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Editorial
President Obama’s Success
Published: November 6, 2012 780 Comments
President Obama’s dramatic re-election victory was not a sign that a fractured nation had finally come together on Election Day. But it was a strong endorsement of economic policies that stress job growth, health care reform, tax increases and balanced deficit reduction — and of moderate policies on immigration, abortion and same-sex marriage. It was a repudiation of Reagan-era bromides about tax-cutting and trickle-down economics, and of the politics of fear, intolerance and disinformation.
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Times Topic:United States Elections
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Readers’ Comments
"I voted Romney. Obama won. Time to give him what he wants. ... Voters have spoken."Bud, McKinney, Texas
The president’s victory depended heavily on Midwestern Rust Belt states like Ohio, where the bailout of the auto industry — which Mr. Obama engineered and Mr. Romney opposed — proved widely popular for the simple reason that it worked.
More broadly, Midwestern voters seemed to endorse the president’s argument that the government has a significant role in creating private-sector jobs and boosting the economy. They rejected Mr. Romney’s position that Washington should simply stay out of such matters and let the free market work its will.
The Republicans’ last-ditch attempt to steal away Pennsylvania by stressing unemployment was a failure there and elsewhere. Voters who said unemployment was a major issue voted mainly for Mr. Obama.
Mr. Romney, it turns out, made a fatal decision during the primaries to endorse a hard line on immigration, which earned him a resounding rejection by Latinos. By adopting a callous position that illegal immigrants could be coerced into “self-deportation,” and by praising Arizona’s cruel immigration law, Mr. Romney made his road in Florida and several other crucial states much harder. Only one-third of voters said illegal immigrants should all be deported, while two-thirds endorsed some path to legal residency and citizenship. The Republican approach, if unchanged, will cost them dearly in the future.
Still, Mr. Obama’s victory did not show a united country. Richer Americans supported Mr. Romney, while poorer Americans tended to vote for Mr. Obama. There also remained clear divisions among voters by gender, age, race and religion.
African-Americans and Hispanics overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama. White men voted for Mr. Romney; he won among those who said they opposed gay marriage, wanted to outlaw abortion, or favored mass deportation of illegal immigrants. None of those are majority positions in this country anymore.
Mr. Romney’s strategy of blaming Mr. Obama for just about everything, while serenely assuring Americans he had a plan to cut the deficit without raising taxes or making major cuts in Medicare, simply did not work.
A solid majority of voters said President George W. Bush was to blame for the state of the economy rather than Mr. Obama. And voters showed more subtlety in their economic analysis than Mr. Romney probably expected. Those who thought the housing market and unemployment were the nation’s biggest problems said they voted for Mr. Obama. Those most concerned about taxes voted heavily for Mr. Romney.
Significantly, 60 percent of voters said taxes should be raised either on the rich or on everyone. Only 35 percent said they should not be raised at all; that group, naturally, went heavily for Mr. Romney. The polling made it clear that Americans were unhappy with the economic status quo, and substantial numbers of voters said the economy was getting worse. But Mr. Romney did not seem to persuade voters that the deficit was a crushing problem. Only 1 in 10 voters said the deficit was the most important issue facing the country.
Republicans had to be disappointed in the results of their unrelenting assault on Mr. Obama’s health care reform law. Only around a quarter of Americans said it should be repealed in its entirety.
People who were comfortable with the rightward slide of the Republican Party (as measured by their comfort with the Tea Party) voted heavily for Mr. Romney.
But Christopher Murphy’s victory over Linda McMahon in the Senate race in Connecticut, Joe Donnelly’s defeat of Richard Mourdock in Indiana’s Senate race and Claire McCaskill’s defeat of Todd Akin in the Missouri Senate race showed the price the Republicans are paying for nominating fringe candidates in their primaries.
The polls were heartening in that they indicated that a solid majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, and that half of Americans now say their states should recognize marriages between same-sex couples.
That the race came down to a relatively small number of voters in a relatively small number of states did not speak well for a national election apparatus that is so dependent on badly engineered and badly managed voting systems around the country. The delays and breakdowns in voting machines were inexcusable.
A version of this editorial appeared in print on November 7, 2012, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: President Obama’s Success.
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780 Comments
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I hope that whoever analyzes the election results will focus, not on peripherals such as Sandy, but rather the central facts: Obama's record of support for the middle-class (symbolized by his rescue of GM); his support for reproductive rights -- and his phenomenal ground strategy. I was one of many, many thousands of volunteers organized by the campaign to canvas and call battleground states. People also could make such calls at home, by logging onto the Obama campaign website. We had our own version of Facebook, with local "pages" for each group. My group had over 200 such members, held two phone banks per week, and sent weekly buses into PA.
Obama did not rely on ads to sway voters; he is a community organizer, and he organized. He had a strategy that focused on holding key battleground states, and he deployed his troops accordingly.
It was a people-to-people campaign. If you want to know why he won, look to the man, and the people. We won it together.
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NEVERTHELESS they supported the man who has slogged through the trenches, who has tried his very best, who is a man of compassion and character. I truly think this vote reflects great courage and resolve on the part of the American people.
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I'd encourage any Member of Congress, of either House, to seriously evaluate any presidential initiative -- always have. But for any such initiative to succeed, it will need to be tolerable to the convictions of those considering it. Remember, every member of the House stood for re-election tonight, too, and those who were elected did so every bit as legitimately as Barack Obama; and they have a job to do, too.
