The US Mid-Terms.

On Tuesday (4/11/14) voters in the US will go to the polls to decide all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 33 of the 100 seats in the Senate which together make up Congress along with numerous local elections including for the Governors of 36 states.

None of these elections will in any way decide who gets to be US President and instead provide US voters with an opportunity to choose who is best to represent them both at the state level and who is best to represent the interests of their state within the federal government. Therefore the main consideration for any voter must be the character of the individual candidates and where they stand on local issues rather then the successes and failures of the current President and the party they represent. That said though part of the role of Congress is to provide a check on the power of the President so how the President is doing always has to be a consideration in Congressional elections.

This is particularly true this time around because the current President Barack Obama has quite clearly built his entire program for 2014 around helping his Democrat Party secure their majority in the Senate and win a majority in the House. This effort has focused on presenting a series of populist but often quite dangerous policies to Congress in the hope that the Republicans will reject them. That was intended to allow Obama to claim that everything would be wonderful in America if only the Democrats controlled Congress. So in no particular order we have had;

Immigration Reform; As I've said on many occasions Obama's plan to make it easier for illegal immigrants to become US citizens represents vote rigging on absolutely epic scale. The Democrat's calculation has been that not only will all the new voters this idea creates owe a debt to the Democrat Party that they will repay by voting for them but also their friends, family members and neighbours will also vote Democrat out of gratitude. Unfortunately for a party that is supposed to represent the working class the Democrats have found it easy to ignore the simple fact that large numbers of immigrants drives down wages and living standards making life even tougher for the poor and the lower middle classes. Also in their rush to stuff the ballot boxes the Democrats didn't spend a moment thinking through the effects of announcing as loudly and frequently as possible that they intended to let illegal immigrants become citizens. This created a massive flood of illegal immigrants - particularly children - across the US' southern border creating what has been - in Obama's own words - "A humanitarian crisis."

The Race Card; This hasn't been officially placed before Congress. However the sub-text of the immigration debate has always been that the Republicans aren't blocking Obama's immigration reforms because they're concerned about the living standards of American workers, the inhumane conditions that illegal immigrants suffer, the integrity of US democracy or even the wider stability of South American nations. No instead the Republicans have only been blocking the immigration reforms of the first black President because they're all racists. This issue really came to the fore during the aftermath of the Micheal Brown shooting. Although it isn't something to be celebrated everyone really knows that Brown's actions more then anything else led to his death in what was a clean police shooting. The Obama administration however saw an opportunity to mobilise the black vote so sent representatives to the funeral. Eric Holder - Obama's appointment as Attorney General - took things even further though by opening an unwarranted civil rights investigation making sure that the Grand Jury was prevented from returning its verdict meaning that we cannot officially say that it was a clean shooting until after the mid-terms. This attempt to pervert the course of justice in order to win votes from ethnic minorities has been an example of racist politics at its worst.

The Minimum Wage; The Obama administration decided that the best way to win votes is simply to offer voters a bribe by promising to raise the minimum wage only to be thwarted by those dastardly Republicans in Congress. This was actually a debate that was played out in miniature during the UK's recent party conference season. The leader of the Labour Party Ed Miliband made raising the minimum wage the centre piece of his speech. Officially this was because he had been so moved by the plight of workers he'd met in a branch of Burger King and nothing to do with the fact the Labour Party had recently hired Obama's campaign manager David Axelrod. In response the Labour Party saw a small bounce in the polls for a week until the leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron made raising the tax threshold (cutting income tax) the centre piece of his conference speech. This completely demolished the Labour Party by making the point that if you raise the minimum wage without raising the tax threshold you are not helping workers. Instead you are levying a stealth tax on employers because most of the extra money they're being forced to pay out ends up with the government not their employees.

Women's Rights;  Both the proposed Equal Pay Act and the sub-text of the minimum wage debate have been attempts to portray Obama as a champion of women who is prepared to fight for them in the evil Republicans "War on Women." Meanwhile despite the fact that everybody lost interest a long time ago a lot of effort is still going into forcing Rihanna into a 'marriage' with Chris Brown who is still mysteriously not in prison. In the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) Obama seems happy to let a group famed for rape and sexual slavery take over the city of Kobane where not only are most of the Kurdish fighters defending the city women but the highly successful overall commander is also a woman. As such I think the only women's issue that Obama and the Democrats are truly concerned about is who they vote for.

Amid this laser focus on winning control of Congress the Obama administration has significantly neglected a host of important domestic issues. For example Obama's response to the humanitarian crisis of illegal immigrants that he'd helped create was not to try and solve it but to bash Texas' Republican Governor. Similarly when dealing with the quarantine of health care workers who have treated Ebola patients Obama's priority has seemed less about making sure that the virus doesn't spread within the US and more about making New Jersey's Republican Governor look bad.

One area where Obama seems to have seen fit to abandon the responsibilities of the President's office enitrely because there simply aren't enough votes in it has been foreign policy.

Obama's first huge mistake was to withdraw US troops from Iraq at the end of 2012. I think we can all agree at this point that it was far, far too soon to do that. However Obama wanted to campaign in 2012 as "The President Who Ended the War!" so the troops were withdrawn, consequences be damned.

The second huge mistake Obama made was to make it clear to everyone that he has absolutely no interest in foreign policy whatsoever. This led to the nastier nations across the World who had previously been reigned in by US influence to realise they could whatever the hell they liked. So not only did nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar poured terrorists and weapons into countries like Libya and Syria but even previously small and insignificant nations and leaders such as Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have decided that the US is simply there to do their bidding. With Libya effectively becoming a failed state and ISIL now in control of large parts of Syria and Iraq amid hundreds of thousands of deaths it should be clear what a disaster this has been.

Having been finally been forced by public outrage to take some action Obama's response to ISIL has been equally disastrous. Nearly three months after the US started bombing ISIL at a cost of around USD8million per day and at least 2 American lives we are still not closer to stopping ISIL from being able to take over fresh territory let alone forcing them from the territory they hold. With every passing day and delay it seems that it is only going to get harder to achieve Obama's stated goal of "degrading and destroying ISIL."

Therefore I think that US voters will actually be doing America and the World a favour by making sure that not only do the Democrats fail to win the House but they also lose the Senate. After all once he has been made a lame duck President who cannot pass domestic legislation Obama will have no option other then to focus all his attentions on foreign policy.

Although Obama still clearly hasn't realised it yet foreign policy is hugely important to US domestic interests because to paraphrase Napoleon; "The King who stays within his castle has already been defeated."


18:20 on 2/11/14 (UK date).