Four more years

12 Comments »

• Craig says:

  7 November 2012 at 10:59 pm

  …..Of hollow promises.
  Just an observation:
  The media covered the race as neck and neck as far as they could.
  Then Obama raced away with it. Deliberate ? Oh yes for sure.

  • Peter Aranyi says:

    8 November 2012 at 10:40 am

    Here’s a reaction from my favourite RW vixen Louise Mensch …

    

    Goodnight all! Well done to President Obama and his supporters. #AlwaysAnotherElection 🙂

    — Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) November 7, 2012

• Craig says:

  8 November 2012 at 7:33 pm

  I can hear the Gleeful giggles from Louise from NZ.

  • Peter Aranyi says:

    9 November 2012 at 11:53 am

    Just finished on Sky News, regret Romney loss but good Fightback from a dead campaign. GOP needs its socially liberal Cameron.”

    https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/266012659940478976

• poormastery says:

  8 November 2012 at 11:09 pm

  Mr Obama seems to be a very personable individual. I think this likeability helped him in the election.

  Yet I notice that Mr Obama himself appeared to be embarrassed by his performance in his first term, constantly apologising for his failures to achieve anything, and promising better was to come.

  I personally think Mr Obama wasted his first four years in office (his only “accomplishment” being an unaffordable health policy).

  Nonetheless, he won the election easily, and deserves congratulations for this.

  Let’s hope that he achieves more in his second term than his first. I think he will.

  The bar is quite low?

  Rgds,
  *p*

  • Peter Aranyi says:

    9 November 2012 at 8:28 am

    Hi poormastery,
    Any way you look at it, whoever took over from GW Bush was given a ‘hospital pass’.

    Political and fiscal options disappeared as the GFC/the great recession started to kick in savagely, post Wall St/Banking fiascos and rolling collapses, and nearly a decade of unbudgeted military expenditure transferred massive wealth from the public balance sheet to the profits of private enterprise military-industrial-complex contractors like Halliburton.

    That, plus the hard right Tea Party-gingered GOP obstructionism (rather than loyal opposition) and determination that ‘this President fail’, attack lines like ‘war on religion’ and the bitter aim of ‘one-term-Obama’ doomed any lofty, idealistic attempt to reach across the aisle, in my opinion.

    That said, campaigns are won and lost for all sorts of reasons.

    For me, the issue was Romney’s clear identification with increased military spending (rewarding his backers, as Bush did) and what some are describing as his lack of identification with the struggles of ‘average’ people.

    I read quite a good round-up yesterday in the NZ Herald http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10845974
    which included this:

    Romney seen as “out-of touch”

    In a Huffington Post blog, public relations and marketing expert David Paine argues the Republicans didn’t do enough to build the case for Romney, instead letting Obama define him as an “out-of-touch, insensitive billionaire”.

    “People will now talk about how the Republicans lost because the platform they championed was too far to the right to appeal to mainstream Americans, but that’s not the reason Romney lost. The reason is that the Romney campaign, from a marketing standpoint, never really gave us a good reason to vote for Mitt. They gave us a lot of reasons to vote against Obama, but never effectively made the case for Romney himself.”

    Terry Madonna, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll in Pennsylvania, agrees.

    “Romney was defined early as a wealthy ‘one percenter’ who didn’t care about the middle class, who ran a business that put people out of work, shipped jobs overseas, made millions on it and won’t tell us what he did with the money,” Madonna told Fox News.

    Romney’s gaffes didn’t help his cause, from with his weird “binders full of women” comment in the second presidential debate, to dismissing 47 percent of the electorate in a leaked video.

    Neither did it help that Romney had to appeal to the conservative base of the Republican Party to win the party’s nomination before moving to the centre to appeal to moderates for the Presidential Election. Often this meant, as Carl O’Brein of the Irish Times writes, Romney was seen to shift positions on issues.

    Writer Paul Harper canvasses some other ‘issues’ like ‘media bias’, race relations, Tropical Storm Sandy, before concluding…

    Or perhaps, at the end of the day, Obama was just the better candidate.

    That’s the one I settled on. I’m not saying Obama is perfect, nor is his record. Indeed, Julian Assange called him ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’, but, at the end of the day (as John Key is so fond of saying) Obama was a better candidate than an untrustworthy Mitt Romney, and deserved another four years, in my opinion.

    – P

    • Craig says:

      9 November 2012 at 10:28 am

      “Obama was a better candidate than an untrustworthy Mitt Romney, and deserved another four years, in my opinion.”
      Agree 100%
      But its like dropping an existing Blackcap whos performing well below par for someone who is no better. Either way we are F***ed.

• Craig says:

  9 November 2012 at 10:24 am

  “Any way you look at it, whoever took over from GW Bush was given a ‘hospital pass’.”

