On Tuesday, November 6, 2012, Barack Hussein Obama was elected to a second term as President. But is he the same man that the country elected in November 2008? No. He’s less idealistic. In the 2008 race, he ran on a platform of changing Washington’s political culture and cleaning up the cesspool that was the result of eight years of economic policies skewed towards the rich.
Obama began his first term devoted to the idea of “post-partisanship.” He proposed that he could get the political parties to work together, that he was the catalyst to cordial disagreement rather than simple blame. As Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, wrote in The Atlantic in December 2007, “Unlike any of the other candidates, [Obama] could take America – finally – past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.” Unfortunately, as the continued gridlock in Congress demonstrates, the President was not able to end the “family quarrel.” He has instead, one could say, lost his innocence after four years immersed in the political realities of our nation’s capital.
As a result, the President took a different approach to his second campaign. He ran mainly on the simple, straightforward plea to the American people that change of the magnitude that the country requires takes a while – certainly more than four years. After establishing this plea, he focused on his successes as President: thirty-two consecutive months of economic growth in the private sector (amounting to 5.4 million new jobs); his work to save the American automobile industry and the addition of 479,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2010; and his passage of healthcare reform through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. He ran on the assertion that he’s had all of this success despite the challenges he’s faced in Washington trying to get Democrats and Republicans to work together.
As he begins his second term, Obama’s main goals are far less grandiose than they were in 2008. Due to the current state of the country, almost all of them are related to economic growth in some way. President Obama vows to change the tax code so that there are incentives to companies to create jobs in the United States; he wants to make tax cuts for the middle class permanent. He says that he’ll invest in education, research and technology. This reduction of grandiosity is directly proportional to the lack of optimism of the American people. According to Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University, Americans have “less faith in what the political system can do.” After watching a presidency characterized by gridlock, I know I certainly do. I just hope that Obama’s new, less idealistic goals won’t prove to require someone of epic hero proportions to realize.
I also hope that he spends time working to improve civil rights, which he championed during his first term. President Obama abolished “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” through the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010, and protected against wage discrimination of women, minorities and the disabled through the Lilly Ledbettter Fair Pay Act. Just as he withdrew troops from Iraq in January of this year, I hope he maintains his commitment to ending the war in Afghanistan in 2014.
Overall, I hope (and expect) that Obama will prove to Americans that he is more than just the better of two presidential candidates. I think that if he manages to leave the country in good economic working order continues to improve social issues, and removes the military from their current constant state of war, he will amount to more than just a better choice. He will amount to being a good choice – the right man, at the right time. •
