Obama’s Campaign: Some Good News, Some Bad News – OpEd

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By Andrei Ptashnikov

The beginning of this week saw both bad and good news for US President Barack Obama who is seeking a second term.

Let’s start with the good news. According to the latest opinion poll, 51 percent of the respondents signaled their readiness to support Obama. This means that he would certainly get the better of his main rival and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney of the Republican Party if the presidential elections were held now rather than in the fall. As for Romney, he is currently supported by 45 percent of the voters, the poll revealed.

That Barack Obama’s approval ratings are now on the increase can be attributed to the fact that unemployment rate in the United States amounted to 8,5 percent in January versus almost 10 percent late last year. This indicates a certain uptick in the US economy which Obama can’t help but hail. In an interview with the NBC he said that he deserved re-election because the national unemployment rate had been reduced drastically since 2005. “But we’re not done yet,” Obama added.

“I deserve a second term, but we’re not done. We created 3.7 million jobs over the last 23 months. We created the most jobs since 2005… but we’re not finished.”

If this tendency persists, Obama’s re-election is completely feasible, our political commentator says.

As far as bad news is concerned, it is all about Obama’s re-election campaign receiving 200,000 dollars in donations collected by the family of Juan Cardona, a fugitive casino magnate linked to drug trafficking and corruption in Mexico who has been seeking a pardon, according to the New York Times. On Monday, the newspaper reported that more than a million Americans had already made contribution to the Obama campaign and that Cardona’s American relatives had also donated in an attempt to make the prosecutors to drop the Cardona case.

Obama’s campaign team said on Tuesday that it has decided to return the money collected by Cardona’s family members which our commentator says is only natural, given Obama’s fear to tarnish his political image now that his popularity ratings are on the rise. In any case, the incident has already been made public and its imminent repercussions will almost certainly help Obama’s rivals capitalize on the scandal.

VOR

VOR, or the Voice of Russia, was the Russian government's international radio broadcasting service from 1993 until 2014, when it was reorganised as Radio Sputnik.

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