Backing Barack

Heading into the final weekend of campaign 2012, let’s check out a few more of the high-profile endorsements given to President Obama’s re-election:

From The Washington Post:

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 more sound 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 time in office. 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.

The Post followed up that editorial with another one, this titled “Mitt Romney’s Campaign Insults Voters”:

Through all the flip-flops, there has been one consistency in the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: a contempt for the electorate.

How else to explain his refusal to disclose essential information? Defying recent bipartisan tradition, he failed to release the names of his bundlers--the high rollers who collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. He never provided sufficient tax returns to show voters how he became rich.

How, other than an assumption that voters are too dim to remember what Mr. Romney has said across the years and months, to account for his breathtaking ideological shifts? He was a friend of immigrants, then a scourge of immigrants, then again a friend. He was a Kissingerian foreign policy realist, then a McCain-like hawk, then a purveyor of peace. He pioneered Obamacare, he detested Obamacare, then he found elements in it to cherish. Assault weapons were bad, then good. Abortion was okay, then bad. Climate change was an urgent problem; then, not so much. Hurricane cleanup was a job for the states, until it was once again a job for the feds.

The same presumption of gullibility has infused his misleading commercials (see: Jeep jobs to China) and his refusal to lay out an agenda. Mr. Romney promised to replace the Affordable Care Act but never said with what. He promised an alternative to President Obama’s lifeline to young, undocumented immigrants but never deigned to describe it.

And then there has been his chronic, baldly dishonest defense of mathematically impossible budget proposals. He promised to cut income tax rates without exploding the deficit or tilting the tax code toward the rich--but he refused to say how he could bring that off. When challenged, he cited “studies” that he maintained proved him right. But the studies were a mix of rhetoric, unrealistic growth projections and more serious economics that actually proved him wrong.

Meanwhile, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg--who has shifted over the years from being a Democrat, to being a Republican, to finally declaring himself an independent--announced his support of President Obama on Thursday. He said his endorsement was heavily influenced by the damage caused this week by Hurricane Sandy, and the president’s commitment to leading on the issue of climate change. Bloomberg explains:

Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be--given this week’s devastation--should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.

But we can’t do it alone. We need leadership from the White House--and over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power plants (an effort I have supported through my philanthropy), which are estimated to kill 13,000 Americans a year. ...

When I step into the voting booth, I think about the world I want to leave my two daughters, and the values that are required to guide us there. The two parties’ nominees for president offer different visions of where they want to lead America. ...

One sees climate change as an urgent problem that threatens our planet; one does not. I want our president to place scientific evidence and risk management above electoral politics.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the influential Lexington Herald-Leader, in the very red state of Kentucky, also supports Obama for a second four-year term:

Romney’s a great salesman, but it’s impossible to know what he’s selling or predict what he would do if elected. This makes him a risky choice.

Barack Obama has a record as president, and though he has not led us to his post-partisan promised land, he has provided steady, principled leadership during an economic crisis.

Obama's approach--tax cuts for working people and businesses combined with stimulus spending--pulled us back from a depression. If you doubt it, look at Europe, which chose austerity over stimulus and keeps sliding back into recession, while the U.S. economy slowly digs out of a very deep hole. ...

Despite Republicans' determination to deny him any victories, Obama has a list of accomplishments that speak well for his priorities: Consumers have new protections against rip-offs by credit card and mortgage companies. The student loan program is freeing up $62 billion over 10 years by cutting out banks as subsidized middlemen. (Romney wants to reinstate the banks and subsidies.) Obama also gave graduates longer to repay loans, making it affordable for them to work in public service jobs such as teaching.

Americans will no longer have to die or go broke because they fall ill or injured. Modeled on a Republican plan that Romney signed as Massachusetts governor, the Affordable Care Act is coming on line slowly, but already in Kentucky, 48,000 young adults have gained coverage and 477,953 Medicare recipients have received free preventive care. This year 249,275 Kentuckians will receive rebates totaling $15 million; eventually almost 700,000 uninsured Kentuckians could gain coverage.

