Lincoln Davenport Chafee ( /ˈtʃeɪfiː/; born March 26, 1953) is an American politician who has been the 74th Governor of Rhode Island since January 2011. Prior to his election as governor, Chafee served in the United States Senate as a Republican from 1999 until losing his Senate re-election bid in 2006 to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. In 2007, he left the Republican Party and became an independent. He is the first independent to serve as Governor of Rhode Island since John Collins, who served 1786–1790.

A Rhode Island native educated at Phillips Academy and Brown University, Chafee worked as a professional farrier for seven years before entering state politics in 1985. He was a delegate to the Rhode Island State Constitutional Convention, a member of the Warwick, Rhode Island city council, and later the mayor of Warwick. Chafee was appointed to the United States Senate in 1999 upon the death of his father, Senator John Chafee, and was elected in the 2000 Senate election for a full six-year term.

Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is a former United States Ambassador to Indonesia, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, President of the World Bank, and former dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, working on issues of international economic development, Africa and public-private partnerships, and chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council.

He is a leading neoconservative. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, he was "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and ... its most hawkish advocate."Donald Rumsfeld in his interview with Fox News on February 8, 2011 said that Wolfowitz was the first to bring up Iraq after 9/11 attacks during a meeting at presidential retreat at Camp David. After serving two years, he resigned as president of the World Bank Group ending what a Reuters report called "a protracted battle over his stewardship, prompted by his involvement in a high-paying promotion for his companion."

Sarah Louise Palin ⁱ/ˈpeɪlɨn/ (née Heath; born February 11, 1964) is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice presidency. Her book Going Rogue has sold more than two million copies. Since January 2010, she has provided political commentary for Fox News, and hosted a television show, Sarah Palin's Alaska. Five million viewers tuned in for the first episode, a record for The Learning Channel.

She was elected to Wasilla City Council in 1992 and became mayor of Wasilla in 1996. In 2003, after an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor, she was appointed Chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, responsible for overseeing the state's oil and gas fields for safety and efficiency. The youngest person and first woman to be elected Governor of Alaska, Palin held the office from December 2006 until her resignation in July 2009. She has since endorsed and campaigned for the Tea Party movement, as well as several candidates in the 2010 midterm elections. From the time of her Vice Presidential nomination in 2008, Palin was considered a potential candidate for the 2012 presidential election until she announced in October 2011 that she would not run.

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.

Susan Elaine Eisenhower (born December 31, 1951) is a consultant, author, and expert on international security and relations between the Russian Federation and the United States of America. She is the daughter of John Eisenhower, and the granddaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower. She was married to space scientist Roald Sagdeev, formerly the director of the Russian Space Research Institute and a Hero of Socialist Labor. Despite the end of the marriage several years ago, they remain friends and business partners.

Susan Eisenhower is President of the Eisenhower Group, Inc, which provides strategic counsel on political, business and public affairs projects. She has consulted for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies doing business in the emerging markets of the former Soviet Union and for a number of major institutions engaged in the energy field.

She is the Chairman of Leadership and Public Policy Programs & Chairman Emeritus of the Eisenhower Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. and in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania part of Gettysburg College. Eisenhower served as the president of the Eisenhower Institute twice, and later as Chairman. During that time, she became known for her work in the former Soviet Union and in the energy field. Eisenhower is a Senior Director of Stonebridge International and a governing board member of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute .