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The Matter of 2008
// Why the Americans Love Uncertainty and the Russians, Evidently, Don't
There is still a year and a half left until the day when the American Republicans and Democrats will name their candidates for president. The Republicans will choose their candidate at the beginning of September 2008, while the Democrats will hold their primary at the very end of August in the same year. The upcoming presidential elections are even father away.
But already the "matter of 2008" has been one of the most important topics in America for several months. Almost every week a new challenger enters the ring. The Democrats are already fielding an impressive team of nine candidates, while the Republicans have no less than twelve candidates in the race for the White House. Accusing them all of jumping the gun would be na?ve, to say the least. The issue is more important than that: the fact that the current US presidential race has started so much earlier than usual means, as the famous poet said, that someone needs it. And that someone is America.
The upcoming presidential elections in the United States are exceptional in many ways. Many people in America and throughout the world believe that the outcome of the battle for the White House in 2008 is a no-brainer: of course the Democrats will win.
After all, Americans have long been talking about the fact that the four-year war in Iraq enjoys ever-shrinking support in the US and that George Bush will have no clear successor by 2008. After the crushing defeat suffered by the Republicans in last November's congressional elections, the conclusion that the next president of the United States will almost certainly be a Democrat has become clear.
But Americans can't let the 2008 race pass without some sort of intrigue to spice things up. That's just the way American politics works.
So both the Democratic favorites and the Republican outsiders have decided to keep things interesting. The Democrats have trotted out from their ranks a highly original duo, Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton and African-American Senator Barack Obama, while the Republicans have tossed in "America's mayor" Rudy Giuliani and the radically-opinionated Senator John McCain.
And so the race has begun, long before its appointed time. And that just adds a certain flavor of uncertainty, without which presidential elections in the US simply would not be "American elections."
Curiously, the "problem of 2008" retains a shadow of intrigue in Russia as well, even though here the outcome of the presidential election would also appear to be obvious: an overwhelming majority of Russians will vote for whomever the current president of Russia tells them to. But that's where the similarities end and the differences begin. The intrigue (real or manufactured) of the American elections will persist right up until the end of the "first Tuesday after the first Monday in November" of 2008, which is when the presidential election will take place. In Russia, clarity will arrive just as soon as Vladimir Putin gives a speech in which he names the person to whom he can feels he can safely entrust Russia.
Gennady Sysoyev
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 02, 2007
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