The 2012 Presidential Campaign

The 2012 Presidential campaign will be very interesting to watch. It will clearly be very different from 2008 for obvious reasons.

First, President Obama will be unable to focus his campaign on being the anti-Bush. This will rob him of his major, and one might say his principal, 2008 message. President Obama will have his own record to defend. Things can no longer be blamed on George W.

Second, President Obama will be unable to campaign on a "Change You Can Believe In" theme. No-one will be buying that. The past three years have been more like "business as usual" for US politics; arguably even worse than usual.

Third, there will be a lot of 2008 campaign promises not kept which will be targets for opponents. For example, not only is Guantanamo not closed. but military trials have been supported by the Administration. Promises of transparency in legislation have not been kept. A lot of Bush era foreign policies have been followed. I am sure opponents, both on the left and the right, will be able to come up with a long list of broken promises.

Fourth, the President seems to have lost the "far" left. Calls for his impeachment by Democrats and liberal supporters regarding his Libya intervention are really quite amazing. Obama's weak defense of the treatment of Private Manning while in detention has drawn the wrath of human rights groups and liberals. The President strangely enough now seems to appeal more to soft conservatives than to liberals.

Fifth, the world has not gone well. Peace in the Middle East between the Israelis and Palestinians seems to be further away now than ever. The turmoil in the Arab world itself, involving the attempted overthrow of American friendly regimes, has caught the President off guard. Talking with one's enemies, like Iran's Ahmadenijad, has not happened and is not going to happen. The US unemployment rate is still very high, housing sales have slumped terribly, the deficit has ballooned. Through this all, President Obama has seemed strangely absent.

The one strong card the President has of course is that a Republican must emerge who can beat him. Whether this will happen remains to be seen. One thing is for sure, however. The 2012 Presidential campaign will be a lot different than the last one.