change in its own survey earlier this year.

The survey, which was conducted in late May and early June, also found strong resistance by the public to becoming more deeply involved – especially militarily – in the Middle East, despite the perception by seven in 10 respondents that the region is more threatening to U.S. security than any other.

For the first time since 9/11, majorities said they opposed the retention or establishment of long-term U.S. military bases in Iraq or Afghanistan.

At the same time, 70 percent of respondents said they opposed a unilateral U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities; and almost as many (59 percent) said the U.S. should not ally itself militarily with Israel if the Jewish state attacks Iran.

The survey, which was released on the eve of the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Pentagon, suggested that the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with the continuing hardships of the 2008 global financial crisis, have soured much of the public on foreign intervention, especially military intervention.

“Ten years after 9/11, we see that Americans are in the process of recalibrating their views on international engagement and searching for less costly ways to project positive U.S. influence and protect American interests around the world,” said Marshall Bouton, CCFR’s long-time president.

“Now, with a strong sense that the wars have over-stretched our military and strained our economic resources, they prefer to avoid the use of military force if at all possible,” he noted.

Indeed, the survey found that a record 67 percent of the public now believes the war in Iraq was “not worth it”, while seven of 10 respondents agreed that “the experience of the Iraq war should make nations more cautious about using military force.”

Sixty-nine percent said the war in Afghanistan either made “no difference” to U.S. security (51 percent) or that it made the country “less safe” (18 percent).

The degree of disillusion with foreign affairs in light of the past decade was perhaps most starkly illustrated by the answers to the binary question of whether respondents thought it best for the U.S. to “take an active part in world affairs” or “stay out of world affairs”.

Led by the Millenials (52 percent), 38 percent of all respondents opted for the latter – the highest percentage since just after World War II and seven points higher than in 2010, according to the Council’s analysis. A majority of 61 percent said Washington should take an “active part” – the smallest majority since 1998.

Nearly eight in 10 respondents (78 percent) said they believe the U.S. is playing the role of world policeman more than it should – a figure that has been constant since 2004, a year after the Iraq invasion.

“While they see leadership as desirable,” according to the Council analysis, “Americans clearly reject the role of the United States as a hyperpower and want to take a more cooperative stance.”

Indeed 56 percent now agree with the proposition that Washington should be “more willing to make decisions within the United Nations” even if such decisions are not its first choice. That is a marked increase from a historic low of 50 percent in 2010.

Most respondents said they were not concerned about the growing influence of emerging nations in Asia and elsewhere. Asked for their reaction to increased foreign policy independence of countries like Turkey and Brazil, nearly seven in 10 respondents (69 percent) agreed that it was “mostly good” because of their reduced reliance on the U.S. rather than that it was “mostly bad because then they are likely to do things the U.S. does not support”.

The survey found persistent support for a large military – 53 percent said they believed “maintaining superior military power” is a “very important” foreign policy goal. But that was down from 67 percent in 2002, shortly after 9/11.

Contrary to Republican demands that the defence budget should be increased, two-thirds of respondents said it should be cut, and half of those said it should be cut the same or more than other government programmes.

And while Republicans continue to attack Obama for “leading from behind” during last year’s intervention in Libya, Bouton said his survey results found that the public was quite comfortable with the low-key role.

Only seven percent said Washington should have taken the “leading role” in the military campaign; 72 percent said it should have taken “a minor role” (31 percent) or “a major but not leading role” (41 percent). Nineteen percent said the U.S. should not have participated at all.

Republican politicans have also mocked Obama for offering to negotiate directly with hostile states. But more than two-thirds of respondents said Washington should be ready to hold talks with the leaders of Cuba (73 percent), North Korea (69 percent) and Iran (67 percent).

The survey found that self-described Republicans generally see the world as more hostile and threatening than Democrats.

The most striking differences between members of the two parties were found over immigration, climate change, and the Middle East, particularly on Israel-related issues, with Republicans siding much more strongly with Israel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran.

