Citizenship form to add questions on terrorism, genocide, military training

IN the tiny Kenyan village of Kogelo, US President Barack Obama’s ancestral homeland, some people talk of hurt feelings of the kind experienced when a favorite relative has failed to get in touch.
Four years ago, Kogelo, and Africa in general, celebrated with noisy gusto when Obama, whose father came from the scattered hamlet of tin-roofed homes, became the first African-American to be elected president of the United States.
Looking across the Atlantic to the Nov. 6 presidential election, the continent is cooler now toward the “son of Africa” who is seeking a second term. There are questions too whether his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, will have more to offer to sub-Saharan Africa if he wins the White House.
Obama, who hailed his “African blood within me,” only visited sub-Saharan Africa once in his four years — a stopover of less than a day in Ghana in between summits elsewhere.
In Kogelo, which was put on the tourism map by Obama’s election and where his grandmother still lives, locals take this personally.
“He should have come to at least say ‘hi’ to the people of Kenya so that we can know that we are still together in spirit, rather than abandoning us as if he was not our son,” said Steven Okungu, 21. “It is a disappointment.” Many in Africa feel their enthusiasm for Obama was not requited by him in terms of increased US commitment and fresh concrete initiatives on the world’s poorest continent, a deficit they see being filled by other emerging players such as China, Brazil, India and South Korea.
Sub-Saharan Africa has gone virtually unnoticed as a topic in the US presidential election campaign, focused heavily as it has been on pressing domestic issues such as the lack of jobs and how to prod America’s stuttering economy into faster growth.
But analysts see a strong counter-terrorism focus increasingly driving US policy toward Africa, as Washington throws its weight behind efforts on the continent to confront the spreading presence there of Al-Qaeda and its allies in hot spots from Somalia to Mali and Nigeria.
“These concerns don’t recognize borders,” Mark Schroeder, Director of Sub-Saharan Africa analysis at STRATFOR Global Intelligence, told Reuters, predicting this security focus will figure strongly whoever wins the election.
In 2009, China overtook the United States as Africa’s largest trading partner. According to the Brookings Institution, President Hu Jintao of China has made up to seven trips to Africa, five as head of state, and has visited at least 17 countries. In contrast, Obama’s 20-hour 2009 sojourn in Ghana has been his only trip to sub-Saharan Africa as president.
“We would have expected to see more American involvement instead of a retreat. If you go to many countries and ask them about who is doing more, they will tell you China,” said Mwangi Kimenyi, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
John Mbadi, a deputy minister in the office of the Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, agrees. “He did not show enough concern to reverse the trend of China’s influence on trade with Kenya and Africa as a whole,” Mbadi said.
Defending the Obama record in Africa, David Young, a senior official in the US State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, said the president had held meetings at the White House with 12 African leaders. “The administration has in fact been very focused on Africa,” Young told Reuters.
He said US exports to sub-Saharan Africa increased 40 percent from 2009 to 2011 and are on track to double by 2013/14.
A multi-stop swing through Africa in August by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her fourth as the top US diplomat, appeared aimed at promoting America as a more principled and reliable partner than China.
Obama carried on initiatives launched by his predecessors. These include Bill Clinton’s African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which waives import duties on thousands of goods exported to the US from eligible countries, George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US aid vehicle that assists countries with good governance.
But the Obama administration’s own signature “US Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa,” in which the president calls Africa “more important than ever to the security and prosperity of the international community” and “the world’s next major economic success story,” was only released in June this year.
“That contributes toward this perception that Africa was an afterthought,” said Todd Moss, vice president and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington.
Obama’s aides have made clear that if re-elected he can be expected to focus on sub-Saharan Africa as part of the unfinished business from his first term, including anti-AIDS initiatives, food security and economic development programs. But such projects could be limited by fiscal realities, with congressional pressure for austerity expected to extend to foreign aid spending.
Despite the disappointment with Obama, prevailing sentiment in Africa seems to favors his re-election, reflecting still the continent-wide rapture surrounding his 2008 victory.