As for protecting America from external threats, Obama has been smart and strong, as evidenced by Romney’s embrace of Obama’s foreign policy in their last debate. That might have been just for public consumption, though; Romney has surrounded himself with belligerent neoconservative advisors who led the previous president disastrously astray.

READ MORE: “Business Abandons Romney as Bloomberg andThe Economist Endorse Obama,” by Sarah Jones (PoliticsUSA); “Mr Romney Is Stillin the Cloud-cuckoo-land of Thinking You Can Do It Entirely Through Spending Cuts.... Backing Business Is Important, but Getting the Macroeconomics Right MattersFar More,” by Kent Jones (The Maddow Blog); “The Simple Case for Saying Obama Is the Favorite,” by Nate Silver (The New York Times); “Frank Rich: Right Will Rage If Obama Wins,” by David Daley (Salon).

Romney’s Hometown Paper Backs Obama

This has got to hurt. The Boston Globe, the largest and most important newspaper in Massachusetts--a state where Republican Mitt Romney once served a single term as governor--today gave its enthusiastic endorsement to Democratic President Barack Obama’s re-election. The editorial reads, in part:

A fresh mandate in November would help to free Obama from a congressional Republican leadership that made his destruction its top priority. It would open the door to a balanced solution to the nation’s fiscal problems. It would clear the way for desperately needed improvements in education and infrastructure. It would give new impetus to a president whose thoughtful engagement with the world has ended wars, disrupted terrorist networks, and rebuilt alliances. It would put America on a sustainable path, with an economy built on human capital, not financial engineering.

Obama’s reelection would also curb the growing power of special interests, who so often hide their self-serving agendas behind a facade of fist-in-the-air patriotism and promises of low taxes. Anyone who lived through the crash of 2008, and now sees Republicans in Congress seeking to thwart the Dodd-Frank law’s protections, should sense the true impetus behind all the pronouncements about unleashing the job creators. The Supreme Court’s wrongheaded Citizens United decision, granting corporations unlimited power to influence campaigns, provided yet another weapon for the powerful to deploy against the general interest.

Obama is both the key to a brighter future and the bulwark against a return to the chaos of the Bush years. He stands between the divides in American society, so some say he must therefore be the source of division. But as president, Obama has reached out repeatedly to Republicans and shied away from the I’m-the-decider pronouncements of his predecessor. He’s been diligent and responsible--to a fault. If anything, he’s been too little of a politician, not enough of a persuader. But he’s built a record of major accomplishments in the face of intense pressures, and fully deserves reelection.

You can read the complete editorial here. The Globe also backed U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren over incumbent Scott Brown in an editorial yesterday.

Meanwhile, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich gives his thumbs up to Obama for being on the right side of what he says is “the biggest issue” in this campaign:

As we go into the final days of a dismal presidential campaign where too many issues have been fudged or eluded--and the media only want to talk about is who’s up and who’s down--the biggest issue on which the candidates have given us the clearest choice is whether the rich should pay more in taxes.

President Obama says emphatically yes. He proposes ending the Bush tax cut for people earning more than $250,000 a year, and requiring that the richest 1 percent pay no less than a third of their income in taxes, the so-called “Buffett Rule.”

Mitt Romney says emphatically no. He proposes cutting tax rates on the rich by 20 percent, extending the Bush tax cut for the wealthy, and reducing or eliminating taxes on dividends and capital gains.

Romney says he’ll close loopholes and eliminate deductions used by the rich so that their share of total taxes remains the same as it is now, although he refuses to specify what loopholes or deductions. But even if we take him at his word, under no circumstances would he increase the amount of taxes they pay.

Obama is right.

There’s more of Reich’s column to read here.

Taking Sides

With just over two weeks until Election Day, newspaper endorsements of President Obama are rolling from some of the most important players on the U.S. media scene.

