Washington Post endorses President Barack Obama

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Washington Post, with a stable of Neocon conservative syndicated columnists who pollute the editorial pages of Arizona newspapers, today in an editorial board opinion endorsed President Barack Obama for a second term in a scathing rebuke to Willard "Mittens" Romney. I hear that Jennifer Rubin and Charles Krauthammer are threatening to jump from the roof of the Washington Post building (just kidding). Endorsement: Four more years:

MUCH OF THE 2012 presidential campaign has dwelt on the past, but the
key questions are who could better lead the country during the next
four years — and, most urgently, who is likelier to put the government
on a sounder financial footing.

That second question will come rushing at the winner as soon as the
votes are tallied. Absent any action, a series of tax hikes and
spending cuts will take effect Jan. 1 that might well knock the country
back into recession. This will be a moment of peril but also of
opportunity. How the president-elect navigates it will go a long way
toward determining the success of his presidency and the health of the
nation.

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 first term. He did not end, as he promised he would,
“our chronic avoidance of tough decisions” on fiscal matters. But Mr.
Obama is committed to the only approach that can succeed: a balance of
entitlement reform and revenue increases. Mr. Romney, by contrast, has embraced his party’s reality-defying ideology that
taxes can always go down but may never go up. Along that road lies a
future in which interest payments crowd out everything else a government
should do, from defending the nation to caring for its poor and sick to
investing in its children. Mr. Romney’s future also is one in which an
ever-greater share of the nation’s wealth resides with the nation’s
wealthy, at a time when inequality already is growing.

Even
granting the importance of the fiscal issue, a case might still be made
for Mr. Romney if Mr. Obama’s first term had been a failure; if Mr.
Romney were more likely to promote American security and leadership
abroad; or if the challenger had shown himself superior in temperament,
capacity and character. In fact, not one of these is true.

Start
with the first-term record. We were disappointed that Mr. Obama allowed
the bipartisan recommendations of his fiscal commission to wither and
die and that he and Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) failed to seal a
fiscal deal in the summer of 2011. [WaPo loves the "Catfood Commission."] Mr. Obama alienated Congress and
business leaders by isolating himself inside a tight White House circle
that manages to be both arrogant and thin-skinned. Too often his
administration treats business as an obstacle rather than a partner. He
hardly tried to achieve the immigration reform and climate-change policy
he promised.

But economic head winds and an uncompromising
opposition explain some of these failures — and render that much more
impressive the substantial accomplishments of Mr. Obama’s first term.

Foremost
among these is the president’s leadership in helping to steady an
economy that was in free fall when he took office. It may be hard to
recall how frightening that time was, as the nation’s finances were
close to seizing up. President George W. Bush had taken the first steps
away from the abyss, winning approval from a balky Congress for the
Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), but nonetheless he had bequeathed
a mess to his successor.

With no time to catch his breath, Mr.
Obama designed and won approval for a stimulus bill that slowed job loss
and helped restore confidence. He engineered a rescue of the auto
industry. The steady experts he put in charge of economic policy,
notably Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, navigated between the
Democratic Party’s left, which urged populist measures that would have
been expensive and ineffectual, and an obstructionist Republican Party,
which at times seemed content to inflict great harm on the country. The
industrial-policy element of the recovery plan, favoring high-speed rail
where it’s not needed and electric cars that consumers won’t buy,
wasted a lot of money. But on balance the administration, working with
the Federal Reserve, succeeded in its core mission. The rebound of the
Dow Jones Industrial Average from 6,626 in March 2009 to above 13,000
today is no comfort to the many Americans who remain unemployed or
poorer than before the crisis. But it reflects a recovery of the faith
upon which every economy depends.

Mr. Obama’s second signal
accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, will go a long way when fully
implemented toward ending the scandal of 45 million Americans being
without health insurance. It also could slow the unaffordable rise in
health-care costs, though it is hardly a full answer to that challenge.

Mr.
Obama advanced the leading civil-rights struggle of the day when he
ended the military’s discrimination against gay men and lesbians and
declared his support for same-sex marriage. He took an important step
against climate change by promulgating, and persuading industry to
support, ambitious fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks.

