FOUR MORE YEARS FOR FIRST COUPLE. Reelected US President Barack Obama celebrates his victory on stage with first lady Michelle Obama after delivering his speech in Chicago, Illinois. Photo by Scott Olson for Getty Images.
THE DEMOCRATS emerged victorious as Barack Obama won a second term as president of the United States, facing four more years in the White House.
With the exception of North Carolina, the rest of the swing states yielded to Obama rather than Republican presidential candidate and Massachusetts ex-Governor Mitt Romney, with an official electoral vote count of 332-206.
The road to recovery
Obama inherited trillions of federal debt from two wars and several oversights of the Bush administration. Election season saw both candidates grapple with preventing the impending plunge from the “fiscal cliff” into another recession, but their forking roads to recovery pulled voters from one side to the other.
The fiscal cliff is a set of austerity measures slated to take effect on the midnight of December 31, 2012 in the absence of a better alternative. It includes massive spending cuts and marks the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and breaks, shrinking the deficit at the expense of blowing up taxes for everyone.
Tax reforms by closure of loopholes on the tax code are underway. However, while Obama wanted to stabilize middle class income by increased tax rates for the wealthiest 2%, which he said could amount to nearly $1 trillion, Romney desired to maintain the tax rates of the wealthy to leave room for their enterprises to trickle down and create jobs.
Post-election, Americans are still waiting for a healthy compromise between the president and his Republican-dominated Congress. “Mending the monumental rift between the two parties will be a huge obstacle to overcome in order to get anything done,” said legal management sophomore Maricris Herrera, who comes from Chicago.
An election of values
Aside from the economy, Obama and Romney had distinct sets of antithetical and irreconcilable beliefs.
Obama led the successful bailout of the auto-industry, in response to which, the title of Romney’s New York Times op-ed read “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”
In tackling contentious issues, Obama embraced everyone, while the spending cuts on Romneys budget plan appeared highly selective. Romney promised to end Obamacare or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, block the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors or the Dream Act, and cease funding for Planned Parenthood, which offers reproductive health for uninsured women. He also sought to overturn the performance-based competition Race to the Top, which encourages educational development, and Roe vs. Wade, which serves as the legal basis for abortion in the United States.
While Obama focused on getting those worst hit by the recession out of welfare and into work, Romney called them “the 47%… who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them,” and added that his role was “not to worry about those people.”
21st century America
Romney also favored state control over federal control, saying that congressional leaders could better address the issues of their constituents directly.
Visiting political science professor from Ohio and author of American Government: A Basic Text for Non-Majors Benjamin N. Muego, PhD, told The GUIDON, however, that this was just a “code” for political partisanship. State control, he said, would condone marginalization of the Latinos, Asian Americans, African Americans and so on, especially in decidedly “red” states.
“America is plural and diverse. The one big mistake the Republicans made is to fail to acknowledge that America has changed from the America they knew growing up,” added Muego. To Romney’s detriment, most of these groups had a higher voter turnout on election day.
In an email interview with The GUIDON, Professor Masaki Hidaka, PhD, who teaches American Government and Politics at the National University of Singapore, thought that Obama won due to “his ‘ground game,’ his ability to target and message undecided voters leaning his way, and successfully get them to the polls.”
Bill Clinton’s speech during the 2012 Democratic National Convention read, “the 21st century version of the American dream is a nation of shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, shared prosperity and a shared sense of community.”
As it turned out, Obama seems to be the epitome of what Clinton calls the 21st century American president.
