Hello, and welcome back to another edition of Lace ‘Em Up’s Presidential Election series as will be going over the Election of 2012; Barack Obama has been dealing with a host of issues both at home and abroad, but he’ll need to throw everything his got against the GOP who are looking to make him a one term president.

The Highs and Lows of President Obama

Following his landmark victory over John McCain in the 2008 election, President Barack Obama had a plethora of issues to contend with such as the Great Recession, foreign policy and political partisanship.

Obama signed numerous acts which aimed to revive and reform the finanicial markets with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Dodd-Frank Act; He also continued bailing out corporations and regular people affected by the Great Recession and by 2012 the recession came to an end, although it didn’t feel that way for many middle class Americans which led to protest in the streets by lefists and conservative groups like the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Tea Party Movement.

On foreign policy, Obama honored one of his campaign promises and brought the troops back from Iraq, however the fighting pressed on in Afghanistan with more troops being sent to fight while the president increased drone strikes overseas. On May 1st, 2011 (U.S. Time) Navy Seals both found and killed Osama Bid Laden, the terrorist leader who claimed responiblity for the 9/11 attacks signaling a major win in America’s War on Terrorism.

Elsewhere, Obama nominated the first woman of Hispanic descent, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan onto the Supreme Court and also signed into law The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or ‘ObamaCare’ which among other things kept American children on their parents healthcare plan until they were 26, allowed people with pre-existing conditions to not be denied insurance and overall attempted to give millions of American muched need coverage.

Despite his successes and attempts to bring unity back in Washington, a conservative backlash soon emerged with many of the GOP’s highest ranking officials using their influence and the party’s massive win in the 2010 mid terms to block most of Obama’s legislation.

Still Obama was widely popular with most Americans and the Democratic Party, so it came as no surprise that he and Vice President, Joe Biden were easily re-nominated.

2012 Republican Presidential Candidates

Following the Republican Party’s ‘Tea Party Tidalwave’ as described by newly elected Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the conservatives had control of the House of Representatives and parts of the Senate which greatly reduced the Democrats power and soon a host of Republican candidates ran with the hopes of adding the presidency to the GOP’s trifecta.

Mitt Romney and Ron Paul returned to fight for the nomination after failing to get in 2008, but they also had other contenders like former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, Gary Johnson, the former Governor of New Mexico not to mention Rick Perry who was the former Governor of Texas and Newt Gingrich who was the former Speaker of the House and leading figure of ‘The Republic Revolution of 1994’.

Seeing his chances of winning the nomination were slipping, Johnson soon left the GOP to run with the Libertarian Party but got less than one percent of the popular vote. Meanwhile Rick Perry was seen as a possible frontfunner but his polling numbers, his showings in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries and an embrassing ‘Oops Moment’ during one of the debates put paid to his plans and he soon dropped out.

The other four major candidates had a back-and-forth race with Santorum winning the Iowa Caucus and a few contests in Colorado, Kansas, North Dakota and a few southern states like Missouri and Alabama while Gingrich won two in South Carolina and his homestate of Georgia while Ron Paul won four and the rest went to Romney.

By Super Tuesday, Mitt Romney had won the most delegates to his side and he became the first Mormon to be nominated as a candidate for president by a major political party; Romney choose Paul Ryan, a U.S. Representative from Wisconsin and future Speaker of the House as his running mate.

Campaign Spending and Attack Ads

This election became the first to take place after the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Citizen’s United v. FEC case which allowed endless amounts spending for political campaigns with much of that money unsurprisingly coming from big money donors connected to corporations and special interest groups.

Both sides are using these unlimited funds to finance their campaigns while using it to buy airtime to broadcast their attack ads with Romney taking aim at Obama’s foreign policy efforts and his comments during a speech in Virginia about how the government built things for small businesses to succeed as oppose to the owners of those businesses.

Obama responds with attack ads on Romney’s time as Governor of Massachusetts where he claimed to be “Severely Conservative” and how numerous jobs were being shipped and outsourced to Mexico, China and India. His also goes after his opponents history with the private investment firm, Bain Capital and even attacking Paul Ryan’s budget plan which harkens back to the old top down ecomonic policies that led to previous crashes in the financial markets.

These ads on Mitt Romney only furthered the issue that many voters in the GOP had which is the fact their looking for an outsider like candidate, but their nominiee for president is both a businessman and a Washington insider at a time when being both of those things were not popular with the base.

On top of that, many of the religious voters in the Republican Party don’t view Mormonism in a positive light, which is further hurting his ablity to connect with the base, but things get problematic when a private conversation involving Romney gets leaked to the public.

The 47% Comment and Election Debates

In September of 2012, a video surfaces courtesy of the nonprofit magazine, ‘Mother Jones’ which shows Mitt Romney talking to a group of donors during a private meeting where he calls out the alleged 47% of Americans who are hooked onto the goverment and there’s no need to get those voters because they’ll vote for the president no matter what…As you can imagine this was a PR nightmare for the Romney campaign and the Obama team made an ad lambasting Mitt’s comments.

When the first presidential debate occurs most probably expected Obama to wipe the floor with Romney especially after that 47% comment, but instead it was Romney who defeated Obama who came off as tepid and uncomfortable during the debate which saw the former governor getting a much needed boost in the polls.

Any uneasiness the president had in the first debate vanished come the second and third debates as he leveled a host of memorable insults at Mitt Romney like: “The 1980’s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” in terms of Romney’s foreign policy ideas and when Mitt criticized the shrinking size of the Navy under the president, Obama responded with: “We have fewer ships than we did in 1916, Well Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.”

Combine this with Romney’s gaffe about having a “Binders Full of Women” when looking for qualified females to be a part of this team during his governorship as well as Joe Biden’s performance over Paul Ryan in the VP debate and it looked like President Obama could narrowly escape election day 2012 with a second term.

Election of 2012: The Results

As you can see from the electoral map above, Barack Obama wins re-election and becomes the third president in a row to win two terms into office. Obama and Romney were pretty close in terms of the amount of states they carried with Obama winning 26 states (plus D.C.) while Romney had 24 states.

In terms of the popular vote things were also a bit close, but the same could not be said for the electoral vote…Obama won 332 electoral votes and 51. 1% compared to Romney’s 206 electoral votes and it turns out he ended up getting that 47% of Americans after all as he got 47.2%.

Similar to presidents like Madison, Wilson, and FDR, Barack Obama got less electoral and popular votes compared to the previous election but he did become the first president since Reagan to win two elections with a majority of both votes and in the process became only the sixth Democrat to win a second term.

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