5 KEYS TO OBAMA’S VICTORY
President Barack Obama confounded
political logic by triumphing over a sluggish economy to win a second term in
office.
A grueling and often unpleasant campaign yielded, in the end, a decisive
victory, built on the strong foundations laid down months ago by his crack
campaign team.
Here are some of the keys to Obama’s win over Republican Mitt Romney:
THE ECONOMY WAS JUST GOOD ENOUGH
The economy, despite tepid growth rates and high unemployment, was not bad
enough to doom Obama, and he appears to have finally received belated credit
for halting the slide into a second Great Depression.
Mitt Romney conceded defeat and Obama got four more years
When he took office in January 2009, the economy was losing 700,000 jobs a
month, and while Americans are still dissatisfied with the economy, exit polls
suggest they still blame ex-president George W. Bush as much as Obama.
Obama endured months of grisly monthly unemployment numbers, which told a tale
of an economy struggling to gain steam.
He got a break over the last few months, as the unemployment rate dipped below
the psychological barrier of eight percent.
Consumer confidence and optimism began to rise along with the stock market, and
Americans began to feel a bit more optimistic as house prices finally began a
slow rise, despite a lingering foreclosure crisis.
Often criticized as aloof and professorial, Obama, in the final days of his
campaign, his voice hoarse, finally seemed to strike a chord with blue collar
workers who enrich the Democratic coalition in the rustbelt.
In a twist of political history, Obama was helped by the embrace of his former
Democratic antagonist, ex-president Bill Clinton, who buried the hatchet after
Obama’s defeat of his wife Hillary in the 2008 Democratic primary.
Clinton, remembered for leading an
era of economic prosperity, often made the case for Obama better than the
president himself.
The two Democratic giants will now stand together in history as the only two
Democrats to win a second term since World War II.
The Obama campaign made a gamble soon after Romney captured the Republican
primary — to go negative.
Searing Obama ads and rhetoric branded the former investment manager a
corporate vulture, who bought and sold firms for his own profit and heartlessly
put good Americans out of work or shipped their jobs overseas.
The plan was to define Romney in a harsh light before he had the chance to
introduce himself to Americans with a multi-million dollar blitz of television
advertising in the swing states, like Ohio,
which would decide the election.
Romney’s limp defense of his record as head of Bain Capital, and his missteps —
including a refusal to divulge his complicated offshore tax arrangements and a
video in which he was seen decrying 47 percent of Americans as freeloaders who
paid no income taxes — played into the stereotype.
By the time of Romney’s stellar performance in the first presidential debate in
October, the damage had been done.
THE BIN LADEN BOUNCE
The killing of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in a daring Navy SEAL raid in
2011 did not win Obama re-election.
But it bolstered the image of the president as a steely commander-in-chief who
kept Americans safe and defused the classic Republican attack that Democrats
are weak and cannot be trusted on national security.
Kudos Obama won with the bin Laden raid, not to mention a ruthless drone war
against terror suspects abroad, may have also insulated the president against a
late-election furor over the killing of the US
ambassador to Libya
in Benghazi.
THE OBAMA MACHINE
For the second election running, Obama’s campaign team has reinvented the way
presidential elections are won.
In 2008, Obama’s political braintrust, led by the intense David Plouffe,
outwitted the political machine of Bill and Hillary Clinton with a delegate
collection strategy that redefined the way primary campaigns are won.
This time around, they defied the strong headwinds of a slowly growing economy
and re-elected their president in the face of ferocious Republican opposition.
The path to victory lay in the most sophisticated voter targeting and turnout
machine in history, which reached all the way down to neighborhoods and was
constructed over several years.
Way back in October 2011, Obama’s political high command insisted to skeptical
journalists that the president, smarting from a drubbing in mid-term
congressional elections, could and would win re-election.
The strategy: position Obama as a populist warrior for the middle class, and
brand his opponent as a rich plutocrat oblivious to the suffering of regular
Americans.
Obama’s team insisted all along that his coalition of young voters, Hispanics
and African Americans, as well as the educated white middle class, would show
up for him in 2012, just as they did in 2008.
Republicans scoffed, but they were proven wrong.
According to exit polls, 93 percent of African Americans backed Obama, along
with 69 percent of Latinos and 70 percent of Jewish voters, and he was able to
limit his losses among white voters.
Obama also won an important victory among unmarried women voters, 68 percent of
whom backed him.
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