*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 Democratic National Convention erupted in controversy this week over the removal of a clause in the party platform stating that Jerusalem should remain Israel’s undivided capital and only grew worse when the wording was hastily re-inserted.

Though party platforms are routinely ignored by presidents and members of Congress, the politically sensitive issue of Israel, which has been particularly prominent in a U.S. presidential election where foreign policy has been downplayed by both sides, has caused ripples far beyond Washington.

The Democratic Party platform had initially intended to remove the wording from 2008 which had affirmed the party’s stance on Jerusalem in order to bring it in line with long-standing United States policy, upheld by presidents of both parties, which holds that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be decided in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Both Republicans and Democrats, however, have routinely voiced support for Jerusalem being Israel’s “undivided capital” in their party platforms in order to gather support from wealthy pro-Israel donors and secure votes in swing states where Jewish voters are believed to be decisive.

Barack Obama, in a 2008 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the major pro-Israel lobbying group, said that Jerusalem must remain undivided, but quickly backtracked and has since held to a policy of keeping Jerusalem as a final status issue.

Although the George W. Bush administration repeatedly stated its intent to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, it never acted to do so, the embassy remains in Tel Aviv, and the United States still has not formally recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Numerous media outlets reported that the Democratic platform had been vetted by AIPAC, which had voiced its approval. But after the controversy erupted, and Republican nominee Mitt Romney referred to the omission of the Jerusalem statement as “shameful”, President Obama was reported to have personally intervened to have the language re-inserted.

The amendment needed approval by a two-thirds majority in a voice vote on the conference floor. The controversy deepened when three calls for a vote came back without a clear majority in favour, much less the required two-thirds. But conference chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, declared that he had heard the required majority. Video recordings of the vote cast strong doubts on that assertion.

“The handling of the Jerusalem amendment in the Democratic party platform was ham-fisted to say the least,” Saqib Ali, a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates and a Democratic Party activist, told IPS.

“By ramming through the amendment on a dubious procedural move, Mayor Villagarosa and party leaders insulted those who believe Palestinians deserve equal human rights to everyone else in the world.

“The Democratic Party platform on this issue contradicts the position of the Obama administration. The divergence between the Democratic platform and the Obama administration policy just doesn’t make any sense,” Ali added.

Palestinians noted the controversy as well. Nabil Abu Rdeneh, an aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said that while the entire episode might just be “election propaganda”, a failure to recognise the Palestinian claim to east Jerusalem will “destroy the peace process” and lead to “endless war”.

The Democrats’ official stance also seems to lack support from the party’s rank and file. In a recent poll by the Arab American Institute, while nearly 60 percent of Democrats said they were not sure what they thought the ultimate disposition of Jerusalem should be, those who voiced an opinion favoured dividing the city over it being controlled by Israel alone by a nearly two-to-one margin.

“Pushing through the amendment was in part a reaction to Republican criticisms that the Obama administration – despite providing record amounts of taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel’s rightist government and blocking the United Nations from challenging Israeli violations of international humanitarian law – was somehow not supportive enough of Israel,” Professor Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, wrote in an article for Foreign Policy in Focus.

“It was also a demonstration of just how determined the Democratic Party leadership is to undermine the Middle East peace process and weaken international law, even if it means running roughshod over their members and thereby hurting their chances in November,” Zunes said.

Other observers were much more explicit about the role of the pro-Israel lobby in the incident.

John Mearsheimer, a professor of politics at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, says that this episode reflected how out of touch U.S. leaders are with public opinion on Israel and the Palestinians.

“I don’t think the flap over Jerusalem will have any effect on the election, since there is no evidence that Obama was responsible for the problem and he fixed it right away,” Mearsheimer told IPS.

“Nevertheless, what happened yesterday was very important because we saw right before our own eyes that the president and his lieutenants were caving into pressure from Israel and the lobby, but at the same time, there was significant opposition to what Obama was doing among the rank and file in the Democratic Party.