“Obama loves the black people. He get attention to the black people, said Violet Williams, a 42-year-old unemployed woman at Congo Cross junction in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown.
“Restrained Obama better than ‘Rambo’ Romney,” wrote Pallo Jordan, a former South African culture minister and member of the ruling ANC’s National Executive Committee, in a newspaper op-ed on Thursday explaining his preference.
Romney’s campaign team takes pains to present Africa as “not a problem to be contained, but an opportunity to be embraced,” urging much more private sector participation in US trade and development initiatives in Africa, in addition to the more traditional programs for education and HIV/AIDS.
“If you say the word Africa, in most Americans’ minds what you basically come up with is the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Everything is negative. Famine, pestilence, degradation, war,” said Ambassador Tibor Nagy, Chair of the Romney campaign’s Africa Policy Working Group.
Nagy, a former ambassador to Ethiopia and Guinea, had worked for the Obama campaign in the last election four years ago. “So you look around and where is the progress? Where have we moved forward? I have been very sorely disappointed,” he said.
A Romney administration would take a fresh, more positive approach, he said: “I would say look at Africa through the windscreen and not the rearview mirror.”
In an extensive foreign policy debate between the two US presidential contenders on Oct. 22, Africa south of the Sahara gained only a passing mention - by Romney, who said the north of Mali had been taken over by “Al-Qaeda-type individuals.”
And even this was framed in a wider verbal joust over who would be tougher against America’s old Nemesis, Al-Qaeda, a theme driven by recriminatory campaign sparring over the killing of the US ambassador to Libya in Benghazi on Sept. 11.
Most American voters are wary of “boots on the ground” foreign entanglements after costly US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But African leaders are hoping Washington will actively support — with equipment, intelligence and training — a plan to send in African troops to try to expel Al-Qaeda and its allies from northern Mali, an area the size of Texas these groups control after hijacking a Tuareg separatist rebellion.
“We are worried about Mali ... Africa is increasingly also having these problems of terrorism,” said the spokesman for Sierra Leone’s President Ernest Bai Koroma, Unisa Sesay, who also cited the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency in Nigeria.
Obama’s deployment last year of 100 military advisers to help African forces hunt Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army was a calculated but limited operation that responded to public outrage over the LRA’s alleged atrocities.
US national security concerns also underpinned a US diplomatic offensive this year in countries such as South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania to shut off imports of Iranian oil and the reflagging of Iranian oil tankers, part of Washington’s efforts to tighten international sanctions against Tehran.
There are those who see the perceived neglect by Obama of Africa as unjust criticism. “The idea that somehow there was some magic button Obama would be able to push in terms of Africa policy, I think that was unrealistic,” said Rod Alence, associate professor of international relations at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand.
Many Africans believe too it is time for the continent to stop looking outside for help and stand on its own two feet.
“Obama failed us ... Now, I don’t mind who comes next, they are all the same. This only means our leaders should start doing things right. We have the resources on the continent — gold, cocoa, oil etc, but our problem is mismanagement,” said Kojo Marfo, a 53-year-old commercial driver in Ghana.
“Unless we put our house in order, we will not get anywhere,” he said.

Thou shalt compromise, at least on immigration reform. That is the message being heard from some leading evangelicals in the United States. After decades of promoting traditionally conservative causes like opposition to abortion, many evangelical leaders are now wielding their formidable influence to persuade Republican lawmakers to back one of President Barack Obama’s top priorities.
Conservatives in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives want to focus the debate initially on securing the border with Mexico and making sure illegal immigrants are not rewarded with an amnesty.
“Some of them don’t necessarily see or acknowledge the changing demographics or the electoral merits of passing immigration reform, but I do think that many of these religious leaders could push them in that direction by really referencing the humanitarian interest, or moral argument,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.
Rodriguez and other pastors are speaking to members of Congress “on a daily basis” to ask them to legalize the status of 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Targeted lawmakers include Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, who chaired a House hearing on immigration last week, and Rep. Raul Labrador of Idaho — a leading Tea Party thinker on immigration.
