Deciphering Obama’s Victory and Second Term Agenda

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A fragile, slow-growing economy, four years of obstinately high unemployment, the “shellacking” of the Democratic in Congressional elections just two years ago, and the unending political gridlock that has frustrated most White House initiatives. Barack Obama should never have been able to claim a second term. Yet he did, and with considerable room to spare. True, the results were close. When the election was over, the president had only two percent more votes than his Republican opponent Mitt Romney. Although he captured a larger majority, 303 to 206, in the crucial electoral vote, the margin was three percent or less in five states with 116 electoral votes (including Florida where outcome remains undetermined). More than anything else, the president’s narrow victory confirmed once again how deeply divided the voting public is in the United States. Unlike the differences among the country’s professional politicians, however, the division is not along any clear or consistent ideological lines. Instead, it involves a mosaic of cleavages—race, religion, gender, geography, urban/rural, age, class, education—that somehow all add up to just about a 50-50 split. Recall that John McCain won 47 percent of the vote in 2008 when he ran against Obama—just one percent less than Romney—despite his badly managed campaign and the fact that George W. Bush had thoroughly discredited the Republican brand by leading the country into two wars and a financial crisis. So, how did Obama do it? Perhaps most important, Romney spent nearly a year cultivating the extreme right, which was necessary to secure the Republican nomination. In the process, he discarded previously held views on issues as varied as immigration, health care, and abortion. He won the nomination, but started his campaign against Obama with an enormous handicap, which the Obama election team exploited mercilessly. Romney was portrayed as a multi-millionaire businessman, distant and uncaring, concerned mainly about profits not people, with no understanding of or empathy for the middle class and the poor. The characterization stuck, reinforced by his choice of budget-cutter and anti-tax crusader Paul Ryan as vice president and Romney’s own multiple gaffes. It was not until the first debate, a month ago in October, that Romney finally managed to dispel this crude depiction, and begin to define himself for the American people. And almost immediately he gained two or three points on Obama in the polls—but he started too late. Second, Romney and the Republicans somehow failed to take note of the massive demographic shift in the United States. Romney and all other Republican candidates not only ignored Latinos, but at times actively offended them by the way they discussed immigration policy. Romney suggested that undocumented immigrants “deport themselves” – a terrible insult to people who consider the US their home, particularly to the many that know no other. Obama cemented his huge support among Latinos when he approved a plan to end the deportation of individuals brought to the US as juveniles, a weak version of the Dream Act which Congress had rejected. The president won upwards of 72 percent of the Latino vote, which turned out to be crucial in a half-a-dozen battleground states like New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, and Virginia. Third, Obama’s campaign organization was bigger, smarter, more experienced, and better managed than that of Romney. Still, it made one major mistake in the campaign. It underestimated Romney, which almost cost Obama the election, when his opponent displayed his talents and competence in the first debate. The Obama team was particularly effective in the last days of the campaign when it succeeded in identifying and getting a very high percentage of Obama voters to the polls, particularly young voters and Latinos, despite a predicted decline in their enthusiasm since the 2008 election. What should be expected of an Obama second term? Any conclusions about Obama’s second term have to be drawn largely from his first term performance and what the election tells us about the mood of the country and how it affected the balance of power in Congress. The election campaign itself was about the candidates and their biographies—including their leadership, their compassion and empathy, their decisiveness, and their honesty, among other characteristics. It was not about issues or ideology. Neither Obama nor Romney, for example, said much about the single most urgent issue confronting Washington—the so-called fiscal cliff. The cliff refers to an arrangement set in place earlier this year to force Democrats and Republicans to agree on a deficit-reducing budget in January 2013 by creating the threat of huge tax rises (estimated to average as much as a $3,500 per US household) coupled with debilitating cuts in the nation’s military budget and spending on health care for the elderly. It has been estimated this might cost the US some three or four percent of its economic output in the next year, and end up severely battering the weak global economy. The fiscal cliff presents Congress and the White House with a mammoth problem that could shape Washington politics for the next four years. If a compromise cannot be reached on the “fiscal cliff”, Congress could well end up gridlocked on issue after issue. Yet neither candidate even sketched the outlines of what a compromise might look like. Nor did either of them set out substantive plans on what needs to be done to promote jobs, repair the economy and encourage more robust growth, or lower the deficit and begin to reduce long-term debt. Foreign policy was discussed just as superficially. Mitt Romney avowed that, on his first day in office, he would declare China a currency manipulator. Few American voters, however, have any idea what a currency manipulator is or does, what it means to declare a country guilty of such manipulation (in practice almost nothing) or what US expects to gain. The statement, in fact, had little to do with US policy. It was an attempt to show off Romney as a tough, aggressive leader, who is unafraid of taking on a country like China. Obama did much the same thing when he simply repeated, over and over, his administration’s success in killing Osama Bin Laden. This was a bold and significant action, but it hardly represents a strategy or an agenda. There is little reason to believe that Republicans and Democrats in Congress will be able to work any more productively together in the coming period than they have over the past four years. The make-up of Congress is little different than it was before the election. If anything, the Senate is likely to be even more divided as the three of most liberal Republicans (Richard Lugar, Olympia Snowe, and Scott Brown) and two of the most conservative Democrats (Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman) resigned or lost their seats—making compromise all the harder. But we will know soon enough whether there is any taste for compromise at all, when the lame duck Congress returns to work next week and begins discussion of the fiscal cliff imbroglio. The best guess is that Congress will find a way, not to resolve the problem, but to defer its consequences for another six months or so. The election results did focus attention on one critical challenge which both Republicans and Democrats may be motivated to address—immigration policy. Obama’s victory demonstrated the importance of the Latino vote, and the cost of ignoring or opposing immigration reform. President Obama has already signaled that immigration would be a high priority issue in this next term—and that intention was surely reinforced by the huge Latino vote that assured his victory. It was mainly Republicans who blocked previous immigration initiatives, including the comprehensive reform package promoted by George Bush in 2007. Many of them will resist changes again, but there are Republicans who understand that their party may soon become irrelevant unless they take the Latino and black constituencies more seriously. They, after all, now represent 25 percent or more of voters, a number that is growing steadily. Obama has not put any new foreign policy issues on his agenda. Iran will remain front and center as it has for the past several years. The Middle East will produce new and recurring crises, and the US has still to manage its withdrawal from Afghanistan and its relations with a troubled and dangerous Pakistan. Europe’s economic deterioration demands continuing first order US attention as well. The US president will likely be even more attentive than usual to China and Mexico, two countries of central importance to Washington, where new leaders will soon be taking charge. In none of these cases, however, are we likely to see major shifts in policy or approach. The US will mainly be responding to developments in the various countries and regions, and not launching initiatives on its own. In many nation of Latin America, particularly in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, US immigration reform would be an especially welcome change in policy that would help to invigorate relations more broadly. In a second term, Obama may seek to pursue further openings to Cuba—but these will be limited unless the Cuban government shows a willingness to reciprocate with new human rights measures or political changes. Drug policy is not high on the US agenda, but the approval in Colorado and Washington State of ballot initiatives to legalize the sale and use of marijuana may spark a wider discussion of drug policy issues that would involve Latin America. It was actually Mitt Romney who offered the most significant policy proposal for Latin America when he highlighted the region’s expanding economic importance, and called for more intensive US efforts to pursue trade and investment opportunities.