Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The conservative British financial rag The Economist has endorsed President Obama for a second term. It's not because they are grateful that the president righted an economy that was falling into the abyss of another Great Depression when he took office, or that the supposedly ‘Anti-Business’ Obama Is the Best President For Corporate Profits Since 1900. Oh, no. The Economist whines mightily that the Obama adiministration "bashes" big business rather than "butters them up" by telling them that they are the "masters of the universe," lord and master over all.
It is because The Economist says the Tea-Publican Party is batshit crazy insane and should not be in charge of the economy — they are in "the
cloud-cuckoo-land of thinking." 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.
* * *
[E]lections are about choosing somebody to run a country. And this choice
turns on two questions: how good a president has Mr. Obama been,
especially on the main issues of the economy and foreign policy? And can
America really trust the ever-changing Mitt Romney to do a better job?
On that basis, the Democrat narrowly deserves to be re-elected.
Mr. Obama’s first term has been patchy. On the economy, the most
powerful argument in his favour is simply that he stopped it all being a
lot worse. America was in a downward economic spiral when he took over,
with its banks and carmakers in deep trouble and unemployment rising at
the rate of 800,000 a month. His responses—an aggressive stimulus,
bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, putting the banks through a
sensible stress test and forcing them to raise capital (so that they are
now in much better shape than their European peers)—helped avert a
Depression. That is a hard message to sell on the doorstep when growth
is sluggish and jobs scarce; but it will win Mr. Obama some plaudits from
history, and it does from us too.
Two other things count, on balance, in his favour. One is foreign
policy, where he was also left with a daunting inheritance. Mr. Obama has
refocused George Bush’s “war on terror” more squarely on terrorists,
killing Osama bin Laden, stepping up drone strikes (perhaps too
liberally, see article)
and retreating from Iraq and Afghanistan (in both cases too quickly for
our taste). After a shaky start with China, American diplomacy has made
a necessary “pivot” towards Asia. . .
* * *
The other qualified achievement is health reform. Even to a newspaper
with no love for big government, the fact that over 40m people had no
health coverage in a country as rich as America was a scandal. . .
* * *
Mr. Obama’s shortcomings have left ample room for a pragmatic Republican,
especially one who could balance the books and overhaul government.
Such a candidate briefly flickered across television screens in the
first presidential debate. This newspaper would vote for that Mitt
Romney, just as it would for the Romney who ran Democratic Massachusetts
in a bipartisan way (even pioneering the blueprint for Obamacare). The problem is that there are a lot of Romneys and they have committed themselves to a lot of dangerous things.
