Election 2012: Why Obama Is A Shoo-In

In the United States, politicians are almost always campaigning for election or re-election. It gives them very little time to focus on what should be the real business of government. Every two years American voters go to the polls to elect a Congress and part of the Senate, or, part of the Senate, a congress, and a President. In any case, because of the lack of  options, the US political pendulum swings in highly predicable ways.

In 2010, according to the own words of President Obama, the Democrats were “shellacked” by the GOP and their allies from the Tea Party. Democrats were wrongly blamed by part of the US electorate for the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash, despite the fact that eight years of mismanagement by the Bush administration provoked the global crisis still lingering now.

It is likely that the 2012 US elections will tell a different story. If, in 2010, some Americans bought the rhetoric painting President Obama as a “socialist”,  in 2011 this ludicrous notion has completely lost traction as people realize that President Obama has a lot more in common with Reagan than FDR in domestic policies. As far as foreign policy, President Obama is even more a “war president” than his predecessor. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still on going, and President Obama has added Pakistan and Libya to the endless wars of the empire.

The American Left Has Nowhere To Go

The small minority, within the Democratic party, which opposed the war mongering policies of the Obama administration, will not be heard; just like in 2008. If any challenge at all comes from this left-leaning, progressive portion of the US electorate, it will be buried by the blitzkrieg of the Obama campaign money machine. President Obama’s goal is to raise a record $ 1 billion for his re-election bid, and he is likely to meet his target. After all, President Obama is in bed with Wall Street, and the industrial-military complex, not to mentioned a sizable part of the so called “Hollywood left”.

The GOP Has No Charismatic Viable Candidate

Aside from the joke pseudo candidates, such as Donald Trump, the semi-viable options for Republican voters are not convincing at all. Newt Gingritch has managed to eliminate himself from the race, and, it seems, that, at this juncture, the most likely contender to finish ahead of the Republican pack is Mitt Romney. Romney has two major hurdles which he is very unlikely to overcome in a run against President Obama. First, he is view by the far-right of the Tea Party as “too liberal”, and therefore will not get their enthusiastic support. Second, Mitt Romney is a Mormon; which will prevent a large number of Christian fundamentalists from voting for him.

The Bin Laden Effect

Even though President Obama was elected in 2008 on the false premises of “hope and change”, when it comes to the implacable logic of maintaining the empire, change is out of the question for a vast majority of Americans. The assassination of Bin Laden gave President Obama a 6 percent boost in the poll, and it is likely that the effect will linger for a while. The ten year anniversary of 9/11/2001 is right around the corner, and the sitting president will remind Americans that he is the one that “got enemy number one.”

The killing of Bin Laden transformed the image of the Commander in Chief  from “relentless warrior”-winning a Nobel peace prize- to the one of  a ruthless fighter coming back home from the battle field with the head of his arch enemy. The “Hope and change” slogan was of course just a convenient gimmick to get elected. At large, Americans do not want change, as far as foreign policy is concerned, instead they just want to maintain the status quo of the empire, and President Obama is the right man for the interests of US imperialism.