“Actually, this is not surprising if you look at public opinion polls on how the American people think about our special relationship with Israel. The evidence is clear that the public is generally pro-Israel, but not so much as to justify the present relationship, where we give Israel more aid than any other country and give it unconditionally.”

Notably, while Obama visibly intervened to change the party platform, he made no mention of Jerusalem in his convention speech, and barely touched upon Israel at all, confining his remarks to a pro forma statement that “Our commitment to Israel’s security must not waver, and neither must our pursuit of peace.”

Obama also was sparing in his remarks on Iran, which has been dominating U.S. foreign policy for the past year. While this may all reflect a general preference of both candidates to speak to ongoing domestic economic issues in this election, some observers thought there might be some small indication of the beginnings of a shift in pro-Israel influence on U.S. foreign policy.

“Like everyone who saw this appalling misprision of democracy by the Democratic National Convention, I was struck by the blatancy of the political manipulation on view,” former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman told IPS.

“Whatever the merits of the issue itself in terms of campaign politics, the Israel Lobby can have done itself no good by exposing its contempt for the opinion of the delegates now gathered in Charlotte in this way.”

Mearsheimer agreed. “What makes the special relationship (between the U.S. and Israel) work is the fact that the lobby is deadly effective at putting pressure on American politicians and policymakers to support Israel no matter what. If the public had a real say in our policy toward Israel, we would have a very different policy than we now have. Wednesday, that point was driven home clearly on our TV screens for all to see. Nothing like that has ever happened before.”

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.”

In a long-awaited decision with potential electoral consequences, the U.S. Supreme Court Monday struck down three out of four provisions of a controversial Arizona law aimed against undocumented immigrants.

A five-to-three majority of the court ruled that those provisions, including one making it a crime for undocumented immigrants to seek work, went beyond existing federal immigration law. It has been a long-established principle in U.S. constitutional law that federal law “pre-empts” state law if they conflict.

But the court unanimously upheld the law’s single-most controversial provision – sometimes referred to as the “show-me-your-papers” law – that would require local police under certain conditions to check on a person’s immigration status if they have been detained or arrested in connection with the violation or enforcement of other laws.

Reacting to the decision, President Barack Obama, whose Justice Department challenged the Arizona law soon after its enactment in 2010, said he was “pleased” with the Court’s decision to strike down those provisions that conflicted with federal immigration law.

“At the same time,” he added, “I remain concerned about the practical impact of the remaining provision of the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally.

“Going forward, we must ensure that Arizona law enforcement officials do not enforce this law in a manner that undermines the civil rights of Americas…,” he went on, adding that the court’s ruling showed the need for Congress to enact “comprehensive immigration reform”.

A number of civil rights groups also reacted negatively to the court’s decision to let the “papers” provision stand, suggesting that they will soon be filing their own lawsuits against the measure once Arizona begins enforcing it.

“By re-instating the ‘show-me-your-papers’ for now, the court has left the door open to racial profiling and illegal detentions in Arizona,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “We have amassed an 8.77 million dollar war chest to fight those battles in court and to counter any and every anti-immigrant copycat measure in other states.”

“The xenophobic virus in Arizona must be contained before it spreads to other states,” he added.

But Arizona Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, who claimed that the “heart of the law” had been upheld by the court, insisted that “racial profiling will not be tolerated” by her administration.

The court’s ruling comes at a critical moment in the 2012 election campaign and could influence its outcome, particularly in so-called swing states with large Hispanic populations, including Arizona and several of its Rocky Mountain neighbours, as well as Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Despite a significant reduction in Latino immigration since the 2008 financial crisis, the overall U.S. Latino population has increased by more than 40 percent over the past decade – to more than 50 million. Much of that growth has been concentrated in the Rocky Mountain states, Texas and the southeast.

Obama won about two-thirds of the Latino vote nationwide in 2008 and hopes to equal or surpass that percentage in November.

In a move that drew enthusiastic support from many Latinos, Obama announced earlier this month that his administration will stop deporting undocumented immigrants under the age of 30 who entered the U.S. as children, have no criminal records, and have either served in the U.S. armed forces or graduated from a high school or the equivalent.

