Congratulations Obama

Congratulations to Barack Obama on winning a second term. Conservative pundits thought that was utterly impossible. Obama won 26 states and the District of Columbia. Only two states switched parties, with North Carolina and Indiana going back to the Republicans. Once again no President has won the election without also winning a majority of states since Jimmy Carter achieved this in 1976. I find that winning the election while winning only a minority of states is quite possible, but the way that votes nationwide swing from election to election makes this particular scenario unlikely. Obama again won all the Kerry states, all the Gore states, 9 out of 10 Dukakis states, and most 1992 and 1996 Clinton states outside the South. Obama is the first Democratic President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win a majority of the popular vote in two elections. FDR won four terms, and won a majority of the popular vote in all four. Since then until this year Democratic Presidents have either been assassinated in their first term (John F. Kennedy), declined to run for a second full term (Lyndon Johnson), been defeated at their run for a second term (Jimmy Carter), or failed to win a majority of the popular vote for their second term or their first term for that matter (Bill Clinton). Presidents have been term limited since the 1940s to two terms when a constitutional amendment was passed limiting the number of Presidential terms. Many felt that FDR’s four terms went against the precedent set by George Washington when he declined to run for a third term and all other Presidents followed suit at the end of their second term until FDR ran for a third term in 1940. FDR ran for a fourth term as well in 1944 in the middle of World War II and won the narrowest popular vote victory of his Presidential career but still an Electoral College landslide. Sadly FDR only completed less than four months of his fourth term before dying suddenly. This paved the way for Vice President Harry Truman to preside over the end of World War II. This in turn paved the way for the famous Dewey defeats Truman headline when a newspaper in the 1948 Presidential election famously called the election incorrectly when in reality Truman had defeated Republican nominee Thomas Dewey. Truman’s victory was not anticipated because Dewey previously had a large lead because the Democrats had been suffering from an uneven economy despite the post-war economic boom. The Presidential term limit was brought in to enshrine what many saw as a sort of constitutional convention that had lasted for over a century. Because of the term limit Obama can’t run for a third term. I’m not sure what impact this has on the chances of the Democrats retaining the White House in 2016. The Democrats will need a new candidate who can take Obama’s appeal and get-out-the-vote machine with them. Romney’s campaign now admits that their internal polls were skewed Republican because that is what they thought the electorate would look like. I personally knew all along that the public polls had the composition of the electorate right. Republicans hoped that Romney would be like Reagan and defeat a Democratic President (Jimmy Carter in the case of Reagan) who was struggling with a poor economy. Of course this dream of Republicans didn’t work for two reasons. Firstly, the electorate is much more Democratic-leaning then it was in 1980. This fact is reflected in the strong support for Obama in the Northeast, Midwest, and west coast that was conspicuously absent in 1980 for Carter. Some have called Obama the Democratic Reagan. This is an interesting concept. It is true in the sense that both inherited a bad economy, both were unpopular during a large part of their first term because of the bad economy, both suffered mid-term election losses for their party in their respective first terms but both also managed to hold onto the Senate in the two respective midterm elections, and both then went on the win re-election to a second term. It can also be argued that ideologically Reagan and Obama complement each other, Reagan with strong conservative convictions on certain issues and Obama with strong liberal convictions on certain issues. So congratulations to Obama, now the hard work for Obama, the Democrats, and the Republicans begins.

Obama's health care overhaul

I support the passage in the United States of the recent health care overhaul. Of course I believe it doesn’t go nearly far enough. But it was hard enough to pass the bill as it was. They had to get every single Democratic Senator to vote for it. One notable Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, would not vote for a health care bill that had a public option. Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman also refused to support a public option. I fully support the public option concept and found it unfortunate that it wouldn’t have taken effect until 2013. Universal public health care is always the ideal. Republicans rail against government takeover of health care. Yet that’s a concept I support, and even the American population supports that concept to some extent. As much as Republicans claim that Americans oppose “government takeover” of health care many polls have shown a majority of Americans support the public option, something that Republicans would indeed classify as a “government takeover.” In my view individual states that have Democratic legislatures ought to pass a single payer system for their own state and go beyond the new federal law. California is attempting to do just that right now. However California has a Republican governor, famous actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has promised to veto a single payer bill. Democrats do not have the votes to override a veto. Also passing budgets and budget related items is so difficult under California’s constitution that the single payer bill would actually need voter approval in a referendum. Voter passage in a referendum is no guarantee when the anti-single payer groups would inundate the state with misinformation in an attempt to defeat a single payer system. There is also no guarantee that a single payer system could be passed into law next year. The open California governor’s race is an exact dead heat between the leading Republican and Democratic candidates at the moment and if a Republican wins, they too would surely veto a single payer bill. As for New York, although New York has a Democratic governor, this Democratic governor is badly embattled and is not running for re-election. New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is expected to seek the Democratic nomination for governor but has yet to announce his candidacy. But even if Cuomo becomes governor, a single payer bill is unlikely to pass unless the Democrats majority in the Senate is expanded. At the moment there is a very narrow Democratic majority in the Senate in which the balance of power is held by socially conservative Democrats. With this narrow majority, it is not clear to me whether a single payer bill could pass. Sadly it also seems difficult for states to implement a single payer system with the constant thorn of budget deficits that is affecting every single jurisdiction in both Canada and the United States. Nevertheless in my view this federal health care bill in the US is only the beginning of the long fight to ensure that the under privileged have complete and total health care coverage in all of the USA.

Obama's State of the Union Address

Barack Obama’s State of the Union address seems very good. Its great that he points out that he and absolutely everyone else hated the bank bailouts. But I would point out that I’ve seen conservatives in the United States blame the hated bank bailouts only on Obama and point to it as example of why Obama is socialist, etc. American conservatives backing Republican Scott Brown in the recent upset Massachusetts Senate election cited the bank bailouts as one of the reasons that they believe Obama is so terrible. But I would point out that the bank bailout bill was signed by George W. Bush in 2008. I’m not sure if Obama was even there to vote for the bank bailout – he was probably out campaigning at the time. American conservatives also have railed against Obama’s stimulus package. But their argument does not hold much water when one considers that Bush also supported a stimulus package in the fall of 2008 but Republicans in his own party filibustered the Bush-supported stimulus until the session ran out. All of these things were just being done to prevent the collapse of the economy and these bailouts and stimulus packages do seem to be preventing the economy from collapsing and seem to be even helping the economy to recover. So in conclusion I’d say a lot more work needs to be done in the United States capital but Obama has given a great State of the Union address.