Election 2012: 12 reasons Obama won and Romney lost

President Obama went into his reelection fight facing significant head winds – most important, high unemployment and slow economic growth. But for a multitude of reasons, including Obama’s positives and Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s negatives, Obama succeeded. Here’s our list.

4. The auto bailout and Obama's union support

The federal government’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler – which started, in fact, under President George W. Bush – proved essential to winning the ultimate battleground, Ohio, where 1 out of 8 jobs is tied to the auto industry. The exit poll of Ohio showed that 59 percent of the state’s voters supported the bailout versus 36 percent who opposed it. Union membership has long been in decline, but across the upper Midwest – from Wisconsin to Michigan to Ohio to Pennsylvania – the unions’ voter-turnout operations supplemented Obama’s efforts. And in an ironic twist, the Supreme Court ruling Citizens United, which Democrats love to hate, allowed the unions to expand their reach to nonunion members.

4 of 12

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.