So, Obama will be in the White House for another four years. I expected as much, and honestly I don’t think it would’ve mattered much had Romney been elected.
In his current term, Obama:
- Won the Nobel Peace Prizeand then invaded Libya
- Implemented a vast change to the nation’s health insurance (not health care) system that fines people who choose not to purchase insurance
- Signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which includes provisions to allow U.S. citizens to be indefinitely detained without trial or even cause, and he threatened to veto the 2013 version of the bill if it didn’t have the same provision
- Reneged on his promise to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay
For me, these are the major failures of Obama’s first term. My only hope is that in the second term he will reverse or mitigate them as much as possible.
For three of these things, Obama should have no objection to doing better, since his first time around he campaigned on promises of peace and restoring civil liberties that fell by the wayside during George W. Bush’s reign. However, I highly doubt any changes will be made to Obamacare.
That said, I don’t think we’re in any particularly worse condition than if Romney had been elected. The Democrats retained the Senate, so it’s unlikely Obamacare would be repealed under a Romney administration either. And Romney hasn’t even paid lip-service to pursuing peace or restoring civil liberties.
Ultimately, there was no decent outcome to be expected from this presidential race. We may have the best of all possible worlds, with Obama continuing to face a divided congress. Of course, since Obama has already shown a willingness to further the militaristic and police-state pursuits of his predecessor, it could be that the best of all possible worlds is a really, really bad world.