Approximately 800,000 people – the vast majority Latino – are expected to benefit from the action.

With just a few exceptions, Republicans – including their presumptive presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney – have come out against Obama’s action, as they have against any measure that they construe as granting “amnesty” to any of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

For the most part, they have also rallied behind the Arizona law and similar or even more severe “copycat” laws enacted over the past two years by legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and several other states. During the primary campaign, Romney endorsed the Arizona law, although Florida Senator Marco Rubio, touted as a possible vice-presidential running-mate, has denounced it.

“I believe that each state has the duty – and the right – to secure our borders and preserve the rule of law, particularly when the federal government has failed to meet its responsibilities,” Romney said Monday in a statement that charged Obama with having “fail(ed) to provide any leadership on immigration”.

Romney’s political problems in reacting to the ruling were noted by Michael Shear of The Caucus blog of the New York Times. “More specific expressions of support for the law’s controversial provisions would be likely to undermine his efforts to increase support among Latinos. But if Mr. Romney distances himself from the Arizona law, he runs the risk of alienating conservative Tea Party supporters who back aggressive enforcement.”

The three provisions of the law that were found to unconstitutionally undermine federal law included criminalising undocumented immigrants who fail to register as such under a federal law or who work or try to find work in the state, and a third that authorised police to arrest people if they have probable cause to believe they had committed crimes that would make them deportable under federal law.

The Justice Department took the position that the fourth provision – the “show me your papers” provision – also went beyond federal law, a position also taken by the appeals court which heard the case before Arizona appealed it to the Supreme Court.

But the justices disagreed, although they also noted that much would depend on how the law was implemented. “This opinion does not foreclose other pre-emption and constitutional challenges to the law as interpreted and applied after it goes into effect,” Kennedy wrote for the majority.

He also stressed that “detaining individuals solely to verify their immigration status would raise constitutional concerns.”

Indeed, a number of Latino and other civil society groups stressed that they intended both to closely scrutinise Arizona’s application of the law and file suits on other grounds against its enforcement.

“The Supreme Court …failed to decisively remove the bull’s eye on the backs of Arizona’s Latinos, leaving it to future lawsuits to address,” declared the National Council of La Raza. “Those challenges will come, because this provision legitimises racial profiling and should not be allowed to stand in Arizona or anywhere else.”

“Knowing as we know, that the intention behind the anti-immigrant Arizona law is to see the largest number of people possible be ejected from the U.S., we find the U.S. Supreme Court decision as a dangerous sanctioning of what could become a witch hunt against foreign-born populations,” noted Angela Sanbrano, president of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC).

“Now more than ever, it will be crucial to closely scrutinise the action by local law enforcement agencies in Arizona.”

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) also expressed dismay with the ruling and scepticism over Brewer’s assurances that the law will not result in racial profiling.

“The Supreme Court ruling opens the door to anti-immigrant abuses we’ve seen in other states with similar laws,” said Grace Meng, an HRW researcher. “The court said it was too soon to know what harm there might be from this one provision, but the harm from a similar provision in Alabama is all to clear.”

All signs are pointing to a more polarised, less moderate U.S. Congress in the near future.

These include some of the recent Congressional primary elections in states throughout the U.S.; the retirement of longtime senator Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican from Maine; and the decline of the Blue Dog Coalition of centrist Democrats.

A recent book, “The Last Great Senate” by Ira Shapiro, reminisces about decades past such as the 1970s and 1980s where Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate seemed better able to work together for the good of the country.

“The pattern that has been present since the 1930s where you had a big conservative element in the Democratic Party and a big moderate element in the Republican Party, those days are pretty well gone,” Randall Strahan, a professor of political science at Emory University, told IPS.

Now, “the parties are more consistent in their programmatic and ideological views. It’s unrealistic to think any time in the near future partisan conflict will go away,” he said.

But Strahan argues that it is not entirely a bad thing.

