Figuring out how President Barack Hussein Obama won re-election, and gave Mitt Romney and the national Republican leadership an electoral shellacking, may not be something many disbelieving, dyed-in-the-wool Red State voters want to contemplate at the moment. And, indeed, there are a lot of strategic and tactical political reasons for why President Obama won. That’s especially apparent in the seven key battleground states where open minds triumphed over blind ideological partisanship, and where Obama’s deftly crafted grass-roots rainbow coalition outperformed the aging Republican model offering a white-and-middle-class-only invitation.
Yet in the end, Obama won for gut emotional reasons: More people trusted him to keep looking forward and trying to do the right thing for all Americans in all the major areas that fall to Washington’s leadership: the economy and job-related policies, health care, foreign policy, tax fairness, national security, environmental progress, national infrastructure, balanced deficit reduction.
They preferred giving Obama more time to attend these needs over going fearfully backwards with Romney to the same-old, same-old Republican trickle-down economics; to more lopsided tax cuts for the super wealthy; to more anti-science foolishness and the compounding damage of environmental neglect and climate change; to blithe denial of the need for health care reform and support of earned entitlement programs; and backwards to more hateful prejudice and prohibitions against women’s rights, immigrants, gays and Americans trapped in poverty or disability and in need of thoughtful help.
Obama’s appeal was “we’re all in this together.” Romney’s underlying tactic relied on intolerance and fear: divide, conquer, step on the unfortunate, blame those who are different or in need, and neglect all but the fearful white-middle-class and the comfortable well-to-do. Obama voters saw authenticity, decency, respect and humaneness in Obama’s agenda, and transparent deceit in Romney’s well-documented shape-shifting. Republicans’ cocky strategists didn’t worry about that, because they failed to appreciate the nation’s rapidly changing demographic trends, and the social glue that binds the conscience of more educated voters to the vital social purpose of national inclusiveness.
The resulting re-election of President Obama, to be sure, does not translate casually into a happy-days-are-here-again mindset. A ticking timeline awaits on the Republican-driven fiscal cliff. Avoiding another economic lapse on this issue will call for a principled compromise on deficit reduction and tax and entitlement adjustments.