Ayoon Wa Azan (congratulations to Barack Obama)

Barack Obama’s reelection campaign is four years old. Indeed, since he won the election in 2008, every single decision, stance or speech he made, and all the promises he put forward, whether he delivered on them or not, was aimed at winning over voters on the first Tuesday of this month. I want to make a quick point about the results. Obama seems to have won the coastal states, where the population is better educated, has a higher income and is more exposed to the outside world. He also won all the states of the north-east, or what they call New England, where the United States first began. Meanwhile, Romney won the inner states, where people are less educated and have lower incomes. Then from our countries all the way to theirs, women have proven to be the smarter sex, and voted for Obama with a majority of 55 percent against 44 percent that voted for Romney, while men chose Romney with a majority of 52 percent against 45 percent for Obama. Now that the president has achieved what he wanted, and will continue to hold the title of “the leader of the Free World” until 2016, we are eagerly waiting to see the real Obama, and not the Obama who was a hostage to the elections. Obama succeeded in instating social welfare benefits for the poor, who account for nearly 50 million Americans, because he believed this guaranteed that they would vote for him. The incumbent president also fought al-Qaeda relentlessly, first because it is a terrorist organization, and second, because disseminating this group was a popular American demand. Ultimately, Obama succeeded where George W. Bush had failed, and took out Osama bin Laden. But the Democratic president had also pledged to shut down Guantanamo, and did not do so, perhaps to avoid entering into endless squabbles with the Republican Party, which may accuse him of trying to give amnesty to terrorists. Barack Obama delivered on his promise to pull out U.S. troops from Iraq, however. Although he would have preferred for 5 to 10 thousand soldiers to stay behind, he could not reach a deal with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that would give U.S. troops immunity from local laws. Obama increased the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan although he had promised to withdraw them. A new date has been set for a withdrawal in 2014, and so we shall wait and see whether this will happen. The president failed to get the country out of the U.S. and global economic crisis unleashed by his predecessor Bush. But it is the U.S. Congress that should be blamed for this, as the House is dominated by the Republicans. This is not just my opinion, but is a fact, as was documented by Bob Woodward in his most recent book The Price of Politics. For Arabs and Muslims, the biggest failure of the Obama administration in the past four years was that he did not deliver on the promises he made in his famous speech in Cairo in 2009, and then again at the United Nations where, in 2010, I heard him say that he wanted to see Palestine occupy a member seat at the General Assembly the following year. Instead, I saw him in 2011 spearheading the campaign against Palestinian UN membership, and heard him again this year relegate the Palestinian question to one single sentence in his speech. Well, Barack Obama has achieved what he wanted, and did not become another Jimmy Carter. So I wait to see a different Obama in his second term, and I venture to say that he will not disappoint a second time. If he lives and we live, then I shall return, in this column, in 2016 to hold him to account and myself. What I can say with confidence today is that Barack Obama as president is a thousand times better than the Republican candidate Mitt Romney. The latter is a businessman before being a politician, and then is a politician without any policies. He is also known to be the ally of war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, and his election team included hardline neoconservatives. Nevertheless, when Romney found that most voters are inclined to be centrist, he moved to the center. Romney’s campaign was lying from the outset. Neil Newhouse, a pollster for Mitt Romney, explicitly stated that they were not going to let the facts dictate his campaign. The lying thus went on until the final day of the campaigning, when the Romney campaign ran an ad accusing Obama of undermining social welfare benefits and of having outsourced Chrysler’s production to China. This prompted fact checkers in the Washington Post to award him a score of “four Pinocchios”, or the highest score for lying, inspired by the legend of the boy Pinocchio whose nose would grow longer each time he lied. Lies succeeded in putting George W. Bush back in the White House in 2004, after a smear campaign against his rival John Kerry. Kerry was a hero of the Vietnam War, and was awarded many medals of honor, and yet, the Bush campaign claimed that he was a coward who betrayed his fellow soldiers as he ran away in a swift boat. In fact, such dishonest accusations ultimately made their way to the English-language dictionary with the word ‘swiftboating’, in the sense of falsely accusing a political rival and deliberately tarnishing his reputation. The major U.S. newspaper themselves ultimately became fearful of a Romney presidency, with the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Lost Angeles Times each endorsing Obama. In the end, it seems that the liberal leanings of these papers overcame the pro-Israeli attitudes of their op-ed sections. Congratulations to Barack Obama, and I wait with the whole world to see the real Obama in his second term.  -- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.