From The New York Times:

The economy is slowly recovering from the 2008 meltdown, and the country could suffer another recession if the wrong policies take hold. The United States is embroiled in unstable regions that could easily explode into full-blown disaster. An ideological assault from the right has started to undermine the vital health reform law passed in 2010. Those forces are eroding women’s access to health care, and their right to control their lives. Nearly 50 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, all Americans’ rights are cheapened by the right wing’s determination to deny marriage benefits to a selected group of us. Astonishingly, even the very right to vote is being challenged.

That is the context for the Nov. 6 election, and as stark as it is, the choice is just as clear.

President Obama has shown a firm commitment to using government to help foster growth. He has formed sensible budget policies that are not dedicated to protecting the powerful, and has worked to save the social safety net to protect the powerless. Mr. Obama has impressive achievements despite the implacable wall of refusal erected by Congressional Republicans so intent on stopping him that they risked pushing the nation into depression, held its credit rating hostage, and hobbled economic recovery. ...

For these and many other reasons, we enthusiastically endorse President Barack Obama for a second term, and express the hope that his victory will be accompanied by a new Congress willing to work for policies that Americans need.

From today’s Detroit Free Press:

What’s the best case Barack Obama can make for re-election? Let’s start with the stunning record of accomplishments he has compiled over the last four years:

• General Motors and Chrysler are thriving--a long, long way from the edge of insolvency, which is where Obama found them on his first day in office. Bridge loans and managed bankruptcies turned them around, and stable growth followed soon after. Is there anything more important to people here in Michigan?

• The economy has grown jobs for the past 30 months, after hemorrhaging 4.9 million in 2009. The bleeding began to stop when Obama convinced Congress to authorize $831 billion in federal stimulus funds, and employment has grown, slowly but inexorably, since the beginning of 2010.

• The Affordable Care Act, a broad set of private-sector and government reforms, is bringing millions of formerly uninsured Americans under the umbrella of reliable health care. It’s a quantum leap forward that has bested both legislative and legal challenges.

• Of the two costly wars started during the Bush administration, one is over and the other winding down. Osama bin Laden and at least 14 other al-Qaida leaders are dead, and their terrorist network is in tatters. Meanwhile, Moammar Gadhafi, responsible for the deaths of more Americans than anyone except bin Laden, was deposed with U.S. help. Not since the fall of the Berlin Wall have the nation’s geopolitical fortunes improved so markedly.

• That’s to say nothing of the president’s lower-profile victories: for women, who regained the right to seek legal redress for pay discrimination when Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law; and for the thousands of gay and lesbian Americans who won the right to serve their country without lying about who they are.

On the strength of those achievements alone, Obama’s second four-year term ought to be a no-brainer. Most two-term presidents can’t claim to have gotten as much done.

The country is safer. Its economy and its largest industry have been restored to health. And health care reform, fought out over 50 years in the U.S. Congress, has at last begun in earnest. When Republicans say pejoratively that Obama “can’t run on his record,” they’re peddling partisan nonsense and indulging a myopic fiction.

The Free Press enthusiastically endorses Barack Hussein Obama for four more years as president.

And finally, from Ohio’s Toledo Blade:

A second term for President Barack Obama would be a better outcome for Ohio, Michigan, and the rest of the country--and would offer more hopeful prospects for the next four years--than would his replacement by his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney. The Blade recommends the President’s re-election.

During his administration, President Obama has provided pragmatic, steady, centrist leadership that has served the nation well. He has dealt effectively with economic recession at home and turmoil abroad, much of which he inherited from his predecessor. The stimulus he promoted--along with the auto and bank bailouts--helped prevent the recession from becoming a depression.

The Daily Kos is keeping track of presidential endorsements here.

Obama’s Re-election “a Matter of Great Urgency”

“The choice is clear,” The New Yorker concludes in its October 29 endorsement of Democratic incumbent Barack Obama over Republican challenger Mitt Romney in this year’s presidential race. The editorial is a long and thorough critique of Obama’s first term in the White House, and will probably prove more influential because it’s so detailed and articulate.

