Obama in Trouble

The unimaginable has occurred. For the first time since his mandate, and about 170 days into the election campaign, the charismatic Obama and his rival, Romney, are equal in the polls. In the United States polls are very frequent and diverse in results during election years. Half of them declare Romney will be the victor by a large margin.

Days ago, Obama stated - in a historic first for a president - that he now was in favor of same sex marriage. He announced this delicately because, although the number of Americans that do not oppose gay marriage has risen considerably, supporters are not yet the majority at 47 percent.

For many reasons the president was obligated to talk about the subject. As of now, Obama’s declaration hasn’t seemed to have paid out excessive dividends: 67 percent believe he only did it for political and electoral reasons, not because of his convictions. The number of those who say the decision will push them to not vote for him in November is somewhat higher than the number of those who assured pollsters that they will vote for him because of this decision. It is possible that Obama’s strategists estimate that the young voters Obama wants to mobilize to the polls in November will be more motivated by the announcement; youth are the part of the population in which that kind of marriage finds supporters.

On one hand, Obama’s progressive nature has prompted him to take a step that the left had asked for. In Hollywood, where Obama dined days ago with George Clooney to collect funding for his campaign, there was clear happiness for his position. The dinner collected about $18 million.

On the other hand, the subject in principle is not important in the electoral campaign at the moment. 62 percent of those polled believe the economy will be the decisive factor when choosing a candidate and only 7 percent agree that they will take into account the question of marriage mentioned.

Within its delicate time frame, the economy would give an advantage to Obama. Inflation in April was at its lowest since a year ago, gasoline decreased by 2.6 percent in the last month. In addition, unemployment hasn’t increased. Nevertheless, Obama’s adversaries -- with Romney as their leader -- want the debate to center on the economic situation and for such a debate to serve as a referendum about the Obama era, rather than focusing on the personality of the candidates. They know Obama’s politics on economy and health have huge detractors: His transcendental health reform, which expanded coverage to millions of people, now has only 39 percent approval. But the president still possesses a substantial personal acceptance index. The person is liked more than his policies.

On the foreign front, Iran and Afghanistan continue to occupy center stage. The president is attacked for being too “easygoing” about the nuclear issue in Iran. His critics say that while the United States and its European allies have shown their teeth to the ayatollah, at the same time, Iran was still working on its bomb and scouting places to hide it to abort an attack on Israel, and the Western powers have looked the other way.

Afghanistan raises all kinds of question marks. The first one is whether or not the Afghan army, created by NATO, will resist the shove from the Taliban once the coalition soldiers retire. In the past few days, it has been published that those Afghan soldiers that have received American training have attacked NATO forces on more than one occasion. It has been revealed that many American soldiers have died in those dangerous attacks.

A new problem rises amongst the members of NATO. It’s cruelly ironic: Washington has been frequently lambasted by the repeated usage of unmanned aircrafts (drones) to eliminate terrorists of Taliban groups. It was argued that no matter how efficient the planes were, the possibilities of making a mistake looking for the target were considerable. The criticism has been huge in Islamic countries. Now it was revealed that one of those very countries – Turkey – was recently alerted by a Yankee “drone” that had detected a suspicious group in the Iraq-Turkey border where the Kurd rebels move about. Turkey launched an attack with its planes shortly after the group was detected and produced more than 30 deaths. The supposed Kurd guerrilla group was comprised of dozens of smugglers that frequently cross the border with petroleum barrels from Iraq to Turkey and other products from the opposite direction.

The clamor in the zone has been deafening. The Americans have rushed to announce that they only provided information to an ally about a movement of caravans or groups in various zones but that they did not announce whether they were civilians, military or guerrillas. The decision to attack was made by its ally, Turkey. Presumably, the Americans, by the escalated criticism, will make it clear that in all places there are lethal mistakes, but the question of usage of the drones – which are becoming more and more sophisticated and which the United States claim serve to control conflicts in a more efficient manner -- is on the table.