Candidates share same goal, different backgrounds
With the Republican primaries winding down at the end of June, the 2012 presidential election will come down to two men: the current president, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney, his GOP opposition. It is fairly obvious where both men want to be next January, but where they have come from is less than common knowledge. Both politicians hold impressive achievements as elected officials, but the personal lives of these men are just as interesting.
Incumbent president and democratic candidate Barack Obama, Jr. was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961 to a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas. Two years after his birth his parents divorced and Barack Obama, Sr. moved back to Kenya after remarrying. After living briefly with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia, he moved back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. Obama attended Occidental University in Los Angeles, and later transferred to Columbia University in New York. After graduating with a B.A. in Political Science, he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer before beginning at Harvard Law School in 1988. He became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review and lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years. He was first elected as an Illinois State Senator in 1996 and served until he won the 2008 presidential election.
He met his future wife Michelle at a Chicago law firm in 1989 and they married in 1992. They have two daughters, Malia and Sasha, and a dog Bo who was a gift from the late Senator Ted Kennedy. He is also the published author of three books, including “Dreams From My Father” (1995), “The Audacity Of Hope” (2006), and “Of Thee I Sing” (2010).
He was elected the 44th President of the United States, and the first African-American to hold the position, in November 2008.
Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate frontrunner by a large margin, comes from a different background.
He was born Willard Mitt Romney on March 12, 1947 in Detroit, Mich. His father was also a businessman and a politician. Unlike Obama, who moved around during the span of his education, Romney stayed in Michigan, transferring from public school to the private preparatory Cranbrook Academy in the 7th grade, and remained there until graduation. A member of the Mormon community, Romney attended Brigham Young University in 1969, shortly before he and his childhood sweetheart, Ann, married. He also obtained degrees from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School.
Romney has spent most of his career working for corporations and businesses, specializing in solving budgetary and financial problems. He co-founded a private equity firm in 1984 called Bain Capital (named after his mentor Bill Bain). He also offered his consulting services to a variety of clients, including the 2002 Olympic Games Committee. After sponsors became concerned about post-9/11 security and began to pull out, Romney restructured the budget to prevent the games from being moved out of Salt Lake City and to a different country.
He was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2003, but he only served one term and left office in 2007 so he could begin a presidential campaign.
He and his wife Ann have five sons and 16 grandchildren. According to his campaign site, Ann has suffered from multiple sclerosis since 1998 and was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago. They have homes in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and California.
For more information about these candidates, visit www.barackobama.com and www.mittromney.com.
Obama and Romney represent the two main political parties in the upcoming election, but there are several other candidates running that have also made notable accomplishments in their campaigns, and others whose campaigns may just be getting started.
Dr. Ron Paul trails behind Romney for the Republican nomination but, despite rumors, has not dropped out of the race or changed his campaign to run as a third-party candidate at the time of this writing. Paul ran for president in 1988 as a Libertarian and again in 2008 as a Republican, according to Biography.
Paul was born on August 20, 1935 in Pittsburgh, Penn. He graduated from Gettysburg College with a B.S. in Biology in 1957, and obtained a medical degree in obstetrics and gynecology from the Duke University School Of Medicine in 1961. He served as a flight surgeon for the United States Air Force in the 1960s, and then moved his family to Texas to open a medical practice, according to his campaign site.
Paul first ran for the House of Representatives in 1974 and lost, but he won the seat when President Ford appointed his opponent as a director. He served on and off until 1985, dabbling in business ventures after losing the 1984 election. He was reelected to the House in 1997, but he does not plan to run again this year, choosing instead to focus on his presidential campaign.
Paul and his wife Carol of 55 years have five children, one of which is the Kentucky junior senator, and 18 grandchildren. He lives in the 14th District of Texas in Brazoria County, where he delivered a majority of the residents’ babies, according to opponent Representative Robert Gammage, who had difficulty getting votes in that area.
Of the third party candidates who are still in the race, only two parties will have access to ballots in enough states to obtain the 270 electoral votes needed to win the Presidency: The Libertarian Party and the Green Party.
Gary Johnson is the Libertarian candidate. Previously running as a Republican, he withdrew from the party to pursue the Libertarian nomination.
Johnson was born in Minot, North Dakota on January 1, 1953. He attended high school and college in New Mexico, graduating from the University of New Mexico in 1975. After college he became a successful businessman. He began a construction company that grew to become one of the state’s largest and gave him a reputation for being able to create thousands of jobs in the private sector.
He was elected governor of the state in 1994 and served two terms, leaving office in 2003. He focused on education and shrinking the size of the government while facilitating a budget surplus of $1 billion by the time he left office.
According to his campaign site and the Conservative Daily News candidate profile, he is an avid athlete whose accomplishments range from participating in triathlons (including invitation-only events in Hawaii), climbing four of the Seven Summits (including a Mount Everest climb in 2003), bike challenges in North America and Europe, and completion of the Bataan Death March, a grueling 25-mile desert hike in combat boots and a backpack weighing 35 pounds.
He was married to his first wife Denise from 1977 to 2005, and almost two years after their divorce was finalized she passed away from heart failure. He has two grown children and lives in a home that he built himself in Taos with Kate Prusack, a real estate agent from Santa Fe and his fiancée since 2009.
Three candidates are still vying for the Green Party nomination, but as of now there is no clear frontrunner. Roseanne Barr, the actress best known for her sitcom “Roseanne,” announced her candidacy on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno in August and officially filed with the Green Party in January. Also running under the Green party are Dr. Kent Mesplay and Dr. Jill Stein. Mesplay was born in Papua New Guinea and has a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering. He is a Green National Committee delegate from California and has run under the Green Party in the last two presidential elections. Stein is a physician from Massachusetts and an environmental health activist, as well as a co-author of two books.
Representative Virgil Goode, Jr. is the candidate for the Constitution Party. He previously represented the 5th District of Virginia (which covers most of central Virginia) from 1997 to 2009, when he was defeated by Tom Periello. Goode will not be on the ballot in enough states to be a mathematically viable candidate, having access to only 152 of the necessary 270 electoral votes.
Surprising Democratic primary results in West Virginia revealed an especially unusual candidate. Felon Keith Russell Judd won 42% of votes against President Obama. A current prisoner in the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institute in Beaumont, TX, Judd’s earliest release date is June 24, 2013. He is incarcerated for felony extortion connected to threats he made at the University of New Mexico in 1999. It has been suggested that Judd’s unexpected success is due to a degree of racism in West Virginia voters, according to an ABC news story.
Third parties and Independent candidates offer alternatives to the two main candidates and provide different ideas. They can also take votes away from one of the major candidates, changing the dynamic of the election. Supporting them does not mean a “throwaway vote” because they represent an important part of the American population. Even if third party candidates do not get elected into office, they still affect change. The presence of third party candidates is an exciting element of America’s political system.
For more information, please visit the campaign sites of any of these candidates.