CAIRO: The two candidates vying for the presidency of the United States have similar foreign policies concerning the Middle East but differ only on the subject of Iraq, a lobbyist has said Monday.
“Both Senator [John] McCain and Senator [Barack] Obama have said that Israel is the United States’ main ally in the region, and that is unlikely to change. Both have indicated support to the two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli issue and that is unlikely to change, Benjamin Ginsberg, lobbyist at the law firm Patton Boggs, told attendees at a lecture at the US embassy in Cairo Monday, discussing the November election.
“On Iraq, Ginsberg added, “there are unique differences between them. Senator Obama has said that basically there is this 16-month timetable under which US troops will be withdrawn. Senator McCain has said he’s going to look at the situation on the ground.
“In terms of perception and where the American people see the two candidates, Senator Obama is perceived as thinking the war was the wrong decision, Senator McCain thought going in was the correct decision . and of course he was a major proponent of the surge.
Ginsberg was the former national counsel for the Bush presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004 before resigning in a storm of controversy after giving legal advice to the Swift Boat campaign against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
There were two other speakers at the lecture, which was introduced by US Ambassador to Egypt Margaret Scobey after a reception at the embassy garden.
Thomas Schaller, author and associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, talked about the changing demographics of the American electorate saying, “Somewhere around 2042 we will become a majority non-white nation.
He added, “While I’m not projecting that demography is destiny, that it’s not determinative of how you vote, increasingly it’s highly probabilistic, it’s highly predictable how you’d vote [based] on your background.
Peter Leyden, former director of the New Politics Institute and a former editor of the original Wired magazine, said, “On the technology [front] we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the technology of politics which is just starting to be fully realized by the people in politics themselves.
Leyden said that the Obama campaign managed to utilize the internet to bypass traditional ways of election campaigning, through raising money online and using the internet to challenge the role of the traditional behemoth of broadcast television in past campaigns.
These new tactics helped a political outsider like Obama to overcome Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries and is helping him hold a lead on McCain, Lyden added.
These new tools of politics are “bringing in new people to politics . which we haven’t seen in the past, he said.
Scobey, having just come from a visit to the US said, “The American people are focused completely on the upcoming US election. The development of the news cycle in the United States is such that it truly is a 24 hour, seven day a week recording cycle.