It begins by recalling the daunting challenges that faced the 44th president when he first took office in January 2009:

Obama succeeded George W. Bush, a two-term President whose misbegotten legacy, measured in the money it squandered and the misery it inflicted, has become only more evident with time. Bush left behind an America in dire condition and with a degraded reputation. On Inauguration Day, the United States was in a downward financial spiral brought on by predatory lending, legally sanctioned greed and pyramid schemes, an economic policy geared to the priorities and the comforts of what soon came to be called “the one per cent,” and deregulation that began before the Bush Presidency. In 2008 alone, more than two and a half million jobs were lost--up to three-quarters of a million jobs a month. The gross domestic product was shrinking at a rate of nine per cent. Housing prices collapsed. Credit markets collapsed. The stock market collapsed--and, with it, the retirement prospects of millions. Foreclosures and evictions were ubiquitous; whole neighborhoods and towns emptied. The automobile industry appeared to be headed for bankruptcy. Banks as large as Lehman Brothers were dead, and other banks were foundering. It was a crisis of historic dimensions and global ramifications. However skillful the management in Washington, the slump was bound to last longer than any since the Great Depression.

Although the magazine acknowledges that Obama has “disappointed some of his most ardent supporters” (which is partly “a reflection of the fantastical expectations that attached to him”), it adds that “The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds.”

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009--the $787-billion stimulus package--was well short of what some economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, thought the crisis demanded. But it was larger in real dollars than any one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal measures. It reversed the job-loss trend--according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many as 3.6 million private-sector jobs have been created since June, 2009--and helped reset the course of the economy. It also represented the largest public investment in infrastructure since President Eisenhower’s interstate-highway program. ...

Obama’s most significant legislative achievement was a vast reform of the national health-care system. Five Presidents since the end of the Second World War have tried to pass legislation that would insure universal access to medical care, but all were defeated by deeply entrenched opposition. Obama--bolstered by the political cunning of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi--succeeded. Some critics urged the President to press for a single-payer system--Medicare for all. Despite its ample merits, such a system had no chance of winning congressional backing. Obama achieved the achievable. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the single greatest expansion of the social safety net since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, in 1965. Not one Republican voted for it.

This editorial goes on to praise President Obama for his commitment to civil rights, as well as his steady hand as commander-in-chief and his determination to withdraw American troops from Iraq. But it also makes the case that, because of his flip-flops, extremist economic and social commitments, and determination to once more outlaw abortion in the United States, Romney is the wrong man to replace Obama in the Oval Office.

... Romney has embraced the values and the priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society. A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.” Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P. would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression that Romney’s remarks about the “forty-seven per cent” were a matter not of “inelegant” expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction.

Romney’s conviction is that the broad swath of citizens who do not pay federal income tax--a category that includes pensioners, soldiers, low-income workers, and those who have lost their jobs--are parasites, too far gone in sloth and dependency to be worth the breath one might spend asking for their votes. His descent to this cynical view--further evidenced by his selection of a running mate, Paul Ryan, who is the epitome of the contemporary radical Republican--has been dishearteningly smooth. He in essence renounced his greatest achievement in public life--the Massachusetts health-care law--because its national manifestation, Obamacare, is anathema to the Tea Party and to the G.O.P. in general. He has tacked to the hard right on abortion, immigration, gun laws, climate change, stem-cell research, gay rights, the Bush tax cuts, and a host of foreign-policy issues. He has signed the Grover Norquist no-tax-hike pledge and endorsed Ryan’s winner-take-all economics.

But what is most disquieting is Romney’s larger political vision. When he said that Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist democrats in Europe,” he was not only signalling Obama’s “otherness” to one kind of conservative voter; he was suggesting that Obama’s liberalism is in conflict with a uniquely American strain of individualism. The theme recurred when Romney and his allies jumped on Obama’s observation that no entrepreneur creates a business entirely alone (“You didn’t build that”). The Republicans continue to insist on the “Atlas Shrugged” fantasy of the solitary entrepreneurial genius who creates jobs and wealth with no assistance at all from government or society.

In its way, this is an old-fashioned variety of editorial--impassioned, well-reasoned, bereft of equivocation, and ultimately, inspiring.

