2012 Presidential Election

Presidential Election 2012--a crucial watershed in United States history----will set the course for economics and domestic politics as well as international relations in the next four years. Who will the winner be? Two Harvard trained lawyers: the former Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, (JD MBA cum laude) 1975, Republican, and the incumbent President, Barack Obama, (JD magna cum laude) 1991, Democrat, will face off against each other in a national contest. PACs on either sides are investing enormous energy, time, and funds in a quest for victory. How do present challenges, national and international, relate to our nation's historical past, as well as to earlier presidential election campaigns? Will the nation's economy recover and prosper? What of United States and China relations, of conflict in the Muslim world? How would past presidents, Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Wilson, Truman and Lyndon Johnson view present crises--in a world of atomic weapons and the internet. What of the struggle for democracy and human rights. The book's author, Professor Niels C. Nielsen (Philosophy and Religion), emeritus at Rice University, invokes the historian, H. G. Wells' Time Machine. What if such an imagined device could take us back into the past and forward in the future? We need to know our place in history--to appraise its opportunities and perils. What if we could communicate with a visitor from another planet or galaxy. What could we learn about democracy, cosmology and warcraft? Religious faith lives on and its sidewinds will influence election results--as a Mormon faces off against a United Church of Christ Congregationalist. What have our candidates as well as former presidents believed about ethics, God and human destiny? What can President Obama or Governor Romney do to deliver prosperity at home and abroad? What went wrong and precipitated the Great Recession? Democracy and pledges made in the heat of campaign and electioneering may be all too soon forgotten. But American citizens, indeed, the world will have to live with the winner's policies about global warming, immigration, education and hydrogen weapons.