US President Barack Obama spent Monday holed up at the White House, bracing himself for what polls suggest will be the worst Democratic election results for a generation, a shift that could leave Washington gridlocked.
Obama opted against a final day on the campaign trail, canceled all public engagements and held private meetings with senior White House advisers. Top of their agenda was drawing up a strategy for how to cope with a post-election landscape in which Republicans are predicted to control at least one chamber of the bicameral US Congress.
“There are only two outcomes: a substantial Republican wave or an enormous Republican wave,” said Larry Sabato, director of University of Virginia’s center for politics and one of the most respected analysts in the US.
Democratic and Republican organizers and activists spent Monday in a last frantic effort to squeeze out as many voters as possible, as a Gallup poll put the Republicans on 55 percent to the Democrats’ 40 percent, a margin not seen since the 1970s.
Voters, more than 13 million of whom have already taken advantage of early polling, were to yesterday decide the fate of all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 37 in the 100-member Senate and 37 state governorships.
Obama’s retreat into the White House comes at the end of a lackluster campaign in which he has appeared tired and his speeches have lacked the fire of the 2008 White House run. Fifty-two percent of the public do not believe Obama will win re-election in 2012, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published yesterday. Only 35 percent said he would win.
The same poll, surveying likely voters, gave the Republicans a smaller lead than Gallup — 50 percent to 44 percent — but that would still give the Republicans 52 gains in the House and a 27-seat majority.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the president’s schedule of closed meetings on Monday included taping radio interviews for use on election day throughout the country, and he planned to spend part of the evening trying to boost the morale of party organizers in key battleground states.
Republicans admit publicly that while the Democrats are likely to be punished across the US, it would be a mistake to see victory as an endorsement for the Republicans.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, interviewed on ABC, said: “I think there is a degree of truth to that. I think the American people right now are much more skeptical of the direction the president and Mrs Pelosi [Democratic US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi] and Mr Reid [Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] are taking the country, but they also have some concerns about the direction that Republicans will then lead when we take control of the Congress in 2011.”
The Republicans will have to decide whether to compromise with Obama in getting some legislation through or opt for all-out combat. A large corps of Republicans backed by the grassroots Tea Party movement are expected to win seats in the House and Senate and will push for non-cooperation with the White House.
CHIP WAR: The new restrictions are expected to cut off China’s access to Taiwan’s technologies, materials and equipment essential to building AI semiconductors Taiwan has blacklisted Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯), dealing another major blow to the two companies spearheading China’s efforts to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chip technologies. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’ International Trade Administration has included Huawei, SMIC and several of their subsidiaries in an update of its so-called strategic high-tech commodities entity list, the latest version on its Web site showed on Saturday. It did not publicly announce the change. Other entities on the list include organizations such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as companies in China, Iran and elsewhere. Local companies need
CRITICISM: It is generally accepted that the Straits Forum is a CCP ‘united front’ platform, and anyone attending should maintain Taiwan’s dignity, the council said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it deeply regrets that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) echoed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China” principle and “united front” tactics by telling the Straits Forum that Taiwanese yearn for both sides of the Taiwan Strait to move toward “peace” and “integration.” The 17th annual Straits Forum yesterday opened in Xiamen, China, and while the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) local government heads were absent for the first time in 17 years, Ma attended the forum as “former KMT chairperson” and met with Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Huning (王滬寧). Wang
CROSS-STRAIT: The MAC said it barred the Chinese officials from attending an event, because they failed to provide guarantees that Taiwan would be treated with respect The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Friday night defended its decision to bar Chinese officials and tourism representatives from attending a tourism event in Taipei next month, citing the unsafe conditions for Taiwanese in China. The Taipei International Summer Travel Expo, organized by the Taiwan Tourism Exchange Association, is to run from July 18 to 21. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokeswoman Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮) on Friday said that representatives from China’s travel industry were excluded from the expo. The Democratic Progressive Party government is obstructing cross-strait tourism exchange in a vain attempt to ignore the mainstream support for peaceful development
DEFENSE: The US would assist Taiwan in developing a new command and control system, and it would be based on the US-made Link-22, a senior official said The Ministry of National Defense is to propose a special budget to replace the military’s currently fielded command and control system, bolster defensive resilience and acquire more attack drones, a senior defense official said yesterday. The budget would be presented to the legislature in August, the source said on condition of anonymity. Taiwan’s decade-old Syun An (迅安, “Swift Security”) command and control system is a derivative of Lockheed Martin’s Link-16 developed under Washington’s auspices, they said. The Syun An system is difficult to operate, increasingly obsolete and has unresolved problems related to integrating disparate tactical data across the three branches of the military,
RSS