Unlikely as it may have seemed at the height of the “culture wars” of the last two decades, these evangelicals are attempting to nudge Republicans to the center. The effort is well timed, coming as the Republican Party strives to improve its appeal to Hispanic voters who went solidly Democratic at 2012 elections.
“This is one area where social conservative input is extremely welcomed by the Republican Party,” said O’Connell.
Support for an immigration overhaul among Christian conservatives has been growing over time. In 2011, the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention — the country’s largest Protestant body — called for “a just and compassionate path to legal status” for illegal immigrants while urging the government to secure US borders.
A Public Religion Research Institute poll in 2010 showed white evangelicals support, by a margin of 2-1, an immigration reform that would allow illegal immigrants to become Americans.
After the election, a group of evangelical leaders signed a letter to Obama endorsing “a path toward legal status and/or citizenship” for immigrants. Among the signers was Tim Daly, president of the Focus on the Family ministry.
Immigration is providing a rare foray into bipartisanship for evangelical veterans of fights over gay marriage and abortion like lawyer Mathew Staver, vice president of Liberty University, founded by evangelical leader Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia. Staver’s Liberty Counsel group threatened to sue a Florida library in 2000 for promoting witchcraft by encouraging young people to read a Harry Potter novel. As recently as last Nov. 8, Staver wrote on Liberty Counsel’s website that Obama won re-election because, “Millions of Americans looked evil in the eye and adopted it.”
But now he acknowledges that Obama deserves credit, along with the Republican head of the House Judiciary Committee and Senators from both sides of the aisle, for drawing up plans for an immigration overhaul. “I think it is incumbent upon us to work together and I applaud the bipartisan committee in the Senate and I applaud the leadership of Bob Goodlatte,” Staver said. “I applaud President Obama too, I just don’t want to use this as a political ping pong.”
But any talk of an alliance between the White House and evangelicals to win immigration reform is stretching it.
US Representative Doug Collins says hospitality to foreigners is fine but must be balanced with respect for immigration laws. “Scripture also teaches very clearly that there is government and civil authority and that there is an understanding of rule of law,” said Republican Collins, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee.

WE campaign in poetry, Mario Cuomo used to say, but we govern in prose.
This was how the then-New York governor explained the gap between his soaring speeches and the more prosaic product of his government, when the springtime of campaign hopes succumbed to the winter of governing discontent.
That was a generation ago. But it is a pithy summary of Barack Obama’s challenge as he goes before his convention this week.
There are a lot of very angry people in the country, out of work or living on less. But anger is not the dominant political sentiment among the voters likely to swing this presidential election.
It is, instead, disappointment.
“There’s absolutely a sense of disappointment among a large subset of Democrats,” said David Segal, a former Rhode Island state legislator who now runs an organization that lobbies for Internet freedom and civil liberties.
The Romney-Ryan team astutely recognized the discontent and tried to package the sentiment at the Republican convention last week. The purpose was to peel away voters who were proud of their vote for Obama four years ago and are disappointed now by the state of the country he has been leading ever since.
“The president hasn’t disappointed you because he wanted to,” Romney said in his acceptance speech. “The president has disappointed America because he hasn’t led America in the right direction.”
As the challenger, Romney has the easier task. He gets to campaign in poetry. But Obama must now explain the governing prose of the last four years.
That is a very hard job, even for a campaigner as capable as Obama. The country on its face is not in great shape. The last president to win re-election with unemployment over 8 percent was Franklin D. Roosevelt. (It was 16.6 percent when FDR was re-elected in 1936, down from 24.9 percent when he was first elected in 1932.)
A key part of Obama’s central argument is that, without him, these last four years would have been worse. There is considerable evidence this is true. A study by the congressional budget office says unemployment could have soared near 12 percent (instead of the peak of 10 percent) without the economic stimulus and other rescue measures Obama succeeded in passing.
