Another major newspaper in another swing state has decided that four years have been enough to adjudge Obama worthy of firing. The Telegraph endorsed Obama four years ago.
As we noted when we endorsed Romney for the GOP nomination prior to the New Hampshire primary in January, Washington is broken. In order to fix it, it will take a strong leader willing to roll up his sleeves and work directly with the heads of both parties to carve out the best possible solutions.
We believe Romney has demonstrated that he can do that; the president has had four years to demonstrate that he can’t.
To be clear, we didn’t make the decision not to endorse Obama for a second term lightly. Nor do we believe, like many of his critics, that he is without achievement during his time in office.
At the very least, walking into the second-worst economic crisis in the nation’s history, the president and his administration deserve credit for steadying the ship of state through a combination of middle-class tax cuts, a stimulus program and a rescue of the auto industry.
And there can be no denying that House and Senate Republicans did everything in their power to stymie the president’s agenda, even putting the nation at risk of default during the debt-ceiling debacle of 2011.
But true leaders find ways to work around such obstacles, much like Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did during their terms in office.
True leaders also don’t wait until two weeks before Election Day – in the form of a 20-page booklet, no less – to lay out a specific agenda for the next four years. Coupled with the negative tenor of the campaign, that merely confirms the president and his strategists felt that attacking Romney’s agenda was more politically expedient than releasing one of their own.
The paper’s endorsement hits the print edition tomorrow.
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