Obama all but over finishing line for second term
This column got it wrong last week. Received wisdom may not allow for natural disasters favouring a sitting president but Barack Obama made Sandy work for him during this last terrible week on the east coast.
The president will win tomorrow — or rather in the early hours of Wednesday morning. It’ll be tight and maddening but his chances of re-election are a little better than good this morning.
Not because he was a strong and reassuring presence on the Jersey Shore when he visited there last Wednesday; nor because he ingratiated himself to the big government detractors on the right by sounding off on bureaucratic red tape, telling all local officials that the normal snail’s pace reaction of federal government would not be a factor during this disaster.
Or not even because New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the darling of fiscal conservatives and a shoo-in to run for the White House in 2016, was so effusive in his praise of the commander-in-chief during the immediate aftermath of the storm.
(Compare the following pair of quotes made by Christie, first to New Jerseyans last week: “Good news for all of us is that the president couldn’t have been better today. He wanted to make sure that there was nothing that we asked for that we didn’t get.” And from the week before at a Mitt Romney rally in Virginia: “(Obama is) like a man wandering around a dark room, hands up against the wall, clutching for the light switch of leadership, and he just can’t find it.”)
Obama will win because swing state voters — whose primary concerns are not the lack of electricity around the New York metropolitan area — were not bombarded with one more reason to doubt their leader. As one observer put it, every minute spent on news coverage of the destruction meant less time for negative reports about the economy and the ongoing question marks over events in Benghazi which led to the death of a US ambassador.
When the jobs figures came out Friday morning, the final week of campaigning ended in the score draw which could prove vital for Obama’s overall victory.
Unemployment ticked up a tenth of a percentage point to 7.9% but stayed below the 8% mark which could have fuelled a conservative revival. All the same and as expected, Romney and his campaign cited the naïve election promises of the incumbent but the game is probably up.
In an election defined by negative ads and soundbites, the challenger needed one more stick to beat his opponent with and it wasn’t forthcoming.
Iowa is less crucial than Ohio for victory but it still matters and frustratingly so.
Unemployment in the state is way below national average at 5.2% while the farming sector is strong. The major concern there is the national debt but that might not help Romney if evangelical fears about his Mormonism hold him back a third time after caucus defeats in 2008 and earlier this year.
Polls emerged late on Saturday night from the Des Moines Register newspaper which had the president ahead by five points while it was also reported that over 40% of likely voters had already cast their ballot.
If Obama added Wisconsin to Iowa then he could afford to drop two of Colorado, Virginia (where Bill Clinton sang his praises on Saturday night), and Ohio whereas any combination that included Ohio would see him well on the way to victory.
All the signs are going his way now. As a result of some good fortune and some good campaigning, the president will hold on. The only question could end up being how that winning margin will look.
One of the higher profile statisticians tracking the polls, Nate Silver of The New York Times, is predicting that a relatively substantial share of the electoral college votes will go to Obama.
If it’s much tighter, there could well be a repeat of what happened 12 years ago when the Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral college vote.
This outcome was made all the more possible by Sandy which may affect voter turnout in New York and New Jersey, two states which Obama will carry. However, their huge populations will impact on the popular vote count either way.
For someone who was once so idealistic and who shot to power on a wave of unifying emotion and stirring rhetoric, potentially re-entering office to govern so divided a nation will not sit well with the president.
Whereas once there were no red states and no blue states, just the United States, now older, wiser, battered and bruised, Obama has told his supporters that tomorrow will be a choice between two “fundamentally different visions” for the country.
As much as Romney has successfully minimised paranoia about his religion, Obama has provoked the strongest response yet from the Catholic Church in the US and will have his work cut out to mend ties if he does return to office.
This subplot is all the more fascinating as the Church, along with many of the other religions who have used their pulpits to try and influence voting, are exempt from paying tax and, therefore, expected by the Internal Revenue Service to stay out of government affairs.
In Illinois, Catholic priests were instructed to read out a letter from Bishop Daniel Jenky at Mass yesterday morning in which he accused the Obama administration of an “assault upon (their) religious freedom”.
“Since the foundation of the American Republic and the adoption of the Bill of Rights, I do not think there has ever been a time more threatening to our religious liberty than the present,” it read.
Bishops of Pennsylvania have also lashed out at Obama’s policies on contraception, abortion, and gay rights, while a bishop in Green Bay, Wisconsin, David Ricken, told his diocese of 300,000 that the president’s policies were “intrinsically evil”.
Obama has learned many hard lessons in diplomacy since early 2008. By Wednesday morning, he should know for sure that he has four more years to work out a better way of bridging all the divides.
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