The president doesn't have any right to unquestioned acquiescence by Congress. And if all he does is seek to re-introduce old ideas already rejected, without having first adjusted them to arrive at a position tolerable to all sides, then those ideas almost certainly will be rejected again. If he wants to keep the ideas and obtain a different outcome, he's going to need to sell them far better than he did in his first term.
And, you might note that while a few Tea Party candidates were rejected, Republicans nevertheless gained ground just about everywhere. Where there were 29 Republican governors, and 26 with Republican state legislatures, there will now be more.
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Saddened to see a sea of well dressed white guys -- no blacks, Asians or Latinos in sight -- as Gov. Romney gave his concession speech. I would love a resurgent moderate Republican party where I could find candidates to vote for without having to worry about their theology and misunderstanding of basic science and biology.
Gov. Romney's 19 pants on fire fact-check record vs. just a couple for Pres. Obama, says more than I ever could about the vicious dissembling and just plain lying that characterized the Romney-Ryan campaign. The best man clearly won.
For those who worry about creeping socialism, I would put Obama to the right of Harry Truman and just slightly to the left of Dwight Eisenhower. We have big problems, but I'm certainly grateful that that under Obama we are unlikely to follow the Europeans into the dead end strategy of austerity.
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And for that we should give a shout-out to President Carter's grandson, James Carter 4th, who unearthed the partial video on YouTube and brought it to nationwide attention. A moment of truth that helped voters realize what defined this "Etch A Sketch" shape-shifting candidate.
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1. He's not running again.
2. If the GOP House tries the same tactics again, it will be much easier to expose them as the Party of No, because that was one of the narratives that came out in the campaign. The GOP may imagine that in 2 years they can make gains in the congressional elections, as in 2010, but if they try the same stubborn obstructionism, this time they will be easier to expose.
3. Obama has learned some useful lessons about the GOP's willingness to go to extremes; he is not likely to place so much faith in bipartisanship.
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This should not be surprising given the nonsensical comments about God and rape coming from senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who, incidentally, lost his bid in Indiana.
This election certainly looks like a watershed moment where traditional sentiment and policy directives that were enough to secure victory are no longer applicable.
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I'm optimistic because, just like the Socialists in France, Greece, and Portugal, the liberals here are soon going to learn the hard way that some of what Mitt Romney said is true. Private industry really is where the jobs come from. Competitiveness matters. Redistribution is necessary, but a way has to be found for entrepreneurship to survive.
I'm optimistic because I think President Obama understands this. He said tonight that he wants our children to live in a land of opportunity. I think he understands that socialist paradises like Greece are not that land. Business has a future here, even if its old Party does not. Our country is in good hands.
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I agree with your thoughts and think the Republican party is out of touch with America. Am I crazy about Obama? No. Was he the better choice of the two for America? I think yes. He put forth his platform. He did not tell the voters, "Trust me on the details". I waited and I waited for Romney to give details of his plan for America but nothing was forthcoming. What was apparent were the outright lies to the American public. And most of the people could spot a phony. Oh how I wish the Republican party would return to the days of moderation. But with Faux News, Rush Limbaugh, Citizen's United, and the Karl Rove's of the world, I won't be holding my breath and will (probably) remain an Independent.
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...and as accurate as the prediction of the Supreme Court's striking down the ACA. Keep the predictions coming, by all means.
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Those Republicans who now claim that Romney was not conservative enough to win the election are deluding themselves. He simply was not moderate enough. Extreme GOP positions on social issues, trickle down tax policies that benefit only the wealthy, ego-driven defense funding that we can't afford, and persistent alienation of non-white voters will bury their party's future in a coffin of hubris. As much as I might enjoy watching the shipwreck if they double down on this deadly course, America truly needs a viable Republican party with more moderate positions that don't completely alienate non-partisan voters.
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The “fiscal cliff” resolution will be a huge test for Obama. He needs to start campaigning on that issue to persuade the public of the historical truth that higher taxes on the wealthy have never caused a recession nor have lower taxes on the wealthy ever caused a boom or even a recovery.
This test will help us to see whether in this term Obama will better grasp the differences among compromise, conciliation and mediation. He cannot be mediator; and conciliation only leads to one’s own compromises, not to mutually beneficial compromises.
Ted Kennedy is famously quoted for saying that one should “never let a perfect solution be the enemy of a good solution.” On the other hand, he did not mean one should accept a bad solution, which Obama has previously done.
Further, Obama may need reminding that FDR welcomed the hatred of his political opposition. It is far more important to be respected by one’s opponents than to be liked by them.
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I don’t think Mr. Romney is evil. But I do think his quest, his unquenchable thirst for power blinded him. He lost his self and sold his soul. When CEO’s of companies email employees suggesting they vote for a candidate, when 47% of the country are considered write-offs, when vitriolic, racist sentiment is thinly, if at all, veiled on “respectable” news outlets and a small group of extremists try to turn back the clock, America--that city on a hill-- was at stake. Yesterday, we stood at the threshold when we nearly returned to a time of the caste system, when the royals controlled the lives of the masses. But, in the end, we came through and preserved this resilient democracy. I am so proud of my America.
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