All You Ever Wanted to Say: FOR Obama and AGAINST Romney

(Take the time to read this.)

Sun Oct 21, 2012, 10:08 AM
State the Obvious (570 posts)

Los Angeles Times: Obama for President



Source: Los Angeles Times

When he was elected president in 2008, Barack Obama was untried and untested. Just four years out of the Illinois state Senate, he had not yet proved himself as either a manager or a leader. He had emerged from relative obscurity as the result of a single convention speech and was voted into office only a few years later on a tidal wave of hope, breezing past several opponents, with far more experience and far clearer claims on the job.

Today, Obama is a very different candidate. He has confronted two inherited wars and the deepest recession since the Great Depression. He brought America's misguided adventure in Iraq to an end and arrested the economic downturn (though he did not fully reverse it) with the 2009 fiscal stimulus and a high-risk strategy to save the U.S. automobile industry. He secured passage of a historic healthcare reform law--the most important social legislation since Medicare.

Just as important, Obama brought a certain levelheadedness to the White House that had been in short supply during the previous eight years. While his opponents assailed him as a socialist and a Muslim and repeatedly challenged the location of his birthplace in an effort to call int question his legitimacy as president, he showed himself to be an adult, less an ideologue than a pragmatist, more cautious than cocky. Despite Republicans' persistent obstructionism, he pushed for---and enacted--stronger safeguards against another Wall Street meltdown, and abusive financial industry practices. He cut the cost of student loans, persuaded auto manufactures to take an almost unimaginable leap in fuel efficiency by 2025 and offered a temporary reprieve from deportation to young immigrants brought into the country illegally by their parents. He ended the morally bankrupt "don't ask, don't tell" policy that had institutionalized discrimination against gays in the military....

It's hard to analyze the effect of Romney's plans because he left so many blanks to be filled in after the election. For example, he wants to replace the healthcare and financial regulatory reforms enacted in 2010, but he won't say with what exactly. He's also advocated rolling back the clock on clean energy, overturning Roe vs. Wade and leaving women's reproductive rights at the mercy of state legislators, and abandoning efforts to help distressed borrowers keep their homes....

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-end-president-20121021,0,3229774.story
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