The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama--and exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act--takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb.” That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has been under way for at least three decades. But we’ve already seen the future that Romney represents, and it doesn’t work.

The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney--a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America--one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality--represents the future that this country deserves.

You will find the full New Yorker endorsement here.

READ MORE: “Compelling Reasons Why Obama Will Win,” by Robert Creamer (The Democratic Strategist); “Will Mitt Get Your Kids Killed?” by Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo); “‘A Striking Coincidence’: New Yorker and New York Observer Covers Compared” (Jim Romenesko.com).

Swinging in Obama’s Direction

In the run-up to tomorrow night’s final televised debate between Democratic President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, Willard Mitt Romney, we’re seeing newspaper editorial boards across the country take sides in this increasingly important race. In addition to his big endorsements by North Carolina’s Winston-Salem Journal and, very surprisingly, Utah’s Salt Lake Tribune, this weekend has found the president three more important advocates, all in swing states.

Ohio’s largest daily, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, opines:

Today, we recommend President Obama’s re-election. He has led the nation back from the brink of depression. Ohio in particular has benefited from his bold decision to revive the domestic auto industry. Because of his determination to fulfill a decades-old dream of Democrats, 30 million more Americans will soon have health insurance. His Race to the Top initiative seeded many of the education reforms embodied in Cleveland’s Transformation Plan. He ended the war in Iraq and refocused the battle to disrupt al-Qaida and its terrorist allies. He ordered the risky attack inside Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. ...

Not only do we still believe this president can do those things, we think he can do it with policies most likely to lift Ohio and Ohioans. Obama's leadership has made a difference when it mattered most. His stimulus package helped avert an even worse economic collapse and initiated investments in education, manufacturing and green energy that should yet pay dividends. His commitment to a balanced path toward deficit reduction won’t please the most zealous members of either party, but it makes sense for the nation.

Meanwhile, The Denver Post begins by declaring President Obama “a steady leader who keeps the interests of a broad array of Americans in mind.” It then goes on:

The Obama administration can be fairly criticized for leaning too heavily on regulations that hamper business, but on balance we have seen enough to believe the president will pursue policies--and compromise, when necessary--that protect the vulnerable, invest in the middle class, and deliver an economy that drives us to a better future.

Obama has moved the country in the right direction on school reform. On higher education, he has taken steps to address affordability through increasing Pell Grants and streamlining the student-loan process. His executive order that allows qualified illegal immigrants brought here as children a chance to pursue college degrees is a positive step--though much remains to be done on immigration reform.

As commander in chief, he has demonstrated himself capable in a tough situation. He eliminated the military's discriminatory “don't ask don't tell” policy, limited this country’s involvement in Libya while still playing a role in the ouster of Moammar Khadafy, and hasn’t allowed the U.S. to be drawn into the Syrian civil war. He has remained a friend to Israel, but isn’t engaging in war talk over the Iranian nuclear issue. Moving forward, the administration owes the American public a thorough explanation of the troubling events surrounding the murder of four Americans in Benghazi last month.

The Post also raises serious doubts about the math Romney uses to support his still too-vague campaign promises:

We know that many have a different view, and point to Romney’s record in Massachusetts as ample reason for his election. Unfortunately, he never seriously campaigned as a centrist alternative to Obama.

From running to the far right on immigration and women’s health in the primary and then saddling his campaign with Rep. Paul Ryan’s extreme and unrealistic budget, the Romney of this election cycle is not the man elected in Massachusetts.

Instead, we must judge him on the menu of options he has repeatedly put forward during this campaign. On policies ranging from tax reform to immigration, from health care to higher education, none of Romney’s numbers add up. Moreover, he has been unwilling or unable to outline for voters specifics that demonstrate his math works--probably because it doesn't.

Romney has said he will repeal Obamacare, yet insists he can keep its most popular provisions without fully explaining how he would pay for it.

He’s calling for 20 percent tax rate cuts across the board. Independent analysts say the government can't come close to making up for that lost revenue without closing popular deductions like those for home-mortgage interest and charitable contributions. Romney’s explanations for how he would do that don't wash.

