Obama’s Reasons

Few doubt the responsibility of Republican governments in the crisis, but is that argument enough for the president to win the election?

Less than two months before the U.S. elections, the polls show a very tight race. The difference has been at levels not exceeding 3 percent of the votes. After the Democratic convention that took place last week, there is the feeling that its artillery continues to be focused on pointing out the state of things and the economy that the president found at the beginning of his term, which doesn’t exempt him from assuming, as he does, a defensive attitude or one of excuses, which could end up not being good for him. He stood to run that country and none other. He has been doing that for the last four years.

It’s completely true that the financial crisis, origin of “all evil,” was possible because of the attitude of Bush’s administrations and wasn’t exactly by accident: The limited role that Republicans assign to the state — to regulate, intervene and control overflows of private interests, to the detriment of general interests — is a mistake that Mr. Romney is proposing to repeat now, convinced of its benefits. The same can be said of the tax cuts that he insists on proposing and that are the origin of the fiscal crisis, in a low economic growth scenario.

But it is also true that the government’s figures are not enough for Obama: Gross domestic product growth of 1.5 percent in 2012, after 2.9 percent in 2010 and 1.7 percent in 2011, is not a positive trend, and is also not enough to reduce the unemployment rate, at nearly 8.1 percent in August, while industry’s share has declined in four years — more than half a point — and public debt has increased considerably as a result of anti-crisis spending and low tax levels. Obama’s weakness is the economy, the same one that has been placed at the center of the electoral debate; now, for voters, it doesn’t seem so important that he achieved the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, limited growth of military expenses and his success in the fight against terrorism.

If the U.S. could observe itself in Europe’s mirror, it would understand the devastating effects of a crisis catapulted by a failed economic model that Mr. Romney insists on prolonging. Like people’s health — it is possible that their antibodies react autonomously, banishing diseases, but while that happens they also lose their lives — the markets can self-adjust without intervention from the state. When? After how many million more poor, unemployed and bankrupt entrepreneurs? While it can’t be predicted with accuracy, the effect of antibiotics, public investment or spending, are tested and are significantly better than sitting around waiting. It is one of the functions of the state, and of good governments, to administer and deliver them.

In such a tight election, however, one must consider that the theory of the rational voters doesn’t apply so much, since they are the ones who will begin to speculate in a decisive manner about factors like the credibility and image of the candidates, factors where President Obama has an advantage, with the exception of the appraisal of his management of the economy. Since independent voters will be crucial — among whom Obama is losing by 14 points up to now — here his campaign’s strategy has failed. Will it be enough? Clearly not, if it is not underpinned by certain employment expectations, at a time when the debate about health and social spending seems exhausted in electoral terms.

Former president Clinton said that “Republican economic policies quadrupled the debt before I took office, in the 12 years before I took office, and doubled the debt in the eight years after I left,” which is true. It should be added that the theoretical permissiveness of the Republican view of the role of the state “drove” the world into a crisis that it has not been able to get out of, harming hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their jobs — among whom the voters for the next president of the U.S. are in the front row and for whom there seems sufficient reason to identify those responsible for their plight, as well as the certainty that they will leave.