(European Central Bank head) Draghi helps out Obama campaign
Barack Obamas chances of re-election as US president rose on Thursday and the words that did it were not his but Mario Draghis.
Long before Mr Obama stood up to accept the Democratic nomination in Charlotte, North Carolina, the head of the European Central Bank had sketched out a new plan to buy the bonds of troubled eurozone countries.
That will not move the polls; it will not move a single vote. But Mr Draghi has lowered the gravest of risks to Mr Obama: a pre-election meltdown in the eurozone that would have blown up banks, pulverised Wall Street, and routed a fragile US economy back into recession.
If that happened, it would not be Mr Obamas fault, but he would get the blame. Just as the failure of Lehman Brothers doomed his rival John McCain in 2008, a eurozone implosion would create economic odds too great for Mr Obama to surmount.
The eurozone has barely been mentioned in the US election campaign swing voters in Ohio care little for Spanish bond yields but economic advisers to Mr Obama and his Republican rival Mitt Romney know its wild card potential.
full: http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bc1cf132-f831-11e1-bec8-00144feabdc0.html
I keep hearing on DU about Republicans sabotaging international events to gain ground in elections, first with the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 and then with Iran in 1980. Now that the economy is doing better than Republicans want it to be, and Israel is so far unwilling to initiate war with Iran, I wonder if Karl Rove or someone like him is trying to get tickets to Italy right this minute to fly to Europe and talk Draghi out of this.