Will Obama get reelected?

Por: Luisa Fernanda Calderón Herrera
Licenciatura en Relaciones Internacionales UDLAP

Trough the history of the United States we have saw that when the country incurs in economic crisis or when the president doesn’t show a firm hand in relation to foreign affairs, it’s almost for sure that he won’t get reelected, we can assume this thanks to the previous experiences (governments) of the president Jimmy Carter and president George H. W. Bush. The governments of both presidents experimented economic crisis and in the special case of the Carter’s government, the president was well respected in the international field but even so he was consider inside his country as a soft politician and as a traitor to the American interests, because he gave back the Canal of Panama to Panama for example, between other measures.

Comparing this facts with the situation today we might found some similarities and the most obvious one is the fact that the Obama’s governments faces also an economic crisis but he does differ in one aspect, his foreign policy has been sawn as a hard one against terrorism, which might help him out in the next elections. Obama’s government find out and killed Osama bin Laden and more recently Anwar al-Awlaki, making his antiterrorism operations a huge success.

Even thought Obama’s government has achieved some goals as providing $12.2 billion in new funding for the individuals with disabilities through the American Recovery and Investment Act or expanding the Nurse-Family Partnership to all low-income first-time mothers, returned the rights of his citizens to visit and assist their families in Cuba or established the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, he has been appointed and criticized firmly by the Congress more specifically by the republicans and actually the Congress has made it really difficult for Obama to pass their bills or the ones he supported, many of them are still in review as the Stop Fraud Act, the Healthy Communities Act, between others and the most renounced one lately is his job bill, a really polemical one.

Representatives of the Congress, specially Republicans have argue that Obama’s job bill has good intentions and that they can identify objectives in common but that they do not agree in some clauses or aspects with the process to achieve those objectives and as the Congress was firm and avoiding some presidential bills before, known the president manifests a rigid and inflexible position concerning his bill, he said that he won’t let amendments to be done and hasn’t really welcomed the intentions of the republicans to negotiate and talk about some other procedures to obtain the same results.

It is clear that the Republicans want to continue pointing out this job bill, to let the population know how they are really willing to work with the president but how he maintains an inflexible position and in the mean time, the president tries to call the attention to social and national security issues to distract the audience, some examples might be abortion, gay rights and environmental situations and his war against terrorism that from the ones mentioned before, might be the most successful one. So it’s really difficult to predict if he will maintain the presidency but for sure it won’t be easy for him to stay in power, when we have seen that when economic crisis appeared presidents were not candidates for reelection and when the opposition doesn’t really allows you to work.