Who will compete with Barack Obama for the office of U.S. President on the first Tuesday of November in 2012? As there is no prominent candidate who is ahead of other Republicans, the names being proposed are many. Sarah Palin remains the most famous among those. However, she is an ignorant who makes George W. Bush appear like a genius by comparison. The names with the best chances today, but not necessarily a year from now, include Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, and Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota whose term will expire with the upcoming elections. There is also Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, who is also a racist right-wing extremist who has voiced some despicable stances in the past. I do not understand how he has returned to the limelight with all the personal scandals linked to his name. Other names include the billionaire Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, who denies that he is a candidate but who nonetheless leaves the door open to speculation regarding a possible bid by him for the presidency. There is also the governor of Mississippi Haley Barbour and the new Senator, Mark Rubio of Florida, and also Rick Santorum who lost his seat in the Senate representing Pennsylvania in 2006, but who is very active in Republican political circles. All the above was in preparation for me to present to the readers my own nominated Republican candidate to challenge Obama in 2012. He is the governor of Indiana Mitchell (Mitch) Daniels. Should he or Obama wins, I will consider myself victorious on behalf of the U.S. citizens in my direct family. There are general reasons that favor Daniel's nomination for office, such as his high level of education, skills and his experience, and my own personal reasons: Mitch Daniels is of Syrian origin. He was born in Pennsylvania on 7/4/1949. His father, who had the same name, was also born in the same state. His mother is Dorothy Mae Wilkes. She was born in Pennsylvania on 26/8/1926. As for his grandfather Elias Daniels, he was born near Homs on 26/4/1884, got married to Afifi Hannah, and immigrated to the United States in his youth. Looking into Daniels' ancestry led me to his Syrian great grandfather, whose name according to the record is Assa Daniel. His maternal ancestry, meanwhile, can be traced back to his eleventh grandfather who lived in England, before the American independence. Governor Daniels is married to Cheri Lynn Herman. They have four daughters. They divorced in 1994, after which his wife moved to California where she married a doctor. But she returned to her first husband and her daughters in 1997, and they remarried. I ask the readers here to contemplate the following with me: A Homsi U.S. President, after a black president. (His family is originally from a village near Homs, perhaps Khirbet el-Maazeh in the Homs countryside, which is enough for me to consider him a Homsi.) The other reasons why Daniels is qualified to become the U.S. President are almost perfect, and are what any presidential candidate would wish to have for him or herself. In Indiana, Daniels won the highest possible award given to high school students, outshining all his peers. He graduated from the prestigious Princeton University, and went to Georgetown University to study law. In his teenage years, Daniels was active in the election campaigns of several congressional candidates. He also worked at the Senate as the Chief of Staff of Senator Richard Lugar. Perhaps the first thing that drew attention to him at the level of public service was his appointment as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under the administration of George W. Bush, a post that enjoys the rank of Secretary (Bush used to call him “my man Mitch”.) Daniels stood out after that as the governor of Indiana. His victory in 2004 was the Republicans' first victory in the state in 16 years. He won a second term in 2008 with an overwhelming majority of the votes, after fixing the state's economy and regulations. Remarkably, he helped the Republicans win a majority in both the state Senate and House (37-13 Senators, and 60-40 Representatives). This is despite the fact that Obama had won the state in his bid for the presidency. Daniels' track record in public service is excellent, and better than that of any other potential Republican presidential candidates. Nonetheless, he is still not very well known throughout the United States. A poll I read has shown that Palin is better known than others, followed by Romney and Huckabee. With Daniels, on the other hand, 63 percent of the respondents said that they do not have a particular opinion about him, although he enjoys an approval rate of 70 percent in his state. Then there is the fact that he is not a handsome young man, although he likes to ride a Harley Davidson motorcycle, perhaps to appear “cool”. Mitchell Daniels's skills made the BBC, the prestigious magazine The Economist and the extremist magazine The Weekly Standard, all publish lengthy reports on him, which I found to be very positive, and he seems to be on his way for greater successes. A Homsi president of the United States? I am in awe! khazen@alhayat.com
