In just a few short weeks Americans all over the world will be mailing in their ballots or heading to polls and it appears this will be a very close election. With polls in the swing states drawing ever closer it is anyone's guess who will win the all important states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Florida.
The two men running have very different stories and are very different people, but both are extremely compelling.
Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii to a single mother and an absent father. At the age of 10 his mother too abandoned him and he was raised the rest of his youth by his grandparents. As a young man of mixed race it always seemed a challenge for him to find an identity. It seems while he was in college at Columbia he decided that his fate didn't lie where he saw all his other contemporaries heading. He went to Chicago and took a low paying job as a community organizer there trying to assist impoverished families and schools. After a few years he headed to Law School at Harvard and became the first African American editor of the Law Review. He worked extremely well with the conservatives there and this gave him the belief that if well intentioned individuals sat down and intelligently discussed and debated then compromise could be reached on all manner of policies. After a difficult introduction to politics, he ran for US Senate in 2004 and gave the speech of his lifetime at the Democratic National Convention. When I saw this speech I was quite convinced that he would be President someday. He took his seemingly naive belief of compromise with him into the White House with him after being elected the first African American President in a country that was founded upon slavery. This belief in compromise failed for many reasons, but mostly because politicians aren't interested in passing good public policy, but winning.
Mitt Romney was born into a good hard working Mormon family of privilege and followed in his father's footsteps with having significant business success, then running a state and finally running for President. Romney was a maverick in his time at Bain Capital and not only created a fortune for his family, but a name for himself in the private equity world. In 2000 he came on board and saved the Salt Lake City games from scandal and disgrace before he ran for governor and won in Massachusetts mid-decade. In 2006 he was pro-choice, pro gay rights and passed Romney-care. This was his banner achievement in politics, passing a health care bill in Massachusetts that mandated all people must buy health insurance. Two years later he decided to run for the Republican nomination for President, but the aforementioned policies didn't warm him to Republican primary voters in Iowa, New Hampshire or any other state. Now in 2012, he has overcome that by altering his views on those policies and attempting to convince voters that he is the man to turn the flat economy around. It remains to be seen if he is given that chance.
My quick assessment: I think both men are good men, good fathers and good husbands. Barack Obama seems to have a drive to genuinely change the situation in our country for the better by sticking to policies that he has believed in for quite sometime. Mitt Romney appears to take a market approach, by trusting the people and the market to determine his policies.
We shall see which direction voters choose in a short time.
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