On 2012-11-05, at 5:28 PM, Carrol Cox wrote: >> >> Does it matter who wins the US presidential election tomorrow > > Probably a bit, but not enough to make it other than an immense bore.
Excepting the Wall Street Journal, all of the major establishment publications - the NY Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, and the Economist - have endorsed Obama, and don't see any significant differences between the two candidates - as individuals. But they're uncertain that Romney can detach himself from the right wing of his party to "govern from the center" while they already know Obama is not constrained by his liberal base. "Better the devil you know than the one you don't", is how the Economist put it. Governing from the center in this instance mainly means avoiding the looming "fiscal cliff" through an early bipartisan deal favoured by the corporate sector which trades off modest tax increases in exchange for deep phased-in cuts in social spending along the lines of the Bowles-Simpson report. Ruling class opinion makers see the intransigence of the Republican base and congressional representatives as the biggest impediment to a deal, and Romney! , despite his belated but vague efforts, has not fully assuaged their concern that he would be able to take his distance from the RP conservative right as Obama did in relation to the DP liberal left in his first term. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
