Our American endorsement: Which one? FOUR years ago, The Economist endorsed Barack Obama for the White House with enthusiasm. So did millions of voters. Next week Americans will trudge to the polls far less hopefully. So (in spirit at least) will this London-based newspaper. Having endured a miserably negative campaign, the world’s most powerful country now has a much more difficult decision to make than it faced four years ago. That is in large part because of the woeful nature of Mr Obama’s campaign. The changeling Mr Obama’s first term has been patchy. Two other things count, on balance, in his favour.
All these problems could have been anticipated. The other qualified achievement is health reform. It is here that our doubts about Mr Obama set in. Above all, Mr Obama has shown no readiness to tackle the main domestic issue confronting the next president: America cannot continue to tax like a small government but spend like a big one. Many a Mitt makes a muddle Take foreign policy. You’d better believe him The devil we know. The New Yorker’s Endorsement of Barack Obama. Washington Post endorsement: Four more years for President Obama. President Barack Obama is better positioned to be that navigator than is his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. We come to that judgment with eyes open to the disappointments of Mr.
Obama’s time in office. He did not end, as he promised he would, “our chronic avoidance of tough decisions” on fiscal matters. But Mr. Even granting the importance of the fiscal issue, a case might still be made for Mr. Start with the first-term record. But economic head winds and an uncompromising opposition explain some of these failures — and render that much more impressive the substantial accomplishments of Mr. FOREMOST AMONG these is the president’s leadership in helping to steady an economy that was in free fall when he took office.
With no time to catch his breath, Mr. Mr. Mr. Mr. OVERSEAS, TOO, there were successes and failures. Mr. WHICH BRINGS us to the third test: What kind of case has Mr. The sad answer is there is no way to know what Mr. Obama for president. When he was elected president in 2008, Barack Obama was untried and untested. Just four years out of the Illinois state Senate, he had not yet proved himself as either a manager or a leader. He had emerged from relative obscurity as the result of a single convention speech and was voted into office only a few years later on a tidal wave of hope, breezing past several opponents with far more experience and far clearer claims on the job. Today, Obama is a very different candidate. He has confronted two inherited wars and the deepest recession since the Great Depression. He brought America's misguided adventure in Iraq to an end and arrested the economic downturn (though he did not fully reverse it) with the 2009 fiscal stimulus and a high-risk strategy to save the U.S. automobile industry.
Just as important, Obama brought a certain levelheadedness to the White House that had been in short supply during the previous eight years. ENDORSEMENTS: The Times' recommendations for Nov. 6. Chicago Tribune endorses Obama for re-election. October 26, 2012|Editorial President Barack Obama greets election officials as he visits Chicago to vote early in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Thursday. (Brian Cassella, Chicago Tribune) Think back. Minutes before 2 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2008, a 158-year-old investment bank obscure to most Americans -- Lehman Brothers -- became the biggest company ever to file for bankruptcy.
Credit seized. There was little reason to think the rookie president elected that November would be more than a bystander as those dominoes toppled. That record of pragmatism and focus in a moment of crisis, not his moves in any one policy realm, should help voters decide whether Obama spends the next four years gazing from a window at the Washington Monument -- or reading and writing at his red-brick manse in sweet home Chicago. Four years ago, when we endorsed Obama’s run for the White House, we said he would act with decisiveness and intellectual rigor. And Obama? And Mitt Romney? Barack Obama for Re-election.