What’s the best case Barack Obama can make for re-election? Let’s start with the stunning record of accomplishments he has compiled over the last four years:
• General Motors and Chrysler are thriving — a long, long way from the edge of insolvency, which is where Obama found them on his first day in office. Bridge loans and managed bankruptcies turned them around, and stable growth followed soon after. Is there anything more important to people here in Michigan?
• The economy has grown jobs for the past 30 months, after hemorrhaging 4.9 million in 2009. The bleeding began to stop when Obama convinced Congress to authorize $831 billion in federal stimulus funds, and employment has grown, slowly but inexorably, since the beginning of 2010.
• The Affordable Care Act, a broad set of private-sector and government reforms, is bringing millions of formerly uninsured Americans under the umbrella of reliable health care. It’s a quantum leap forward that has bested both legislative and legal challenges.
• Of the two costly wars started during the Bush administration, one is over and the other winding down. Osama bin Laden and at least 14 other al-Qaida leaders are dead, and their terrorist network is in tatters. Meanwhile, Moammar Gadhafi, responsible for the deaths of more Americans than anyone except bin Laden, was deposed with U.S. help. Not since the fall of the Berlin Wall have the nation’s geopolitical fortunes improved so markedly.
• That’s to say nothing of the president’s lower-profile victories: for women, who regained the right to seek legal redress for pay discrimination when Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law; and for the thousands of gay and lesbian Americans who won the right to serve their country without lying about who they are.
On the strength of those achievements alone, Obama’s second four-year term ought to be a no-brainer. Most two-term presidents can’t claim to have gotten as much done.
The country is safer. Its economy and its largest industry have been restored to health. And health care reform, fought out over 50 years in the U.S. Congress, has at last begun in earnest. When Republicans say pejoratively that Obama “can’t run on his record,” they’re peddling partisan nonsense and indulging a myopic fiction.
The Free Press enthusiastically endorses Barack Hussein Obama for four more years as president.
The next four years
But re-election campaigns aren’t just about the first four years; the next four, and where the country is headed, are equally important.
By that measure, Obama’s case for a second term still trumps former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s argument for a change of leadership. But Obama must focus his second term on two priorities: faster, more robust job creation and a plan to combat the country’s long-term economic imbalances.
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It’s true that the economy is on a 30-month run of job growth, but also true that this recovery has been slow.
Some of the recovery’s sluggishness stems from conditions that pre-date Obama’s presidency: the shift toward high-skill jobs for which too many Americans are not qualified or trained; lingering trade deficits that continue to suppress demand for American products in China and other overseas markets; and the fear that growing debt could spark inflation and interest rate hikes that will discourage hiring.
Some of it is about recent Republican intransigence — bull-headed opposition to a second jobs bill and to a national bank to finance the construction and repair of aging infrastructure.
In his second term, Obama must overcome all these impediments to faster job growth. He’ll need to persuade lawmakers to reinvest in training and education, get new, tougher trade pacts approved, and work with Congress to pass a second, more-focused jobs bill.
One place to start: Government employment has plunged by 1.2 million since December 2008, according to the U.S. Labor Department. A focused plan to get more cops, firefighters and teachers back to work — along with investment in the kind of infrastructure projects that boost construction jobs — could lower the unemployment rate at least another point.
The country’s long-term economic sustainability also deserves the president’s rapt attention in a second term. Obama squandered an important opportunity last December when he failed to embrace the ideas put forward by the Simpson-Bowles commission. The recommendations yoked sweeping tax reform and spending cuts (from a bipartisan perspective that provided lots for both sides to hate) and offered a framework for a serious effort to tame the deficit.
Obama would have an even stronger argument for re-election if he’d taken the commission’s ball and run with it.
He’ll need to grab it Nov. 7 if he’s to help Congress avoid the “fiscal cliff” — a set of massive, reckless cuts and automatic tax increases scheduled to take effect Jan. 1 unless Democrats and Republicans can agree on a more thoughtful plan for reducing America’s long-term debt.
Romney's unbelievable plan
Mitt Romney has his own record of successful governance. He led Massachusetts ably for one term, and he rescued the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics from impending disaster. He is a Detroit native and the son of an auto chief and former governor whose legacy still evokes bipartisan respect.
But as a candidate, Romney has been a shape-shifter, his message twisting and reconfiguring itself to fit the needs of the moment. And his economic plans are a rehash of those responsible for the fiscal crisis that greeted Obama in 2009.
Romney would cut taxes more deeply than even George W. Bush did (a 20% additional cut, across the board) and eliminate taxes on dividends, interest and capital gains for most payers. He’d also lop the top bracket off the corporate tax rate.
How would he pay for the estimated $4.9.trillion in lost revenue? He won’t say, except to promise that a combination of loophole closures, unspecified spending cuts and economic growth will cover it.
An easy test for the seriousness of a Republican promising spending cuts is how willing he or she is to reduce defense department outlays, the nation’s largest domestic spending category. In Romney’s case, the number’s zero — no defense cuts at all, and in fact he wants to hand the Pentagon extra funding it hasn’t requested.
The cuts he’s promised to make — 5% in discretionary, nondefense spending, including pink slips for Big Bird & Co. — fall far short of closing the $4.9-trillion gap.
Romney also says his tax cuts will grow the economy enough to make up the difference, the old “tax cuts pay for themselves” line that helped Bush trash the economy 10 years ago.
The nation has no appetite for Act II of that operatic tragedy.
Foreign policy needs steady hand
Even more troubling has been Romney’s about-face performances in the closing weeks of the campaign. He was a hard-liner during the GOP primaries and the convention, but in the debates with Obama, he has been someone almost entirely different — “Moderate Mitt” is the term some pundits have coined.
It’s unclear whether Romney is playing for political advantage, or whether he’s just unsure of who he really is. Either is unacceptable in the White House, where the president needs certainty not just about what he believes, but why — and he must be able to rally others to his cause.
Romney’s self-ambiguity suggests he’s not ready to be president.
And if Romney isn’t up to America’s domestic challenges, he’s certainly not ready for the role of commander in chief. He’s moved from seeming ready to declare war on Iran during his first debate to saying, by the third, that America can’t kill its way out of the global war on terror.
With the myriad, significant conflicts in the Middle East, southeast Asia and Africa, not to mention the U.S.’ perpetually tense relations with China and Russia, the president has to have a steady, learned hand on the tiller.
Romney does not have that hand.
Obama’s first term proved he can deliver at home under the worst imaginable circumstances, battling multiple crises that individually would have sunk lesser presidents; abroad, Obama has restored American credibility and influence that was frittered away by former President George W. Bush. With a refocus on job creation and long-term sustainability, his second four years could impress even more.