Barack Obama

By Alan Fisher in Americas on January 27th, 2012
Republican presidential candidate Gingrich, left, reaches to shake hands with fellow candidate Romney [Reuters]

There have been 19 televised Republican debates. They have been boring in parts, and repetitive, with the same old arguments and lines trotted out again and again. But they have been hugely significant in shaping the battle for the nomination.

Most people don't follow the day to day movements of every campaign, and so the debates become the touchstone, the place where people tune in, sit back and make their judgements. Here strengths and weaknesses are exposed and campaigns are strengthened or diminished as a result.

Texas Governor Rick Perry was a Republican front-runner, a favourite with the right of the party and a good campaigner. But his candidacy unravelled in 53 seconds during a debate where he stammered and stumbled as he tried to recall the third government department he would close down. 

By Al Jazeera Staff in Americas on January 26th, 2012
Four Republican presidential candidates are facing off in their 19th debate [EPA]

Our producer in Florida, Roza Kazan, keeps you up to date with the latest from the debate and ensuing reactions.

11:25pm: Jennifer S Korn, the Executive Director of the Hispanic Leadership Network told Al Jazeera that she too thinks the economy remains very important to Latino voters. “It's the number one issue, whether you are Hispanic or not,” Korn said. 

She said illegal immigration is a “huge problem” for the US and won't just go away. But the way to solve it, she said, is to solve the problems of legal immigration in order to “eliminate” illegal immigration. “Most people would love to come to work here in a legal way, but right now it practically does not exist," Korn said. 

By Sam Bollier in Americas on January 24th, 2012
Obama's State of the Union address is expected to focus on the economy [Reuters]

Tonight at 9 PM, US President Barack Obama will deliver the annual State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress. He's expected to focus on the economy, proposing tax reform that would require the very rich to pay more taxes; initiatives that would create more manufacturing jobs in the US; and changes to the troubled residential mortgage market.

Because 2012 is also an election year, the address will also likely double as a campaign speech. Expect Obama to draw sharp contrasts between himself and Republican policies.

After the speech, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels will deliver the Republican Party's response.

10:55 PM: Cain calls on Obama to "stop the class warfare" and - vaguely - to have Obama's surrogates stop "the racial innuendos".

By Alan Fisher in Americas on January 23rd, 2012
Gingrich has proclaimed himself the 'best debater' of the GOP candidates [Reuters]

Newt Gingrich likes to talk. He's a smart guy - a professor of American history and a former speaker of the House of Representatives. It's his love of debates that has thrown him to the front of the field of candidates hoping to secure the Republican presidential nomination.

He gives emphatic answers. He makes promises. He rightly addresses the format of the debates when he suggests that some of the issues raised, such as the economy or US relations with Pakistan, can't be summed up in a one-minute response and a 30-second rebuttal: that the world is slightly more complicated than that.

His message that Washington is broken, President Obama is awful and the "liberal media" is trying to alter America, resonates with Republican voters. Gingrich appears to have an intellectual depth missing from some of the other contenders.

By Alan Fisher in Americas on January 18th, 2012
Photo by AFP

Some presidential election campaigns will end here in South Carolina.

The candidate or candidates will come to the realisation that they cannot win the Republican nomination, that their vision of America has not been accepted by the majority, and that despite the hopes and dreams, the hands shaken and the interviews given, that it is finally over.

Jon Huntsman has already left the field, lacking money and supporters, his “ticket out of New Hampshire" not even good for a week.

To accept the thinking of the Mitt Romney campaign, then the contest is over.

He has done what no other Republican challenger has, and that's win the first two nomination contests, in Iowa and New Hampshire. And they argue, victory in South Carolina on Saturday - which has picked the winner in every contest since 1980 - will make him the presumptive nominee for his party. They are attempting to build an aura of inevitability.

The conservatives in his party don't like him.

By Alan Fisher in Americas on January 5th, 2012
AFP photo

It was just before two in the morning when the head of Iowa's Republican Party walked onto the stage in front of the thinning ranks of journalists in the Polk Convention Centre in Des Moines to announce the result of the state's caucus.
 
After a record turnout of more than 122, 000, the former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, topped the poll by just eight votes.

But even though he finished first, the big winner on the night was the new standard bearer for the right of Republican Party, former Pennsylvania senator, Rick Santorum.
 
And that perhaps is an indication of the battle America's Grand Old Party has been having with itself over the past two years.

It believes Barack Obama is vulnerable and they could easily consign him to the history books as a one-term president, but they don't know what face to present to the wider American public.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on January 2nd, 2012
Hi, old friend! Obama and Rousseff in Brasilia in March. [Roberto Stuckert Filho/PR]

In one of her last official appearances of 2011, on December 22, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, arrived in a sweltering gymnasium in downtown Sao Paulo to give a speech to a few hundred working-class social activists.

In her speech, she mentioned “Lula” more than 10 times.

At one point the audience briefly broke into chants of “Lula, Lula, Lula!”

Lula wasn’t even present.

“Lula” is Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the wildly popular and charismatic former president of this country.

This is the man who in 2009 told a ballroom of CEOs at a regional World Economic Forum meeting in Rio de Janeiro he was going to scrap the speech his advisors had prepared and instead gave a blistering and empassioned critique of how the rich, developed nations were resonsible for the global economic mess and it was poor all over the world paying the price.

By Alan Fisher in Americas on December 29th, 2011

File 57156
Reuters photo

It is just six days to the Iowa caucus, the first real test of the seven Republicans hoping to win their party’s presidential nomination for the 2012 election.

Karl Rove, the man who masterminded George Bush’s election victories, has described the current battle for the heart of the Republican party as “the most unpredictable, rapidly shifting, and often downright inexplicable primary race I’ve ever witnessed”. 

By Alan Fisher in Americas on December 26th, 2011
Photo by Reuters

Eight days away from the first true test of the Republican presidential hopefuls brings a new poll with a new leader.

By Patty Culhane in Americas on November 15th, 2011
[GALLO/GETTY]

I know why economic summits are always held in beautiful tourist towns. If not, no one from the media would want to go.

When I was told about the assignment to Honolulu, Hawaii to cover the Asian Pacific Economic Conference (APEC), my colleagues immediately expressed jealousy, even mild disdain for my good fortune. Here is the secret though; no one likes to cover these things. Very little news is made, the limited availability you're given to talk to leaders usually results in the same scripted sound bites. But the biggest reason by far is that Free Trade Agreements are incredibly hard to understand and even tougher to explain on television.

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