  That’s such a cop out, he President he’s voted in to mend the issues behind him and progress the success’s. Obama did neither.

• poormastery says:

  9 November 2012 at 11:04 am

  Hi Peter,

  I suppose that my view is that it doesn’t matter much who deserved what.

  “Deserve has nothing to do with it,” (Clint Eastwood, The Unforgiven).

  Mr Obama won. Fair and square. Mitt Romney? Who cares now?

  What will Mr Obama do with his win?

  You say:

  “Any way you look at it, whoever took over from GW Bush was given a ‘hospital pass’.”

  I fear another four years of excuses.

  Perhaps we should listen to Obama himself on the issue of change?

  “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

  Okay. Much better.

  You say:

  “Political and fiscal options disappeared as the GFC/the great recession started to kick in savagely, post Wall St/Banking fiascos and rolling collapses, and nearly a decade of unbudgeted military expenditure transferred massive wealth from the public balance sheet to the profits of private enterprise military-industrial-complex contractors like Halliburton.”

  Obama says:

  “Change doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.”

  Okay. Much better.

  You say:

  “That, plus the hard right Tea Party-gingered GOP obstructionism (rather than loyal opposition) and determination that ‘this President fail’, attack lines like ‘war on religion’ and the bitter aim of ‘one-term-Obama’ doomed any lofty, idealistic attempt to reach across the aisle, in my opinion.”

  Obama says:

  “I’m in this race not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation.”

  Okay. Much better.

  In the end, there is a place for great rhetoric.

  Yet what makes a great politician?

  Today, I would subscribe to the Herr Goethe school of political thought:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe

  “Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.”

  It is not time for excuses. It is not time for looking back.

  It is time.

  For action.

  Let us hope Mr Obama makes it so…

  Rgds,
  *p*

  • Peter Aranyi says:

    9 November 2012 at 11:17 am

    Well said. Reasonable. Thanks.

    By ‘deserved’ to win, I equally mean he didn’t deserve to be turfed out.

    There’s no question in my mind that Obama and his team recognised that the soaring rhetoric of the 2008 campaign — which, in delivery, in Washington, had been blunted by the harsh economic times, the determined partisan GOP gridlock, to borrow JFK’s phrase:
    “tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace”.

    Older, wiser, perhaps disillusioned (like much of the electorate?) … no doubt that consciousness was behind Obama and his team’s far more feet-on-the-ground talk/pitch — about the work, the struggle, the effort required to move forward.

    Yes, they went negative on Romney too. Which HE deserved. In my opinion.

    – P
    Update: But it’s also wrong to say the first term Obama administration achieved nothing. Very wrong, in my view.

    • Craig says:

      9 November 2012 at 4:15 pm

      I’m sorry Peter but you are simply making unjustified excuses for the Candidate you love.
      I don’t care how you break it down. Which Obamabot website you Cut and Paste from, I cannot agree with you he absolutely deserved to be turfed out. any person with no Dog in the Race can see that. However it’s far more a reflection on very Poor Republican representation. Any Semi decent opponent would of won (IMHO)
      PoorMastery’s point about making a difference this term is highly unlikely.
      Obama had the far majority in Congress and the Senate. for the main part of the first term. And he still managed to do nothing. Now the power has swung. He blew it plain and simple.
      And for the record the Health Care Plan he proudly stands beside is a disaster.
      And I still stand by my point of that he’s all Talk and 0 Walk.

• Peter Aranyi says:

  9 November 2012 at 3:39 pm

  The problem wasn’t Mitt Romney — it was all down to Republicanism.
  
  The party of Todd Akin, who said rape couldn’t make women pregnant, lost two Senate seats directly to unforgivable comments by different Republican candidates on rape.

  Romney LOST with women. He looked weak when he couldn’t unseat Akin from a Senate race that Akin then threw away.

  Success … Obama wins a second term in the White House
  He LOST with ethnic minorities. Not just African-Americans voting for Obama — he lost the Jewish vote, the Asian vote, and the crucial Latino vote.

  And he LOST with young people, who defied history by actually showing up at the polls this time.

  Republicans thought the nation would vote against Obama. Instead, it voted against Republican culture wars.

  Efforts to legalise gay marriage succeeded for the first time at the ballot box in several states.

  Two states voted to make marijuana legal for recreational use.

  This was liberal America showing up.

  Republican strategists need to understand that they only won with two groups — white men, and seniors. That’s not enough. The party will need to drop its hard line on immigration to appeal to the crucial Latino vote in Florida.

  They need to embrace equal marriage — the ship has sailed.

  Most of all, they need to stand strong on women’s rights — and women.

  from Romney shambles — Former Tory MP Louise Mensch on Mitt’s downfall The Sun