WorldView:'There is nothing wrong with this country that a good election can't fix."
So spoke US presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968, though you could be forgiven for thinking they are the words of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as he continues his search for a solution to the current crisis in the Palestinian territories.
Indeed, while Hamas supporters celebrated the first anniversary of the Islamist group's victory in the Palestinian legislative elections last week, Abbas was preoccupied with his attempt to oust them from power by holding early presidential and parliamentary elections.
As senior Fatah official Saeb Erekat has explained, the options for the future are either "bullets or ballots" and his boss, Abbas, had chosen "ballots".
One can only sympathise with Abbas's predicament.
His effort to forge a national unity government with Hamas appears impossible to achieve.
So far nothing has come of meetings with the Islamist group's leaders - whether in Gaza, Cairo or Damascus - and the talking will be over for good if nothing comes of Sunday's invitation from Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah to Abbas and Hamas to travel to Mecca to meet once more.
As such, Abbas's recourse to calling for early elections is undoubtedly due to his desire to find a political solution to end what he has termed the "vicious circle" of violence and to prevent the escalation in fighting between pro-Fatah forces and those loyal to Hamas from spilling over into outright civil war.
Over the last few days these clashes have left over twenty dead and dozens wounded and there has been a spate of kidnappings as well as the burning-out of the Palestinian Authority's education ministry.
But despite Abbas's sincerity in looking for a way to avoid civil war, it is doubtful that holding early elections alone is the answer.
The next elections are officially scheduled to take place in 2010 and the Hamas leadership is adamant that any decision by Abbas to go to the polls before then is "unconstitutional" and a "real coup", as Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh and his foreign minister Mahmoud Zahar have respectively termed it.
Such outspoken defiance on this issue highlights the fact that it has been Abbas's failure to act assertively in the face of the Hamas challenge over the last four years that has, to a great extent, created the current crisis.
During his brief prime ministerial tenure in 2003, Abbas made no effort to disarm the numerous armed factions, including Hamas, which were then far less powerful than they are now.
Instead, he attempted to win their consent for a temporary suspension of hostilities.
When he succeeded long-time Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in January 2005 as Palestinian president he continued to insist that he would not resort to the use of force against the various militant Palestinian groups and would rather persuade them to abandon the armed struggle through inclusion in the political process and the promise of Israeli acts of goodwill toward Palestinians.
Despite the fact that he was directly threatened by Hamas and was engaged in a battle with the Islamist group to fill the power vacuum in Gaza after Arafat's death, he also decided to incorporate elements of the rejectionist militias into the official security organs and, at the same time, failed to consolidate his hold on the security services or to appoint new and loyal officers.
All this played into the hands of Hamas, which was able to consolidate its military strength and role in society while at the same time blaming Abbas and his Fatah party for the chaos and disorder that continued unabated during his period of rule.
Abbas also missed the opportunity to impose law and order following Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in the summer of 2005 and refused to heed the call of his long-time backers in the "international quartet" of the UN, US, EU and Russia that the Palestinian leadership must "maintain law and order and dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructure" following the Gaza withdrawal.
It was this failure that was largely responsible for Hamas's success in the January 2006 legislative elections, which led to the tenuous powersharing arrangement between Hamas and Fatah that is now in a state of almost total collapse.
And so Abbas has been left with little choice but to declare: "We'll go back to the people and let the people decide."
He is no stranger to taking calculated political risks or acting unilaterally when he has felt it vital.
In 2003 he resigned as the Palestinian Authority's first prime minister only to succeed Arafat as Palestinian president in January 2005, while he also twice postponed the parliamentary elections, which had been originally intended for July - and then November - 2005, as a way of draining the groundswell of support for Hamas.
This latter decision to postpone the elections ultimately backfired when they were finally held in January 2006 and Hamas stormed to victory.
There is no guarantee now that an electorate which views Abbas as a puppet of Israel and the US - and which believes the call for new elections to be unfair - will not return Hamas with an even bigger majority.
But, even if Fatah is successful and regains power, the reality is that a change of government alone won't reverse the slide towards civil war that Abbas so desperately wants to prevent.
That can never be achieved until he can impose the rule of law and central control over the means of violence within Palestinian society. And at no point during his time at the top has Abbas been able, or even willing, to do that.
Dr Rory Miller is a senior lecturer in Mediterranean Studies at King's College, London and author ofIreland and the Palestine Question, 1948-2004.