And his pledge to create 12 million jobs in four years sounds good, but Moody’s Analytics has predicted that type of job growth regardless of who is elected.

Interestingly, the red-state Arizona Daily Star, headquartered in Tucson, recommends President Obama’s re-election as well:

When we look back four years, we see the steps we’ve made, not as quickly as anyone would like, but there is progress in health care, job creation and tax policy. It’s not an easy road.

Changing course would undercut that progress and create further uncertainty--two things we cannot afford. We can and must move ahead. And no matter who we elect to the White House, we’ll still have a divided Congress. Anything possible and good must first come through consensus-building leadership in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. No president will be successful without one unified American agenda.

Principled leadership, consensus and time are required. Obama’s accomplishments and positions on health care, higher education, and economic and social issues continue to make him the best choice for the interests at home in Southern Arizona and in our country.

This is why the Arizona Daily Star endorses Barack Obama for a second term.

You’ll find still more swing-state editorials calling for Obama’s re-election here and here.

Romney a “Servile,” “Shape-shifting Nominee”

I never expected Utah’s Salt Lake Tribune to endorse President Barack Obama’s re-election, but it has. This, despite the fact that Utah is a reliably red state (it has sided with the Republican candidate in the last 11 presidential elections), and GOP challenger Mitt Romney has strong ties to the state as a result of his being Mormon and having overseen the 2002 Winter Olympics.

The paper is especially critical of Romney for not being the candidate “we knew, or thought we knew, as one of us.”

Sadly, it is not the only Romney, as his campaign for the White House has made abundantly clear, first in his servile courtship of the tea party in order to win the nomination, and now as the party’s shape-shifting nominee. From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: “Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?”

The evidence suggests no clear answer, or at least one that would survive Romney’s next speech or sound bite. Politicians routinely tailor their words to suit an audience. Romney, though, is shameless, lavishing vastly diverse audiences with words, any words, they would trade their votes to hear.

More troubling, Romney has repeatedly refused to share specifics of his radical plan to simultaneously reduce the debt, get rid of Obamacare (or, as he now says, only part of it), make a voucher program of Medicare, slash taxes and spending, and thereby create millions of new jobs. To claim, as Romney does, that he would offset his tax and spending cuts (except for billions more for the military) by doing away with tax deductions and exemptions, is utterly meaningless without identifying which and how many would get the ax. Absent those specifics, his promise of a balanced budget simply does not pencil out.

Obama, meanwhile, is embraced more generously:

For four years, President Barack Obama has attempted, with varying degrees of success, to pull the nation out of its worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, a deepening crisis he inherited the day he took office.

In the first months of his presidency, Obama acted decisively to stimulate the economy. His leadership was essential to passage of the badly needed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Though Republicans criticize the stimulus for failing to create jobs, it clearly helped stop the hemorrhaging of public sector jobs. The Utah Legislature used hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to plug holes in the state’s budget.

The president also acted wisely to bail out the auto industry, which has since come roaring back. Romney, in so many words, said the carmakers should sink if they can’t swim.

In giving the president its endorsement, the Tribune applauds him as “a competent leader who, against tough odds, has guided the country through catastrophe and set a course that, while rocky, is pointing toward a brighter day. The president has earned a second term. Romney, in whatever guise, does not deserve a first.”

You can read the full editorial here.

Obama’s Unexpected Thumbs-up

This is a welcome surprise. North Carolina’s Winston-Salem Journal has not endorsed a Democrat for president of the United States since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, according to Wikipedia. However, it has finally broken that precedent this year. An editorial in the newspaper’s October 14 edition began:

Americans have a clear choice between two presidential candidates with starkly different ideas for spurring the economy, providing for the health of our people, defending our interests abroad, educating our children and protecting our environment. We believe that President Barack Obama’s progress on these issues merits him a second term in the White House.

Four years ago on this page, we endorsed Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona over Obama. We wrote that we were impressed with Obama, but McCain would “bring the Iraq war to a successful conclusion, work to end American dependence on foreign oil, reduce America's output of climate-changing gases and begin the rebuilding of our economy.”

