Obama and Romney

The presidential election campaign is focused on the two candidates … with the Supreme Court’s permission.

The true campaign for the November presidential election has just begun. Obama has started to plainly criticize Mitt Romney; the latter has started to obtain good results from his attacks to the president in the three primaries of Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C. In fact, the target of his attacks is not his rivals within the Republican Party but Obama himself. However, the institution that will certainly have more influence in these elections does not have a vote but, rather, a ruling. In June, the Supreme Court will issue a statement about the health care law, which has become Obama’s banner. If the judges bring in a ruling against it, this would present a torpedo in the waterline of the current president’s campaign.

In fact, people are paying more attention to the Supreme Court’s hearing on the topic than they are to the primaries. The central aspect of the hearings concern whether or not the government can force people without private medical insurance to sign up for it. Obama, who has spoken in public about this for the first time, thinks there is a “human element” in this law, and 30 million citizens without medical coverage can benefit from it. He also states that the Supreme Court cannot overturn a law “passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

The second issue of the campaign is the increasing economic inequality in American society. This goes back a long way, but in the solution to the crisis, the wealthy are those who are taking advantage of the recovery of growth experienced during the last two years. Among the wealthy, something that can become his weakness, we can find Mitt Romney, former entrepreneur and main Republican candidate today.

Thanks to his right-wing speech, Romney has managed to attract some of Rick Santorum’s followers from the radical tea party, comprised the most conservative voters, as well as some evangelical Christians. Nonetheless, he does not have 652 delegates of the necessary 1,144 to ensure the Republican nomination in August (20 primaries are still to come). Romney has become the true Republican candidate, but at a price of a radicalization in his speech that, at the moment, clears the center for Obama. In surveys, the distance between the two of them is of four points in favor of the president. The situation can still change, except for the conviction that this election is just a matter of the two of them and the Supreme Court.