“Obama‘s failure to accelerate the improvement of the economy is the dominant reason Romney is the right choice, but it’s not the only one. There are also the broken promises. On the campaign trail in 2008,
Obama promised to halve the annual budget deficit of the United States. Instead, the shortfall has remained over $1 trillion per year, and the national debt has increased about 45 percent.
Obama said he would pass comprehensive immigration reform, but he never made a significant attempt to address it.
He said future generations would look back on his election as the time we began to slow the rise of the oceans and hasten the healing of the planet, yet he never introduced meaningful legislation aimed at achieving those goals.
Obama promised a transparent administration but instead ran a secretive White House. And Obama promised a newfound respect for civil liberties, and yet, in an expansive reading of
congressional authority to use military force, he has authorized the unilateral assassination of American citizens abroad.
Obama promised to drive the unemployment rate below 6 percent in four years. It sits at 7.9 percent, just above the level when he was inaugurated.
History may well laud Obama for passing the first comprehensive health care plan to cover millions of uninsured, guarantee coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and for preventive care, and keep young adults on their parents’ policies until age 26. But the
law may not control costs, fails to address malpractice litigation and the expense it imposes on the system, and is based on iffy funding. Worse, Obama didn’t sell the public on his plan, allowing his opponents to hijack it.
Most important, Obama promised to end the partisan divide in Washington but didn’t do so. To be fair, he had no help from Republicans, but that is the case, by definition, with partisan divides. Obama should have looked to the track record of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and brought his case to the people.
The decision to endorse Romney is not an easy one. Superstorm Sandy has made it clear that his untested notion about shifting primary responsibility for disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the states is a great risk. The storm should add even more urgency to deal with extreme weather and rising seas, which Romney has not addressed in his campaign.
And Obama has distinct achievements. He was correct to preserve the auto industry in the United States. His stimulus plan did create jobs, though not enough of them. His creation of tougher mileage standards for automobiles is a major step in the right direction. He
also made the right decisions in refusing to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and in creating a limited Dream Act by executive order to stop punishing illegal immigrants unwittingly brought here as children. His two U.S. Supreme Court appointments were talented jurists without an agenda to overturn precedents.
He got us out of Iraq quickly, has us on the road out of Afghanistan, and oversaw the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Against this we have Romney, a flawed candidate. He tends to waver on the issues, and the plans he’s laid out to better the lot of the nation lack both specifics and mathematical rigor. These are problems, but in the current political environment, they may also become his greatest assets as president.
What Romney has actually shown in his political evolution is a willingness to represent the will of his constituencies. We hope that means a lack of dogmatic zealotry, rather than a lack of leadership.
Romney should not be, as he claimed during the primary season, “severely conservative.” He’s not the first candidate who swayed
toward a more extreme base while seeking the nomination, then tacked toward the center during the general campaign.
But Romney has shifted so opportunistically over the years on issues such as a woman’s right to choose and health care reform that it’s hard to be sure which Romney the nation would get. We are worried about the criteria he would use to select any justices, should an opening arise on the high court.
He is also a novice on foreign affairs who’s surrounded himself with holdovers from the administration of George W. Bush, advisers who have been far too eager to take the nation to war. His
saber-rattling on Iran is worrisome.
Yet there is one chorus Republicans and Democrats sing in unison: “Washington is broken.” It’s true, and the far-right wing of the Republican Congress is more averse to compromise than any other faction. Who, then, can bring this side to common ground?
The dogmatic Democrat who empowered the tea party revolution in 2010,
or the Republican who will have far more power to bring the
firebrands in his own party to heel and has no history of enmity to poison the process? If Romney succeeds in uniting the Republicans and bringing them back to the center, it could be an advantage for the nation.
His proposals to limit the Medicare entitlement and replace it with vouchers, and to fund Medicaid through block grants, would shift costs from Washington to individuals and states like New York. Romney would need to remember that the most populous states, even consistently blue New York, have different and important needs, especially after Sandy.
Although he was elected in a time of economic turmoil, Ronald Reagan’s greatest achievement wasn’t his tax plan or his economic theories. His success came from emotional leadership, the ability to bring us together and reignite our confidence in the virtues and future of the nation. This is what FDR did.
It is this that Barack Obama has failed to do.
Elected with a significant mandate and his party briefly in control of both houses of the Congress, Obama squandered the support of the nation.” via Free Republic
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Ed. note: Newsday is a New York metropolitan area newspaper which is very liberal and normally endorses Democrats. So it was a shock to see its endorsement of Mitt Romney. I thank them for caring enough about America to make what couldn’t have been an easy decision for them. I’d like to mention two points from the editorial. Newsday makes clear it believes in man-caused global warming and that with more federal legislation in the US, the world’s CO2 would drop appreciably, ie, alleged global warming would diminish. Sometime after the election, I will send Newsday copies of recent mainstream press reports quoting science that US CO2 has dropped drastically over several years and is headed lower. And that other countries’ has stayed the same or gone higher including those who’ve spent hundreds of billions on cap and trade and extra taxes. Newsday also cites its belief in FEMA. I can’t imagine they still believe in FEMA at this moment. So far, FEMA has either been absent or has taken what little gas and water was left for local residents for its own use. The one alleged advantage to a federal aid program is it would bring into the ravaged area that which was lacking. FEMA hasn’t done that to this point. It has made things worse when it’s done anything at all. In the meantime, I thank Newsday for their editorial. (And I always enjoy their baseball coverage).
Here's Newsday's front page for Sunday, 11/4/12:
Above, Newsday front page, Sunday 11/4/12
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P.S. I would've put links in my comments but my high speed internet connection is down, and I'm working with dial up. It has taken me 3 hours just to get connected to the Newsday article and post it here.
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