My vote this year again will be for Barack Obama for a second term in office.
I wish more had been accomplished during the past four years but what has been done, especially in an economy that was in total collapse when he took office, is breathtaking.
He would almost earn my vote for the killing of Osama Bin Laden, something the George Bush administration  couldn’t accomplish. It was Obama that got the job done. Just as he promised.
Ohio, with its big stake in the auto industry, must be grateful for the skillful way the Obama administration saved General Motors and Chrysler. Mitt Romney - at the very least - gave no support for this. And it’s not just GM/Chrysler he saved. It was hundreds of suppliers to these companies, whose bankruptcies would have impacted  the economy of scores of communities in Ohio and the Midwest.
Romney said on his first day in office, he would have repealed Obamacare. Tell that to the millions of Senior Citizens who have benefited, tell it to the many families who can still keep their children on their health plan for several more years. Obamacare must be amended to make it more friendly to the medical profession, but all the good stuff in it to see that the middle class doesn’t go broke over illness should be retained.
As for a “voucher” system for Social Security and other benefits, which Romney-Ryan espouses, although we have much reforming to do, that’s a no-go as far as I am concerned. You are pitting millions of people out there against insurance companies who have the expertise to out-maneuver them. Social Security must be reformed but a voucher system is a threat to all of the middle and lower classes.
It is unacceptable to me that people earning millions of dollars a year should be paying no more-or even less-than their secretaries. And Romney-Ryan are pledged to give the millionaires and billionaires a tax break even with the current deficits and other challenges. They’ll make up for it, they say, with ending, “loopholes.” At every step of the way, brilliant attorneys/lobbyists who earn more in an hour than the average reader and advertiser of this newspaper make in a week, will be building giant walls to stop them. The major “ loopholes”  that would be ended would be those benefiting the average citizen.
I have been disappointed in Obama. I had hoped the Asian wars would have been over within his first year. I had hoped for an immediate clamp-down on tax benefits for moving American production overseas. I had hoped for the deficits to be reduced or eliminated despite the irresponsible mess left behind.
But, given the challenges he has faced and partially overcome after eight years of Bush’s gross mismanagement, I believe Obama deserves another term in office.
In the past four year, we have seen:
— Reversal of the 800,000-a-month losses in jobs in the private sector;
— Return of a good measure of the respect for the United States among many countries since the debacle of the Bush administration;
— Passage of the U.S. Food Safety Modernization Act;
— Achievement a new treaty with Russia to limit warheads and launchers;
— Keeping American troops from being involved in the Syrian Civil War;
— End of torture policies, which according to the Geneva Convention were illegal;
— More financial possibility for students to get through college;
— Tripling of AmeriCorps;
— More protection for credit card consumers;
— Reduced oil imports and the probability the USA will be a natural gas exporter; and
— Payroll taxes reduced.
(Another view of the election  is presented today by my friend Jim Perry of Perrysburg, a former Delphos resident who is a long-term director of Delphos Herald, Inc.)