With re-election comes more responsibility. President Barack Obama defeated former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney and earned another term in the White House. While that allows Obama another four years to fulfill campaign promises and work on long-term economic recovery, it also means that the public will only scrutinize him more as he works to achieve his goals.
Obama stood out as the strongest candidate compared to Romney, despite Romney’s appeals to the American public’s wallets and desires of reduced unemployment. The public sided with Obama, arguably for his stance on social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion, as well as for his foreign policies regarding negotiations in the Middle East. A number of Americans likely cast their ballots acknowledging that many circumstances regarding the recession were out of the president’s control and that, considering the intensity of the recession, recoveries sometimes take a painfully long time. However, the majority of those voters who re-elected Obama are doing so with the hope that he will revisit issues that he failed to address over the last four years such as Guantanamo Bay. The country is giving him another chance with the hope that he will revitalize the economy and provide new, good jobs for Americans. Now that he does not have to worry about re-election, perhaps he will be able to push harder for those changes.
That being said, it will still be interesting to see how he tackles healthcare, an area where he dedicated a lot of time in his first term.
After months of town halls and campaigning for healthcare reform, Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law in 2012, which marked the largest overhaul of the healthcare system since the 1960s. Over these next four years, Obama will not only be overseeing the Act, but will have an opportunity to tack on minor or major amendments to it.
However, it will be even more interesting to see how Obama addresses the economy. Student loan debt is mounting and 23 million Americans are still out of work, according to a statement on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s website. There have been some small improvements — in spite of the unemployment levels, new jobs have been created and federal loan repayment has been capped at 10 percent a year.
However, going into this next term, the question on our mind is, Can Obama be proven right in his potential to bring forth economic stability for Americans?
Hopefully, the Obama we see these next four years will surpass the Obama we’ve seen over these past four years. The new Obama will hopefully focus more on the issues to which he has given neglect, namely the economy.
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