Obama 2012?

Looters target Coney Island after Sandy sweeps through

President Obama got welcome final-week polling news Wednesday as new surveys in several keenly contested states showed him holding or expanding a lead.

In Wisconsin, a new survey from the Marquette University Law School showed Obama grabbing an 8-point lead, 51%-43%, over GOP challenger Mitt Romney among likely voters. The poll also showed Democratic Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin clinging to a 4-point edge over Republican Tommy Thompson in a race that could prove pivotal to control of the chamber.

A Marquette poll taken in mid-October in the wake of Obama’s disastrous debate performance in Denver had given the president just a 1-point edge over Romney, 49%-48%.

In Ohio, a Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll gave Obama a 50%-45% edge over Romney. Obama has held a consistent lead in Ohio polls that Romney so far has been unable to erase.

Yes, we can! One more term!

I decided to support Barack Obama pretty early in the Democratic primary, around spring of 2007. But unlike so many of his supporters, I never experienced a kind of emotional response to his candidacy. I never felt his election would change everything about American politics or government, that it would lead us out of the darkness. Nothing Obama did or said ever made me well up with tears.

Possibly for that same reason, I have never felt even a bit of the crushing sense of disappointment that at various times has enveloped so many Obama voters. I supported Obama because I judged him to have a keen analytical mind, grasping both the possibilities and the limits of activist government, and possessed of excellent communicative talents. I thought he would nudge government policy in an incrementally better direction. I consider his presidency an overwhelming success.

I can understand why somebody who never shared Obama’s goals would vote against his reelection. If you think the tax code already punishes the rich too heavily, that it’s not government’s role to subsidize health insurance for those who can’t obtain it, that the military shouldn’t have to let gays serve openly, and so on, then Obama’s presidency has been a disaster, but you probably didn’t vote for him last time. For anybody who voted for Obama in 2008 and had even the vaguest sense of his platform, the notion that he has fallen short of some plausible performance threshold seems to me unfathomable.

Wow, jc. I read the article, and it is "great"!

Yet far from being the voice of fiscal prudence, Mr Romney wants to start with huge tax cuts (which will disproportionately favour the wealthy), while dramatically increasing defence spending. Together those measures would add $7 trillion to the ten-year deficit. He would balance the books through eliminating loopholes (a good idea, but he will not specify which ones) and through savage cuts to programmes that help America’s poor (a bad idea, which will increase inequality still further). At least Mr Obama, although he distanced himself from Bowles-Simpson, has made it clear that any long-term solution has to involve both entitlement reform and tax rises. Mr Romney is still in the cloud-cuckoo-land of thinking you can do it entirely through spending cuts: the Republican even rejected a ratio of ten parts spending cuts to one part tax rises. Backing business is important, but getting the macroeconomics right matters far more.

Our American endorsement
Which one?
America could do better than Barack Obama; sadly, Mitt Romney does not fit the bill