EDITORIAL - Obama's second coming

President Barack Obama emerged victorious last night after a bruising electoral campaign which presented two very different visions of America.

Victory did not come easy. Donors, including powerful special-interest Super PACs, poured more than US$1 billion into the propaganda trough of advertisers in the most expensive election campaign on record. The mudslinging and muckraking came thick and fast. And truth was a regular casualty in the war of words between party hacks.

Inevitably, Barack Obama outran the momentum of Mitt Romney because the majority of Americans believed he was the more credible, trustworthy leader. Voters placed their faith in a candidate whose progressive ideas on women's rights, abortion, health care, gay marriage and climate change, among others, were more liberal and cerebral than the narrow, myopic rants of Republican right-wingers.

Mr Obama also benefited from the Democrats' willingness to embrace the evolving America - where fast-growing ethnic minorities like African Americans and Hispanics will, cumulatively, in decades to come, displace the white majority. The president understands that declaring all-out war on Hispanic illegals, or promulgating the Romney policy of mass self-deportation, is untenable; he prefers priority targeting of violent illegal migrants while strengthening border control.

economic failures

However, Mr Obama's second coming must not be a time of gloating over the ruinate Republicans. Now is a time for introspection and soul-searching, for Mr Obama must acknowledge that his presidency has failed to live up to the heady heights and rhetorical flourish of 2008 when he portrayed himself as a revolutionary Washington outsider.

Slogans and punchlines like 'Change we can believe in' or 'Yes, we can' do not obscure the tattered state of the American economy.

President Obama promised to slash unemployment; instead, joblessness spiked, before settling last month at 7.9 per cent, according to the latest data out of the Department of Labour.

He must chart a path to close America's trillion-dollar deficit. Restoring middle-class jobs, a staple theme of Mr Obama, and boosting trade must also take priority.

Mr Obama's next four years must be marked by greater attempts to unite a very polarised United States, and to get greater buy-in, both in the House of Representatives and the Senate, from Republicans who, generally, have been obstructionist, recalcitrant and ideologically tone deaf. And he should urge the thinking cohort of the GOP not to surrender ground to the extremist, anachronistic Tea Partiers.

confront assad

Now that the election is over, President Obama must be bold and shore up America's place in global politics, starting with Bashar al-Assad, the bloodthirsty Syrian dictator whose regime has bombarded cities and towns and bludgeoned rebels and innocents. The death toll is hurtling towards 40,000.

Mr Obama's reluctance to talk tough and act tough on the Syrian conflict may be understandable, considering the closeness of the US elections, the narrowness of the race, and the potential fallout, politically, if the US became embroiled in air or ground forays.

But there are many ways to skin a cat. And with the elections in the rear-view mirror, President Obama must assert America's role as a conscientious defender of democracy and freedom, and, with Western and Middle East support, turn the screws on Assad.

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