Barack Obama Wins Key Newspaper Endorsements In Swing States, Conservative Areas


Barack Obama is still making his case to the American people that he deserves four more years in the White House, but the president has apparently already convinced editors at several influential newspapers in swing states that he’s the man for the job.

In recent days Obama has won the endorsements of many of the largest newspapers in some of the biggest battlegrounds of the 2012 election. Though it remains to be seen how much influence newspapers still yield in a time when a greater number of Americans get their news online, but with razor thin presidential poll margins in many of the swing states candidates are looking for any advantage.

Ohio is shaping up to be the linchpin of the 2012 election, with the winner of the Buckeye State likely taking the election, and Barack Obama has picked up some coveted endorsements there. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Akron Beacon Journal endorsed Obama for a second term, noting that he has been able to show great leadership throughout a domestic crisis unlike any other.

The paper noted:

“Recall how dire things were when he arrived at the White House, the economy plunging downward, at a pace much worse than almost anyone thought, contracting 8.9 percent in the final quarter of 2008, and then another 6.5 percent the following three months. The job losses were staggering, the contraction the most severe since the Great Depression. The blows to housing, construction and finance made certain the recovery would be slow and halting, many coping with diminished assets and heavy debt, all of it setting back demand.”

Barack Obama has won other newspaper endorsements throughout swing states, PoliticusUSA noted. Papers in Colorado, Ohio, and North Carolina have urged voters to pick Obama on Election Day.

In New Mexico, which had started as a swing state but has now swung solidly in Barack Obama’s favor, the Santa Fe New Mexican lauds the president’s decision-making over the last four years:

“He inherited an unholy mess — an economy teetering on the edge of a second Great Depression and two foreign wars top the list of disasters. Slowly, steadily and with his eye fixed firmly on the needs of the country, the president has worked hard every day to improve our collective good. It was President Obama who bailed out the auto industry, salvaging 1.1 million jobs and keeping manufacturing alive in this country. It was President Obama who made the gutsy call to invade a compound in Pakistan, tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden. It was President Obama who finally signed comprehensive health reform so that no American has to fear bankruptcy because of a medical catastrophe. More work remains for a second term.”

Barack Obama has even managed to win newspaper endorsements in traditionally conservative areas and from right-leaning newspapers. The Los Angeles Times, which despite publishing in one of the bluest states has a conservative lean editorially, picked Obama over Mitt Romney. In doing so the paper calls Obama’s formula for economic growth more realistic than Romney’s, which “would neglect the country’s infrastructure and human resources for the sake of yet another tax cut and a larger defense budget than even the Pentagon is seeking.”

What may be the most shocking newspaper endorsement for Barack Obama came from Utah, one of the most reliably Republican states and one where Mitt Romney has strong ties. Though Obama has no chance of winning the state’s electoral votes — barring something drastic — he still earned the endorsement of the Salt Lake Tribune, the state’s largest newspaper.

Though an endorsement of Obama, the Salt Lake Tribune’s editorial focuses heavily on discrediting Mitt Romney:

“More troubling, Romney has repeatedly refused to share specifics of his radical plan to simultaneously reduce the debt, get rid of Obamacare (or, as he now says, only part of it), make a voucher program of Medicare, slash taxes and spending, and thereby create millions of new jobs. To claim, as Romney does, that he would offset his tax and spending cuts (except for billions more for the military) by doing away with tax deductions and exemptions is utterly meaningless without identifying which and how many would get the ax. Absent those specifics, his promise of a balanced budget simply does not pencil out.

If this portrait of a Romney willing to say anything to get elected seems harsh, we need only revisit his branding of 47 percent of Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, yet feel victimized and entitled to government assistance. His job, he told a group of wealthy donors, “is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

With now less than a month to the finish line and all the presidential debates concluded, Barack Obama’s campaign is hoping that the string of newspaper endorsements could provide a boost the president needs to get over the finish.

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