The Washington Post endorses Obama

The Washington Post editorial board endorsed President Obama on Thursday.

Much of the editorial, published shortly after noon, focuses on the economy. It says the most important question of the election is which candidate is better able to put the country on "sounder financial footing." The editorial then goes on to say the second biggest priority is which candidate can engineer a compromise to avoid massive tax hikes and spending cuts that go into effect on Jan. 1 unless a deal is reached.

"This will be a moment of peril but also of opportunity. How the president-elect navigates it will go a long way toward determining the success of his presidency and the health of the nation," the editorial says. "President Barack Obama is better positioned to be that navigator than is his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney."

The editorial does include criticism of Obama though. The endorsement says that Obama's first term has included notable "disappointments." 

"He did not end, as he promised he would, “our chronic avoidance of tough decisions” on fiscal matters. But Mr. Obama is committed to the only approach that can succeed: a balance of entitlement reform and revenue increases," the editorial continues. "Mr. Romney, by contrast, has embraced his party’s reality-defying ideology that taxes can always go down but may never go up. Along that road lies a future in which interest payments crowd out everything else a government should do, from defending the nation to caring for its poor and sick to investing in its children. Mr. Romney’s future also is one in which an ever-greater share of the nation’s wealth resides with the nation’s wealthy, at a time when inequality already is growing."

The editorial board also writes that it was a disappointment that Obama did not act on the recommendations of his fiscal commission or come to a grand bargain deal on deficit reduction with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

"Mr. Obama alienated Congress and business leaders by isolating himself inside a tight White House circle that manages to be both arrogant and thin-skinned," the editorial reads. "Too often his administration treats business as an obstacle rather than a partner. He hardly tried to achieve the immigration reform and climate-change policy he promised."

But the editorial praises Obama as well for passing his stimulus bill, bailing out the auto industry and passing healthcare reform legislation.

"The steady experts he put in charge of economic policy, notably Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, navigated between the Democratic Party’s left, which urged populist measures that would have been expensive and ineffectual, and an obstructionist Republican Party, which at times seemed content to inflict great harm on the country."

Near the end of the endorsement, a few paragraphs are devoted to Obama ending the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy as well as killing Osama bin Laden and supporting rebels in Libya against Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

"Mr. Obama advanced the leading civil-rights struggle of the day when he ended the military’s discrimination against gay men and lesbians and declared his support for same-sex marriage," the editorial said. "He took an important step against climate change by promulgating, and persuading industry to support, ambitious fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks."

The editorial is critical of Romney, saying it's unclear what kind of president the former Massachusetts governor would be.

"The sad answer is there is no way to know what Mr. Romney really believes. His unguarded expression of contempt for 47 percent of the population seems as sincere as anything else we’ve heard, but that’s only conjecture," the editorial says. "At times he has advocated a muscular, John McCain-style foreign policy, but in the final presidential debate he positioned himself as a dove. Before he passionately supported a fetus’s right to life, he supported a woman’s right to abortion. His swings have been dramatic on gay rights, gun rights, health care, climate change and immigration."

The endorsement concludes that Obama is "far more likely" than Romney to succeed.

"In a second term, working with an opposition that we hope would be chastened by the failure of its scorched-earth campaign against him, he is far more likely than his opponent to succeed. That makes Mr. Obama by far the superior choice," the editorial says.

In 2008 the Post also endorsed Obama for president.

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