In less than two weeks, Americans will either elect a new president, or give the incumbent a second term.
In following the latest polls, one can observe that since the first debate on Oct. 3, support among likely voters across the country has shifted in favour of Mitt Romney.
The Gallup and Rasmussen polls have indicated Romney presently leads President Barack Obama nationally, and in the battleground states where the election will be decided, either Romney has pulled even with Obama or tending to take the lead. More importantly, Romney is ahead by double-digits over Obama among independent voters, and the gender gap in support of the incumbent has vanished.
Democrats are pretty much in a state of panic. The Obama administration and the campaign team for the president’s re-election appear to be a in a firefight of their own making and, likely for the first time, they are awakening to the realization that this election is theirs to lose.
What happened? The tide that brought the Republicans roaring back in the 2010 mid-term election to take control of the House in the U.S. Congress has not ebbed in American politics. This tide will likely take Romney into the White House.
In the lead-up to the 2010 election, an increasing number of Americans began to slowly recognize that Obama was not the same individual they voted for in 2008. He appeared to be ideologically rigid, fiscally imprudent, bent upon spending as he recklessly added to the national debt already perilously high, and as a man of the left disdainful of his opponents.
The 2010 election was a referendum on the Obama administration’s inept handling of the economy. Yet Obama remained heedless of the Republican majority in the House, failed repeatedly to submit the annual budget or negotiate any compromise on spending. The economy continued to suffer, jobs vanished, unemployment figures remained unacceptably high, and the recovery has been anemic.
During the 2008 primary season, I wrote about candidate Obama as the Harold Hill of American politics. Harold Hill in the well-loved musical play The Music Man is a likeable flim-flam artist out to hustle the good simple folks of River City, Iowa, and they fall for him.
A significant number of Americans fell for candidate Obama in 2008, seduced by his charm and his slogans of hope and change.
But by 2010, as the mid-term election results showed, enough Americans realized their own responsibility in being misled. Then came the October surprise in September as Americans watched the Obama administration engage in lies and deceptions in informing them about the deaths of four Americans, including the ambassador, in Benghazi, Libya, at the hands of al-Qaida-affiliated terrorists.
Thomas Sowell, the highly respected conservative economist and American of colour at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, wrote recently, “The full story of what happened in Libya, down to the last detail, may never be known. But, as someone once said, you don’t need to eat a whole egg to know that it is rotten.”
This sense of wrong surrounding the administration, and its failed attempt to depict Romney as a heartless plutocrat, not surprisingly might make Barack Hussein Obama a one-term president.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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