Washington Post endorsement : Four more years for President Obama - Editorial praises the Economic Achievements of President Obama saving the Nation from a Depression and condemns Romney's Economy, his remarks of 47% and his "Self-Deportation" of Latinos !

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Washington Post Editorial
The Post’s View
Washington Post endorsement: Four more years for President Obama
By Editorial Board
October 25, 2012


Washington Post endorsement: Four more years for President Obama


Some excerpts :

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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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