“America is back,” President Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union address. That sounds muscular, very Schwarzenegger-sque. But America’s new avatar is a little different from old Uncle Sam. In 2009 in his first State of the Union, President Barack Obama said “We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before … It is time for America to lead again.” What a difference one term in office makes.

Mitt Romney made his first attempts to gain critical support from Latino voters this month, but failed to confront his own negative record on issues of high priority to Latino voters. During a primary race stop in New Hampshire Jan. 9, he spoke of the need to "convince more Latino Americans to vote Republican" if the GOP wants to be competitive in November against the Democrats and Barack Obama, who is already campaigning for re-election.

A long and tortuous road it has certainly been for the "Newt 2012" campaign for the Republican nomination. But the former Speaker of the House has proven a renegade in both political form and function, blazing a campaign trail every bit as erratic and full of gambits as his politics and incendiary rhetoric. 

It’s full-tilt political boogie in the United States and Mexico. Media in both nations are saturated with interviews, profiles and satires of the candidates. Cable blasts virtually nonstop news of the Republican primaries and the ones for president and Mexico City mayor south of the border. In 2012 the neighboring countries will experience national, local and state elections in extraordinary times. In the year 2000, the last time major U.S. and Mexican elections coincided, the results led to jarring and even unimaginable events in both countries.

The most bizarre thing about the American presidential election is that everyone who wants to move into the White House spends all their time trying to emphasize how they don’t really belong there. It is probably the only job in the world where prior experience is actually viewed as something of a liability.

After a pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, spent nearly $3 million on attack ads in Iowa targeting Newt Gingrich, his lead in the state swiftly plummeted. But a new pro-Obama super PAC, 1911 United, has a different strategy in mind: to mobilize an "army of Obama supporters."

From New America Media: Things got worse for GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul when his rival Newt Gingrich recently called him out for purportedly using racially inflammatory language in official fundraising newsletters during the 1990s. The newsletters in question brought in a considerable haul of cash for Paul, a longtime politician and presidential candidate. His half-baked racial scribbles are by now well known: He’s bashed Blacks for being chronic welfare grifters, thugs and lousy parents. 

From New America Media: That Black voters will again give President Obama a sky-high percentage of their vote in 2012 was never in doubt. What is in doubt is how many will make up that percentage. If Black voters had not turned the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries into a virtual holy crusade for Obama, and if Obama had not, openly in the South Carolina primary and subtly in primaries thereafter, stoked the Black vote, he could easily have been just another failed Democratic presidential candidate. 

From New America Media: Romney’s record on diversity as Massachusetts governor gives a strong hint of what his White House would look like. When it came to appointing minorities and women to judicial posts, his record was atrocious. The Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association repeatedly lambasted him for his near-exclusive white male state house. Romney, partly in response to the public pounding and partly with an eye on a presidential run where he knew his state record on diversity would be closely scrutinized, made a slew of appointments of minorities and women to the state bench in his last year in office.

 

From New America Media: The excuses some Democrats give for their chill toward backing President Obama’s re-election bid would fill up a legal pad. The Blue Dog and moderate Democratic congresspersons and senators representing shaky swing and conservative districts are scared stiff that if they rub shoulders too close with Obama, they will be signing their political obituary for re-election.