Category: Politics

{President Barack Obama nominates Jeffrey DeLauentis over a year after restoring diplomatic ties with communist nation.}

The United States has tapped career diplomat Jeffrey DeLaurentis to become the first official ambassador to Cuba in more than five decades.

“The appointment of an ambassador is a commonsense step forward toward a more normal and productive relationship between our two countries,” President Barack Obama said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Having an ambassador will make it easier to advocate for our interests, and will deepen our understanding even when we know that we will continue to have differences with the Cuban government,” he said.

Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced a thaw in relations in December 2014. The two countries restored full diplomatic relations in July 2015.

Since then, Washington and Havana have taken once-unthinkable steps to mend ties after more than half a century of enmity.

Obama visited Cuba earlier this year and relaxed portions of the US embargo imposed since 1962.

Flights have resumed and cruise ships can now sail from Miami to Havana.

US companies like Airbnb and Netflix now operate in Cuba and hotel group Starwood, acquired last week by Marriott International, opened a Sheraton in Havana last June.

DeLaurentis is currently the Chargé d’Affaires at the US Embassy in Havana and previously worked in Bogota and at the United Nations.

But his nomination, which requires Senate confirmation, is likely to face stiff opposition in Congress, where Cuban-American lawmakers have sought to garner local support by opposing Obama’s policies.

Any senator could place an anonymous hold on the nomination. Several Republican lawmakers have opposed Democrat Obama’s outreach to the Communist regime led by Castro.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American presidential contender in the Republican primary race who ultimately lost to Donald Trump, blasted Obama’s nomination.

“A US ambassador is not going to influence the Cuban government, which is a dictatorial and closed regime,” Rubio said in a statement.

READ MORE: Obama visits Cuba, hails ‘historic opportunity’

“This nomination should go nowhere until the Castro regime makes significant and irreversible progress in the areas of human rights and political freedom for the Cuban people.”

Accusing the Obama administration of failing to confront Cuba over its repressive policies, Rubio said the US embassy in Havana’s Twitter account “seems more like a travel agency than an advocate for American values and interests”.

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the State Department and foreign operations, on the other hand, argued for DeLaurentis’ confirmation.

“The Cuban people have their ambassador in Washington. The American people need their ambassador in Havana,” Leahy said in a statement.

Cuba’s top diplomat in Washington, Jose R Cabanas, was given the rank of ambassador last year.

{US presidential candidates face-off over race, economy and foreign policy in first TV showdown ahead of November’s vote.}

US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have gone head-to-head over the issue of race, the economy and foreign policy in their first televised debate ahead of November’s election.

Clinton accused her Republican rival of racism, sexism and tax avoidance, while Trump, a businessman making his first run for public office, repeatedly cast his opponent as a career politician and demanded that she should account for her time in government.

Monday’s televised face-off was the most anticipated moment in the election campaign, with both sides expecting a record-setting audience for the showdown at Hofstra University in New York.

In one of the more heated exchanges, the two candidates attacked each other for the controversy Trump stoked for years over whether President Barack Obama was born in the US.

Obama, who was born in Hawaii, released a long form birth certificate in 2011 to put the issue to rest. Only earlier this month did Trump say publicly that he believed Obama was born in the US.

“He (Trump) has really started his political activity based on this racist lie that our first black president was not an American citizen. There was absolutely no evidence for it. But he persisted. He persisted year after year,” Clinton said.

Trump repeated his false accusation that Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign against Obama had initiated the so-called “birther” issue.

“Nobody was pressing it, nobody was caring much about it … I was the one that got him to produce the birth certificate and I think I did a good job,” Trump said.

The Republican also backed the controversial “stop-and-frisk policing” tactic as a way to bring down crime, while the Democrat said the policy was unconstitutional and ineffective.

Foreign policy

The stakes were high as the candidates headed into the debate tied in most national polls ahead of the November 8 election.

The centrepiece of Trump’s case against Clinton, a former senator and secretary of state, was that she was a “typical” politician who has squandered opportunities to address the domestic and international issues she is now pledging to tackle as president.

“She’s got experience,” he said, “but it’s bad experience”.

When the debate moved to international affairs, Trump, who has faced accusations that he has a weak grasp of policy, accused his rival of sowing chaos in the Middle East during her tenure as secretary of state.

“It’s a total mess, under your direction, to a large extent,” the Republican said.

But he appeared on shaky ground as he defended his refusal to reveal his plan for defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group.

“You’re telling the enemy everything you want to do. No wonder you’ve been fighting ISIS your entire adult life,” he said, with Clinton replying that, unlike, her rival, she at least had a plan for fighting the armed group.

Trump also repeatedly insisted that he opposed the Iraq War before the 2003 US invasion, despite evidence to the contrary.

The Republican charged that Clinton and Obama created a vacuum when the US withdrew the majority of its forces from Iraq in 2011 after years of war.

ISIL “wouldn’t have been formed if (more) troops had been left behind,” he said.

Clinton countered by saying Trump had supported the invasion of Iraq, adding that the agreement about when US troops would leave Iraq was made by Republican president George W Bush, not Obama.

The Republican also appeared to contradict himself on how he might use nuclear weapons if he is elected president. He first said he “would not do first strike” but then said he could not “take anything off the table”.

Clinton said Trump was too easily provoked to serve as commander-in-chief and could be quickly drawn into a war involving nuclear weapons.

“A man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes,” she said.

Trump replied: “That line’s getting a little bit old.”