Mr.
Obama continued Mr. Bush’s generous campaign against HIV/AIDS,
especially in Africa. He prodded states toward useful reforms in
teacher accountability and school choice. Though he failed to champion
immigration reform, his Justice Department stood up to the worst
harassment of immigrants in Republican-governed states such as Arizona
and Alabama. He peppered his Cabinet with leaders of substance,
including Hillary Rodham Clinton at State and Arne Duncan at Education,
and he nominated and won confirmation for two well-qualified Supreme
Court justices.

Overseas, too, there were successes and failures.
Mr. Obama’s administration vigorously pursued al-Qaeda and tracked down
its leader, Osama bin Laden. He supported a popular uprising against
Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi. He recognized the importance of
bolstering allies in Asia against Chinese bullying, and he opened trade
talks with Asian nations intended to encourage an alternative to China’s
state-sponsored, often corrupt capitalism.

On the other hand, he
was hesitant and inconstant in responding to the two greatest and most
unexpected foreign-policy opportunities of his presidency, the
pro-democracy uprising in Iran in 2009 and the Arab Spring two years
later. Mr. Obama kept the United States on the sidelines as Syria
plunged into civil war, costing more than 30,000 lives — most of them
civilians — and breeding extremism that may destabilize a half-dozen
countries. He failed to capitalize on America’s decade-long commitment
to Iraq by securing a presence there after ending the U.S. military
mission, and his ambivalence regarding Afghanistan — sending more
troops, but with artificial deadlines and no clear commitment to their
success — promises trouble in coming years. [There's the WaPo Neocon war mongers we all know!]

Mr. Romney has
criticized that record, often persuasively. But his policy prescriptions
— on Afghanistan, Iran and Syria, to name three — hardly differ.
Neither he nor his running mate has foreign-policy experience. And his
unscripted moments have not inspired confidence: calling Russia
America’s greatest foe, for example, or delivering intemperate outbursts
while the United States was trying to negotiate an exit for a human
rights activist in China or when its diplomats in the Middle East came
under attack. Mr. Romney has offered no evidence that he would do better in the world.

Which
brings us to the third test: What kind of case has Mr. Romney made for
himself? He promises, appropriately, to focus on recovery and job
creation. Though his political résumé is thin, his business record is
impressive and he has managed a disciplined campaign. Perhaps his
administration would be more pragmatic than his campaign rhetoric
suggests. Surely he understands the risks of further widening the
deficit. Would “moderate Mitt” occupy the White House?

The sad answer is there is no way to know what Mr. Romney really believes. His unguarded expression of contempt for 47 percent of the population seems
as sincere as anything else we’ve heard, but that’s only conjecture. At
times he has advocated a muscular, John McCain-style foreign policy,
but in the final presidential debate he positioned himself as a dove.
Before he passionately supported a fetus’s right to life, he supported a
woman’s right to abortion. His swings have been dramatic on gay rights,
gun rights, health care, climate change and immigration.
His ugly embrace of “self-deportation” during the Republican primary
campaign, and his demolition of a primary opponent, Texas Gov. Rick
Perry, for having left open a door of opportunity for illegal-immigrant
children, bespeaks a willingness to say just about anything to win.
Every politician changes his mind sometimes; you’d worry if not. But
rarely has a politician gotten so far with only one evident immutable
belief: his conviction in his own fitness for higher office.

So voters are left with the centerpiece of Mr. Romney’s campaign:
promised tax cuts that would blow a much bigger hole in the federal
budget while worsening economic inequality. His claims that he could
avoid those negative effects, which defy math and which he refuses to back up with actual proposals, are more insulting than reassuring.

By
contrast, the president understands the urgency of the problems as well
as anyone in the country and is committed to solving them in a balanced
way. In a second term, working with an opposition that we hope would be
chastened by the failure of its scorched-earth campaign against him, he
is far more likely than his opponent to succeed. That makes Mr. Obama
by far the superior choice.