Squeaker landslide

The polls were right:  the margin in popular votes was narrow, but Barack Obama won with a substantial majority of electoral votes that may grow significantly if Florida falls his way.   The Democrats did better in the Senate than they once expected but worse in the House than is healthy.  I take some personal satisfaction in Virginia going blue once again (and also electing Tim Kaine to the Senate), as I spent the last five days in Suffolk campaigning for Obama (and Kaine).

The Republicans are saying this is no mandate.  But of course it is.  The question is, a mandate for what?

On the domestic side, above all there is a need for a serious budget that keeps us from falling off the fiscal cliff into the realm of draconian sequester.  The Democrats will use the threat of allowing all the Bush tax cuts to expire to extract an agreement on revenue increases and spending cuts.  This is a scary game of chicken that may include kicking the can down the road a few months, but it is really important that in the end there be a credible and serious agreement.   American credibility worldwide requires it.

I spoke about international issues last night, before the results were clear.  The video should be up sometime today:

By the end of his campaign, Romney was leaving little to choose on foreign policy between himself and the President:  not much more than a promise of greater “resolve,” a hint that his red line on the Iranian nuclear program was lower than Obama’s and a suggestion that he would allow heavy weapons (anti-tank and anti-aircraft) go to the Syrian rebels.

The real difference between the candidates was on budget for international affairs.  The Ryan budget includes dramatic cuts for the “150” account that funds State, USAID, international organizations and lots of other things.  Had Romney been elected, there would have been precious little left in the kitty other than what is needed to sustain our embassies (though security for them would have been cut) and maintain high-priority commitments like those to Egypt and Israel.  Romney’s ideas about reshaping American foreign assistance to support the legal and institutional framework for trade and investment were in my view sensible, but there wasn’t going to be any money to fund them.

There is no guarantee in the second Obama administration that foreign affairs will do well, even if I take it for granted that they will do better than under the Ryan budget.  It all depends on what compromises are made to get a budget passed by both House and Senate.  The Tea Party still drives the Republican majority in the House.  And Barack Obama has made it eminently clear that he has no interest in nation-building abroad.  If Hillary Clinton leaves State, as she is expected to do, the foreign affairs budget could still be at risk of serious cuts.

Will Barack Obama take any new directions in foreign policy in his second term?  That was perhaps the most frequent question I got, in one form or another, last night.  Some may imagine that like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton he will try to revive the moribund Middle East peace process, but I see no sign of that in anything he has said so far.  But most presidents find new directions in their second term, even if they don’t announce them up front.  This is true for both domestic and foreign policy.  And Iran is likely to force the President to do things–either a nuclear agreement or war–that will be challenging.

Neither the landslide in electoral votes nor the squeeker in popular votes was due to foreign affairs, which were not much at issue in a campaign that seemed at times to put in doubt everything else.  But that doesn’t mean we are on an even keel.  Whoever leads the State Department next is going to have to improve on how it sells what it, and the other foreign affairs agencies, do to the American people and to the Congress.  Or face the consequences.

PS:  With Florida declaring declaring for Obama four days after the election, it is more landslide and less squeaker than I thought when I originally published this.

PPS:  The more or less final results, as of November 23.