HONOLULU—Up until election day in the United States on Nov. 6, it seemed as though Barack Obama would be a one-term president.
His old magic in 2008 was gone and he flubbed his first debate with his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney. The US economy had taken a nose dive under his watch. The unemployment rate sidelined 23 million Americans amid rising costs of living. The battery of right-wing pundits and conservative media analysts concluded that his policies had failed. Poll after poll predicted a neck-and-neck count in the so-called “battleground states,” especially Ohio, the traditional harbinger of American presidential victories.
But all these would turn out to be much sound and fury that resulted, instead, in a resounding second mandate for Obama and a humiliating loss for Romney. It wasn’t even close, as had been suggested by the polls. Romney lost all but one of the swing states that he had hoped to sweep. The popular vote was closer, but Obama’s lead in the electoral vote column was insurmountable early on. What happened?
Simply that while a great number of the US electorate had reason to be disenchanted with Obama, they figured that the alternative—i.e., Romney—would be a lot worse.
And this calculated deduction came about because of an America that is changing in a demographic, cultural, social and political sense. In short, the “minorities” won the day: The African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, women, and other such groups that were previously on the margins of American society have grown in numbers and influence, which the Republican Party had failed to understand, let alone appreciate.
Though Obama lost 9 million votes since his 2008 stunning victory, he managed to hang on to his rainbow coalition of minorities, while holding Romney at bay on the question of who would be the better manager of the economy for the next four years. It paid off, as the majority of the voters decided to give him a second chance rather than begin all over again with an untested rival.
Romney himself, in true patrician and elitist fashion, was his own worst enemy in the campaign period. His first salvo to the electorate was to repeal “Obamacare,” the President’s health plan approved by Congress, his singular achievement in his first term. It was upheld by no less than the Supreme Court when its constitutionality was questioned in a lawsuit by 26 states.
Romney followed this up with an arrogant gaffe berating 47 percent of the electorate for being tax cheats, who had developed a culture of dependency on and entitlement from the government as far as their livelihood was concerned. And, he added, these “47-percenters” would vote for Obama no matter what. His message, of course, was that Obama was “pampering” these tax evaders.
Where in the world will you find a presidential candidate scolding nearly 50 percent of the voters when he was supposed to be appealing for their support? It’s simply crazy, speaking of self-destruction. He was supposed to win voters to his position, not alienate them right off the bat. Politics is essentially addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division.
Romney and his Republican Party simply have not kept abreast of a changing America where more than 70 percent of Latinos, African-Americans and Asian-Americans, as well as great majorities of women and other nonwhite groups gave Obama a convincing mandate of another four years. Romney won a majority of “white male” votes, but not much else. He was growing against the grain of a changing America once dominated by upper-class families like his.
Another factor that contributed to Romney’s debacle was his decision to move closer to the radical right, which was prompted by his primary contests with the likes of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who had argued that Romney was not “conservative enough.” The Tea Party, the right wing of the Republicans, also put the pressure on him to move closer to the right. He was also heavily supported by the so-called “super PACs” (political action committees), which poured billions of dollars into his campaign on the basis of the Supreme Court’s decision to allow corporations and wealthy individuals to contribute as much as they could to support candidates (usually Republicans) of their choosing. In the end, this shameless American-style “vote-buying” by these Republican-leaning superPacs backfired in their attempts to oust Obama.
Not to be outdone, Obama himself cranked up his old fundraising machine to raise money from the people, and ended up, ironically, outspending Romney in his bid for reelection. The US Chamber of Commerce alone spent $33 million on ads for losing Republican candidates for the Senate. A Las Vegas casino owner, Sheldon Adelson, spent no less than $53 million of his money to support initially Gingrich and later Romney when the latter won the Republican nomination for president.
This set of events leads many of the liberal-leaning pundits like Joel Mathis to say that if Romney’s Republican Party were seen as “a welcoming place for a wider cross-section of America, it would earn the support of a wider cross-section of America.” It was not to be.
Instead, Romney was appealing passionately to a slowly shrinking piece of White America. By 2050, projections have it that White America itself would become a minority.
Dr. Belinda A. Aquino is professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she served as professor of political science and Asian studies and director of the Center for Philippine Studies before retiring.