The Democratic president has done all those things and more. He is calm under pressure and courageous in standing up for the rights of all Americans, including the poor, veterans, the elderly, women, gays and immigrants. In contrast, we’ve sometimes found it hard in the last few weeks to tell just what Obama’s challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, really stands for.

The paper goes on to remark:

Under Obama’s policies, including the successful bailout of General Motors, the country averted what could have been a far worse economic disaster, maybe even a depression. The economy is slowly recovering--the national unemployment rate has finally fallen below 8 percent--and the president’s policies of continued government investment in infrastructure and education offer the best hope that the recovery will accelerate. Obama promises to cut spending and raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but keep taxes where they are for the vast majority.

Its distrust of Romney, particularly on the matter of maintaining and strengthening social programs, is pretty clear:

We like Obama’s health-care plan, finding it far better than that offered by Romney, even if it is largely based on Romney’s own Massachusetts program. We see no sign that Romney, should he succeed in repealing “Obamacare,” would succeed in balancing the many competing health-care interests that Obama worked into a compromise.

We fear that Romney would turn Medicare into a voucher program that would not match the full cost of private insurance for the seniors. His hybrid plan would drive the sickest Americans into a government plan and let the insurance companies cherry-pick the healthiest clients.

You can read the Journal’s entire editorial here.

READ MORE: “Why Ohio Early Voting Decision Could Be a Big Deal,” by Greg Sargent (The Washington Post).

Making the Case for Four More Years

Within the pages of its October 25, 2012, issue, The New Republic offers what may be the most thoughtful center-left argument for President Barack Obama’s re-election. The article reads, in part:

Health care reform, if it is properly nurtured, largely completes the social safety net. Financial reform, if the lobbyists don’t shred it, will curb maniacal risk-taking in the markets. The stimulus provided the seed money to launch Race to the Top--perhaps the most significant wave of experimentation in the history of public education--and to remake the energy grid. It created industries from scratch: biofuel refineries and plants that manufacture batteries for electric cars.

Obamaism itself is perhaps this administration’s most important innovation. The president has used New Democratic means to achieve Old Democratic ends. In pursuit of old liberal dreams, he has relied heavily on the insights of markets: spurring competition, reforming bureaucracies, and leveraging small investments to achieve big goals. Two of his signal programs--health care’s individual mandate and cap and trade--were tellingly conceived by conservatives. ...

At times, Barack Obama has failed to appreciate the virulence of the modern Republican Party. He has earnestly entered negotiations with adversaries interested in breaking his presidency, not splitting the difference. It took him painfully long to arrive at a realistic assessment of his foes. But over the course of this campaign, he has emerged as a different kind of politician—a populist bruiser capable of skillfully and passionately assailing his opponents, while remaining indifferent to the hand wringing of establishment opinion. Perhaps this is a style better suited for the next four years, in which his primary task will be managing a fiscal crisis that his opponents will cynically exploit. Having extended the safety net, he must now protect it. Without a second term, the accomplishments of his first would evaporate.

And the magazine doesn’t hesitate to cite the manifold weaknesses of Obama’s Republican opponent:

Mitt Romney is the perfect avatar for a party in the throes of ideological convulsion. When he first considered running for president, in 2006, he seemed an archetype desperately missing from American politics. As a governor, he presented himself as a rigorous empiricist; his record formed a coherent pattern of bucking GOP orthodoxy on climate change, health care reform, and gay rights. But six years of pandering to Republican primary voters and donors will apparently distort even a first-rate mind. Far more than Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, he has promoted a libertarian vision filled with substantive and rhetorical hostility to the poor. His foreign policy is similarly wild, urging the escalation of military hostility with nations who pose no meaningful strategic threat.

You can (and should) read the entire editorial here.

READ MORE: “Obama’s First-term Approval Ratings Now Equal Clinton and Reagan,” by Jason Easley (PoliticusUSA); “5 Reasons President Obama Will Be Re-elected” (The National Memo).