US Presidential Race

The U.S. presidential race has reached the point where there’s a high probability that Barack Obama’s election opponent has been determined. In the Republican primary elections held in 10 states on “Super Tuesday,” March 6, Mitt Romney won six times, Rick Santorum came out ahead in three, Newt Gingrich in one, and Ron Paul did not win any. By the end of the week, Romney added victories in the three overseas territories, while Santorum took one state, Kansas. In total, Romney so far has 453 delegates for the Republican National Convention, which is more than the number possessed by all his rivals.

Romney’s supporters are trying to convince his competitors to give up, but this has not happened yet. The other competitors have likely set their sights on the second prize, an invitation to become a vice-presidential candidate. Formally, this decision is at the complete discretion of the leading candidate.

Romney, who is a 65-year-old ex-governor of Massachusetts and a multimillionaire, is trying for a second time to get nominated as a U.S. presidential candidate. Previously, he was most frequently labeled as a moderate, but now Romney is working hard to prove that he is conservative.

This is the special characteristic of Republicans’ campaigns: They are guided by their electorate’s shift to the right in the last few years.

Another distinctive feature of the Republicans’ election campaigns is the negativity. The opponents persistently incriminate each other in being politically inconsistent and/or insincere. This is a consequence of their lack of constructive policy solutions in a difficult economic environment. Both of these features will inevitably affect the nature of the campaign’s final stage. The competition will likely get very tough.

Political analysts believe that in order to win over the undecided voters, Romney will move towards the center, and at the same time will be forced to compensate for this by inviting a conservative partner. The main weapon that the Republican candidate will use against Democrat Barack Obama is already known. It is a bulky book complied by experts with more than 500 pages of unfulfilled promises made by Obama to voters in the 2008 elections. The promises are about social and economic policy.

For now, foreign policy has not been one of the central themes of the election campaign. The two exceptions are issues related to Israel, which the Republican candidates fully support, and to Iran's nuclear program, which the candidates promise to stop by any means, including militarily.

Republicans have made a variety of critical assessments of Russia, which for now have not gone beyond pre-election rhetoric. Thus, Romney has questioned the need to "reset" bilateral relations, and pledged to rein in Russia so it would not limit the construction of U.S. missile defense. He would also like to provide fellowships for representatives of the Russian opposition to study in the U.S.

According to American experts, neither Romney nor other Republicans have been able to get an edge over Obama. The likelihood of Obama being re-elected is very high, and he has not reduced his activity as the head of the U.S. executive branch, including in the area of foreign policy. Significantly, the White House has recently confirmed its intention to further reduce its nuclear arsenals.

All this gives us hope that this year — the election year — will not be marked by a pause in the relations between our two countries. This is evidenced by an exchange of telegrams between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin when the latter was elected president of the Russian Federation. Both of them emphasized continuing on the "reset" path, and the development of mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and the United States.