Uphill Struggle

After a checkered campaign, Mitt Romney managed to secure the delegates he needed to become his party’s candidate for the U.S. presidency. The nomination will be announced at the Republican National Convention in Florida in August. Romney will attempt to fulfill the Republican leadership’s promise to prevent the reelection of Barack Obama. To that end, the Republicans have made use of every tactic available to them, some of which are barely legitimate, frequently going too far in the use of media in order to achieve their goal.

Perhaps the most controversial tactic has been their dogged obstruction of measures designed for a more rapid exit from the economic crisis that Obama inherited from his predecessor. Among the victims of this are millions of workers who lost their jobs after the crisis. Romney has taken advantage of this situation, criticizing the president for his inability to solve the country’s economic problems, unemployment among them. What he has not said is that his own party members in Congress are the ones who have stood in the way of economic recovery, time and again voting against recovery programs proposed by Obama’s administration. The conclusion drawn by 50 percent of the population is that the president is solely responsible for unemployment. The latest opinion polls show the president and his Republican rival in an almost dead heat on the question of who is the most able to solve the country’s economic problems.

There are still five months to go before the elections, and anything could happen. The only thing that can be said for sure is that the campaign will be long and very probably plagued with attacks, most of which will have no factual basis. An example is the recent event organized by Donald Trump, which raised $2 million for Romney’s campaign. For the umpteenth time, the organizer raised doubts over the president’s nationality and demanded that Obama prove his status as a U.S. citizen by releasing his birth certificate.* As well as being dirty, the campaign seems set to be the most expensive in American history. The Washington Post reported that, in just nine states, candidate support committees spent $87 million on television adverts, an unprecedented sum for the electoral process.

From now on, Obama must act decisively to hold off the onslaught that the Republican Party has launched on all fronts. Once again it looks as if the independent voters will be the ones to decide the outcome of the election, and Obama must convince them that not only is his government not directly responsible for the slow economic recovery, but also – and this could prove more difficult – that he has not been able to fulfill his electoral promises because of the Republican leadership’s obstructions.

* In fact, Obama released his long-form birth certificate last year, but since then, Trump and the birther movement have been calling into question the authenticity of the document.