Elect the USA

von Stefanie Proksch-Weilguni

The United States of America can definitely be declared one of the most powerful nations in the world, its influence on the economy as well as on political issues reaches far past the borders of its continent. That’s the reason why the president affects our lives in every action he takes, or in the case of the coming election, she takes.

The election of a president in America is far more complicated than that of Austria and can be broken down into four phases: the primaries, the national convention, the election campaign and the election.
From January to June the delegates are selected either through open primary elections, in which every registered voter is allowed to take part, closed primaries, which are reserved for members of the party or caucuses, which are open party, meetings. The purpose of the primaries is to choose the delegates of each party for the convention, where they nominate their final candidates. At the convention voters are supposed to vote for the candidate they chose during the primaries. Usually, the nominees are known before the actual convention which takes place in the summer before the elections.
Then comes the third phase, campaigning between the two nominated candidates of the Republican and Democratic Party. On November 4, 2008, the final election will take place. The president is elected by the electors; each state has as many electors as representatives in Congress. The candidate with the majority vote in any given state receives all the electoral votes of the state.
Hillary Rodham-Clinton and Barack Obama are the front runners of the Democratic Party for the 2008 election. The former First Lady, Clinton has already spent more time in the White House than all the other candidates combined. On the other hand, Obama has less experience and his supporters argue with hope what he might do. Hope is, in fact, the center of his campaign and also the title of his book The Audacity of Hope. His lack of experience aside, Obama has reached more  than any black politician before him. He has captured the support of black and white voters alike nationwide. On the other hand, Clinton would be the first woman in the White House and uses that to lure in women voters. She formed a “Women for Hillary 2008” network with weekly “Hillagrams”.
When it comes to the issue of Iraq, Clinton and Obama propose a withdrawal of troops, but their plans avoid fixed deadlines or goals. Like Obama, the Republican nominee Senator John McCain of Illinois speaks hopefully without very concrete plans. McCain’s major advantage is that opposed to all his rivals, in 2002 in the Senate he advocated President Bush’s idea of using force in Iraq. Obama said that he would have voted against it while Clinton tried to improve her stance on the issue when she said that if she had been the president in October of 2002 she would not have began the war. In fact, both Democrats are opposed to the idea of an increase in troops overseas and support withdrawal. The only frontrunner who advocates the idea of troop increase is McCain. McCain returned from Vietnam in 1973 as a shot down Navy Pilot and prisoner of war. He also ran for the Republican nomination in 2000 against George W. Bush and in 2002 he approved the war and still supports it. McCain is not against a timetable for troop withdrawal but closely associates the idea with adding troops.