Obama’s ambitious second-term agenda

What happened

President Obama was re-elected to a second term in office this week by a sharply divided electorate, his victory secured by a strong turnout of Latino, black, young, and women voters in swing states. Obama achieved a resounding Electoral College victory, with 332 votes to Mitt Romney’s 206, by winning narrowly in battleground states Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, and Florida. He also beat Romney by about 2.5 million in the popular vote. Exit polls showed that the Democrats enjoyed a 6-point lead over Republicans in turnout, with at least 71 percent of Hispanics voting for Obama—which gave him the margin of victory. White male voters broke for Romney 62–35, but made up only 34 percent of the total vote—a 2-point decline from 2008.

Returning to the soaring rhetoric of his 2008 campaign, Obama said he’d been humbled and educated by his first term and the election, and he expressed renewed hope for forging consensus on major problems facing the nation. “We are not as divided as our politics suggests,” he said. “We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states.” On his agenda, he said, were tax and immigration reform and steps to address climate change.

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What the editorials said

Obama fully earned this re-election, said the Los Angeles Times. His bold actions in 2009 saved the country from a depression, and his health-care reform plan will bring coverage to 30 million Americans. Now his second endorsement by the American people gives Obama “some political capital,” which he must use to forge a compromise on the “fiscal cliff” of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts coming at the end of this year. After that, he needs to come up with “a credible, long-term plan” for addressing the enormous federal budget deficit, which will require entitlement reform. Solving these problems is a “tough order in a partisan age,” said The Washington Post, but Obama’s success or failure in doing so will define his presidency. “Now the hard work really begins.”

Talk about “winning ugly,” said The Wall Street Journal. Obama’s brutal caricature of Mitt Romney as “a plutocrat and intolerant threat” to minorities, women, and the poor spurred them to vote Democratic in record numbers, even as he won only about 40 percent of the white vote. Even then, Obama might have lost had super-storm Sandy not halted Romney’s momentum in the final week. Obama’s narrow victory continues “his long run of extraordinary good luck.” It’s no mandate.

What the columnists said

Of course Obama has a mandate, said Joan Walsh in Salon.com. A broad coalition of voters just endorsed the “Democratic ideal of activist government.” They’ve already seen the first stages of how Obamacare benefits women, families, and people with pre-existing conditions, and have applauded his intervention to save 1 million jobs in the American auto industry. “Democrats have found their Ronald Reagan,” said Josh Greenman in the New York Daily News. In his second term, Obama can become a truly transformational president both by building on his historic, progressive achievements and by providing “solid, bipartisan economic stewardship.”

“This is a mandate to do what?” said Holman W. Jenkins in The Wall Street Journal. Obama’s agenda is an “almost comic mystery”; he won the election mainly by frightening women that their free contraception and abortions would be taken away. All this election produced was “the same old reality”—a Republican House, a Democratic Senate, a president committed to “big government hubris,” and an over-leveraged federal government “whose options are steadily narrowing.”

Obama’s economic proposals are actually “quite clear,” said Jonathan Cohn in TNR.com. He wants responsible spending cuts combined with higher taxes for the wealthy—and in January, he’s likely to get them. Obama can hold out for a deal as the fiscal cliff nears, because the “default action”—simply letting all the Bush tax cuts expire and mandated defense cuts take effect—is “far worse for Republicans than it is for him.” Congressional Republicans will try their best to limit his achievements, but as he heads into four more years, Obama is holding some very strong cards.