“Some people say partisan conflict turns off voters. The evidence is just the opposite; hotly contested politics turns out voters. It (polarisation) clarifies choices for voters. When you have a Democratic Party all over the map, conservative segregationists in the South and liberals in the North, it’s very ambiguous when you vote for a Democrat what that means,” he said.

In fact, a highly polarised U.S. Congress has been typical throughout U.S. history, with the last several decades of moderation as the anomaly, Strahan said.

The conservative Tea Party celebrated last month when Thomas Massie, a Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for U.S. House in Kentucky, won the Republican primary there. He is expected to win in November’s general election.

Massie was backed by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican with libertarian ideology, also from Kentucky, who is attempting to strengthen the Tea Party Caucus. Rand Paul is the son of Representative Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican who has served Texas in the U.S. House for decades and ran for president multiple times. Rep. Paul is retiring this year.

Currently, there are four U.S. senators and 62 U.S. House members who are part of the Tea Party Caucus, including Senator Paul, as well as Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Mike Lee of Utah, and Jerry Moran of Kansas, all Republicans.

Another Tea Party-backed candidate, Richard Murdoch, created a big upset last month when he defeated Senator Richard Lugar, a moderate Republican from Indiana.

Murdoch may have a difficult time winning in the general election. He faces U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat from Indiana, this November, and the polls are currently tied.

On the left, progressive Democrats have made a some inroads by defeating moderate Democratic incumbents.

In late April 2012, Matt Cartwright and Rep. Mark Critz of Pennsylvania, progressive Democrats, defeated Tim Holden and Rep. Jason Altmire, centrist Democrats, respectively.

But progressive Democrats have not done well in all their races this year. State Senator Eric Griego, a progressive Democrat from New Mexico who had received the support of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, lost to a centrist Democrat earlier this week.

And U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a progressive Democrat from Ohio who made multiple runs for president of the U.S., was ousted from his Congressional seat by a moderate Democrat, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, in March. They had been redistricted to run against each other this year.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) currently has 73 voting U.S. House members, two non-voting House embers, and one U.S. senator, Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.

The CPC is likely to gain senators this year, as CPC members U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii are both running for open Senate seats.

The Progressive Caucus and Tea Party Caucus are currently about the same size.

However, the once powerful Blue Dog Coalition (BDC), a group of centrist Democrats in the U.S. House, is seeing its members dwindling.

The Blue Dog Coalition’s membership was nearly cut in half in the 2010 election, in which 28 out of 54 members were defeated or chose not to run again.

The group’s membership is now down to 27 with the resignation of Rep. Jane Harman, a centrist Democrat from California. Rep. Janice Hahn was elected to fill the vacancy, and Hahn is now a member of the CPC.

Several of the remaining BDC members have said they will not run again; others, like Atmire and Holden, have already been defeated in Primaries.

Meanwhile, Rep. John Barrow of Georgia, the last remaining white Democrat in the U.S. south, and a BDC moderate, has been targeted for defeat by Republicans this year.

David Swanson, an activist who has supported numerous progressive candidates for Congress in the past, says that while he sees increasing polarisation in the legislature, overall, he believes Congress is moving to the right.

“I buy the right-warding of Congress, not necessarily the left-warding of Congress,” Swanson told IPS.

“I’m thrilled to have Rand Paul putting locks on measures that would start wars with Iran, regardless of what ideologies that’s coming from,” he added.

“You see a handful of liberals taking positions against wars and presidential power abuses, but not enough to make a real difference,” he said.

And he said that, despite partisan gridlock on many issues such as the federal budget, he sees Congress largely working together.

“When it comes to increasing military spending every goddamn year, enlarged war powers, letting presidents make lists of who they want to murder, sanctions on Iran… refusing to raise the minimum wage or protect the rights to organise or clean out the money and undo Citizens United, there’s pretty large bipartisan agreement,” he said.

The landmark and controversial Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission overturned longstanding election finance laws and permitted unlimited spending by corporations in elections.