Tax returns and emails

In feisty exchanges on the economy, Clinton called for lowering taxes for the middle class, while Trump focused more on renegotiating trade deals that he said have caused companies to move jobs out of the US.

Clinton attacked Trump for not releasing his income tax returns and said that decision raised questions about whether he was as rich and charitable as he has said.

“There’s something he’s hiding,” she declared, scoffing at his repeated contentions that he will not release his tax returns because he is being audited. Tax experts have said an audit is no bar to making his records public.

Clinton said one reason he has refused is that he may well have paid nothing in federal taxes. He interrupted to say, “That makes me smart”.

Trump aggressively tried to turn the transparency questions around on Clinton, saying he would release his tax returns, “when she releases her 33,000 e-mails that have been deleted,” alluding to the Democrat’s use of a private email server as secretary of state.

Toward the end of the debate, Trump said Clinton did not have the endurance to be president.

“She doesn’t have the look, she doesn’t have the stamina,” he said. Trump has made similar comments in previous events, sparking outrage from Clinton backers who accused him of leveling a sexist attack on the first woman nominated for president by a major US political party.

Clinton leapt at the opportunity to remind voters of Trump’s numerous controversial comments about women, who will be crucial to the outcome of the November election.

“This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs,” she said.

Citing her own public record, Clinton retorted: “As soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a ceasefire, a release of dissidents … or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina.”

Quinnipiac University declared the race “too close to call” on Monday, with its latest national poll of likely voters suggesting 47 percent of support for Clinton and 46 percent for Trump.

“It really felt great,” Trump told reporters after the debate.

But political analyst Jason Johnson told Al Jazeera that he would not be surprised “if we see slight chances in the polls at the end of the week” in favour of Clinton.

“Trump came out aggressively … but never had much in terms of substance or answers,” he said.

“I think Hillary did what she needed to do better than Trump. She offered solutions.. explained how she sees America and her worldview. Her supporters will come out very enthusiastic.”

It was the first time the two candidates stood side by side since becoming their parties’ nominees.

Two more debates are to follow on October 9 and October 19.

{As the first debate between Clinton and Trump nears, excitement is building but can it actually change the result?}

The anticipation is huge. The audience will be massive and the build-up has been relentless. But the reality is American presidential debates are rarely the “game changers” the pundits and supporters hope they will be.

This time we’re told it’s different. There are so many new dynamics on the state. There is the man v woman contest. There is the experienced politician against the political neophyte. There is the reality TV star against the candidate who seems to hate any media attention.

The two campaigns have been lowering expectations for weeks.

The Clinton camp has been predicting that Donald Trump will do well because he was the host of a reality TV show that attracted big audiences.

The Trump campaign has been suggesting their candidate has not being doing traditional debate preparations: no big briefing books; no mock debates; no rehearsed answers. It’s hard to believe either side is serious.

But if you lower expectations and your candidate does as you expected, you can then spin that it was a “fantastic performance” and the narrative that is created the day after the debate is almost as important as the event itself.

Historians will point to key moments in previous debates that suggest races changed there and then.

There was John Kennedy looking cool and composed in the first ever televised debate, while Richard Nixon who was ill looked sweaty and ill at ease. It’s interesting to note that those listening on the radio thought the Republican won that one hands down.

In 1976, President Gerard Ford claimed Poland was not under the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. It is paraded as a massive mistake. But few voters interviewed the next day even recognised the error. And the suggestion that Ford’s polling numbers took a dive after that ignores the fact his support was dropping all through the campaign season.

The same is true just four years later in 1980. Ronald Reagan gave an impressive debate performance. Despite concerns about his age (at 69 he was one year younger than Donald Trump is now, and one year older than Hillary Clinton) he was considered to be “calm and in control”.

He went on to win the election handsomely. But his opponent President Jimmy Carter was plagued with bad economic numbers, there was a congressional investigation into his brother, and the Iranians were not willing to negotiate the release of hostages held in the US Embassy in Tehran. Before the debate, Reagan had a five-point lead. His performance just gave him a bigger lead.

Just four years ago, everyone thought Mitt Romney won the first presidential debate in Colorado. I was there. He did. President Barack Obama seemed bored, disengaged, and was way too wordy to get his points across.

The Romney campaign headed out of Colorado on a high. Suddenly people were engaged with a candidate many liked but didn’t love. At his first event post-debate, people queued for hours to get to see him. I know this because we got stuck in the traffic going to cover it.

But the polls didn’t move much. The lead Obama had remained consistent. On the night of the election a Romney campaign supporter told me the Republican had won, the polls were wrong and the momentum generated from the first debate was responsible. The election night party turned from a celebration to a wake.

Most people have already made up their mind on these candidates. The debates may provide a few more snippets of information to those wavering, but people tend to cheer their chosen candidate. And the candidates can largely control how they perform in the debates. They can be prepared, organised and ready to handle any attack.

READ MORE: Here’s why Donald Trump might win

What will change the face of the election will be those unpredictable events between now and election day – things outside their control – and how they react.

Four years ago, in an excellent analysis in the Washington Monthly, George Washington University political scientist John Sides looked at these moments.

“Scholars who have looked most carefully at the data have found that, when it comes to shifting enough votes to decide the outcome of the election, presidential debates have rarely, if ever, mattered,” he concluded.

So why are we expecting an audience of about 100 million, the largest ever for a presidential debate?

Well, people will be watching to see if Clinton keels over at the podium or if Donald Trump throws aside the discipline that has been injected into his campaign and becomes the wild, unfocused, thick-skinned insult machine of the Republican primary debates.

If there is such a thing as a political circus, this is the main show in the ring.