2012 Presidential Election: Obamamania

From the UK Independent, "'Gangnam Style' to Obamamania: 12 reasons to be cheerful about 2012: If the economic crisis has turned you into a gloomy bunny this year, here are a dozen reasons to look back on the past 12 months and smile." on 30 December 2012, "No. 3 Obamamania!" by David Randall -- 

And so, as 2012 sits mumbling to itself in the Father Time Care Home Facility for Terminally Past-it Years, sipping soup through a Tommy Tippee cup and calling all the nurses "mummy", let us give thanks to ethnic-minority Americans, the country's women, its welfare claimants, tree-huggers, nerds, pinko liberals, gays of either coast, geeks, members of the Book of the Month Club, listeners to public radio, and Medicare patients.

These are the real heroes of the past 12 months, for they are the ones who stood between us and a billionaire bozo as leader of the free world. They didn't let us down. Aided by the congenitally centre-leaning mainstream media and an economy at last responding to treatment, together they stopped the planet having to cope with the election of Willard Mitt Romney as president.

 There was a time, of course, just after the first presidential debate, when the possibility arose that this most rainbow of coalitions might not pull it off. The polls actually had Romney in the lead. But some of us never lost faith. We were convinced that, even in a nation notorious for spawning more than its share of loony-tunes, the millions who know a right-wing huckster when they see one would finally do right by us all.

And they did. They re-elected Barack Obama – a thoughtful politician whose aversion to knee-jerkery, cronyism, and trying to bomb Muslim countries into over-sized hamburger-eating democracy has been such a welcome contrast with his predecessor. Just think: a president who not only reads books, but appears to understand them as well.

The alternative result in November hardly bears contemplating. Romney is a multi-billionaire who declined to come clean about his past tax-paying, who dismissed 47 per cent of his fellow countrymen and women – that's close to 100 million people in real money – as feckless ne'er-do-wells, and who chose as his running mate a man whose economic policies make George Osborne look like a Trotskyite.

 

All you need do to appreciate the enormity of what we avoided is to tot up those elements and interest groups who would have been throwing their hats in the air at a Romney victory: bankers, the gun lobby, billionaires and country-club types, Middle East extremists, Fox News, rabidly conservative bloggers, al-Qa'ida, Goldman Sachs bonus-getters, Sarah Palin and assorted camouflage-wearing, Bowie-knife-owning libertarian nut-jobs.

God bless America – especially 47 per cent of it. (source:  UK Independent)