But it’s a hard sell to compare what a report says and what palpably is. Modern American sound-bite politics resist subtle what-ifs or might-have-beens. The template of modern presidential campaigning was a simple yes or no question from the master, Ronald Reagan. Romney wants voters to answer Reagan’s simple question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Obama wants to change the question: Are you better off now than you would have been without me?
“It takes many more months for an incumbent to develop a credible defense of a half-full glass than it takes a challenger to remind people that the president promised to fill the half-empty glass all the way,” said Samuel Popkin, a political scientist who has given message advice to several Democratic presidents and candidates.
David Plouffe, one of Obama’s key strategists, went on TV Sunday to explain that Obama should be re-elected because he would do more than just finish the job of pulling America out of the recession. “We’re going to explain to the American people and the middle class of this country how we’re going to continue to recover, but do more than just recover from the recession, to build an economy from the middle out.”
Plouffe no doubt knew what he meant by the phrase “from the middle out.” Presumably, it has something to do with the difference between “trickle-down” economics and middle-class economics. But whatever it means, it is a more difficult message to get across than 2008’s “Yes, we can.”
Politics is always about comparisons and expectations. Few events in American political history sent expectations soaring higher than the new fact of Obama’s election. But those raised expectations collided with the reality of a sour economy. Turning the welter of governing prose back into campaign poetry now is tricky.
On Monday, Joe Biden took a shot, amplifying a line that’s been kicking around for days. “You want to know whether we’re better off? I got a little bumper sticker for you,” he said. “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” The Romney campaign jumped all over him for suggesting people were better off at a time when unemployment is still high and gas prices have doubled.
Biden’s quip and the reaction to it point back to a central question: How well does Obama actually grasp his own plight?
There was clearly a period when he did not, when Democrats worried he would be a one-term president because he was not getting the problem. At one point, he said the problem was that he had not communicated well enough. “Every politician who gets in trouble thinks it’s how they are saying things instead of what they’re saying,” Paul Begala, an adviser to Bill Clinton, said after they left office in 2001.
But Obama seems more focused now on doing what is needed to keep his job. He has reconciled with Bill Clinton, no small task, and at times now seems to be running on Clinton’s economic record rather than his own, which makes political sense — if the public will buy it.
Yet even now, there are moments when it isn’t clear if Obama’s campaign fully grasps the challenge.
Aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Jen Psaki, the campaign spokeswoman, said Romney had more at stake in his convention than Obama does at his because “the American people know a lot more about the president than they know about Mitt Romney.”
Actually, it is precisely because the country knows so much about Obama that he has the higher hill to climb. That’s the downside of being the incumbent. It will take more than Joe Biden’s bumper sticker for Obama to assuage two very different groups of disappointed voters — liberals who wish Obama had done more and swing voters who wish what he had done had worked more.
After trying to position himself as a conciliator and a mediator, Obama in recent months has been more confrontational with Congress and moved unilaterally on key issues designed to appeal to the base of the Democratic party — endorsing gay marriage, for example, and suspending deportation of young immigrants brought here illegally by their parents as children.
Those steps may help mitigate disappointment by re-energizing disillusioned liberal segments of the Democratic party. Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate is helping, too, and in the end liberal voters don’t have many other places to go (although staying home would be a problem for Obama).
The middle is a different story. Much of the Republican convention was an embedded appeal to swing voters that it was okay to have voted for Obama and now reconsider. In effect: They were seduced, and now it’s reality time.
“Let’s put the poetry aside,” said Artur Davis, a 2008 Obama supporter who switched to the Republican Party and spoke this year at its convention. And that comment illustrates precisely why an incumbent’s road is harder. The very elegance of Obama’s 2008 campaign has become one of his major liabilities in 2012.
That means a recalibration, and this week is the moment to see if he can be a different kind of candidate. The test now is this: Four years on from the poetry that delivered Barack Obama to the White House, can he find a voice that makes the cadence of governing prose compelling enough to keep his job?