The 2012 election

At the beginning of September 2012, at its national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Democratic Party officially nominated Obama and Biden as its candidates for president and vice president of the United States. On the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Obama’s attention and that of the world was directed to Benghazi, Libya, where an attack on the U.S. diplomatic post resulted in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Initially, it was thought that the attack had been a spontaneous outgrowth of rioting occurring outside the post in response to an anti-Islam film that had been produced in the United States. Angry demonstrations against the film had occurred elsewhere, most notably at the U.S. embassy in Cairo. In the following days and weeks, however, it became increasingly certain that the assault had been a premeditated terrorist attack. Obama promised to get to the bottom of the matter, but both he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged their ultimate responsibility in the situation. The issue persisted as a point of criticism of Obama by Romney and the right in general.

Obama maintained a significant lead over Romney in September in the national opinion polls, partly a result of a “convention bounce” and partly because of negative perceptions some held of his Republican challenger. Those perceptions were deepened by the release of secretly shot footage at a private fund-raiser at which Romney said, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what…who believe that they are victims” and whom he would never be able to convince that “they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” In the heated aftermath, Romney stood by his remarks, though he said that they had not been “elegantly stated.”

Both campaigns were spending fortunes in what was projected to be the most expensive presidential campaign in history, the first since the creation of the public financing system in which neither candidate accepted public funds and the spending limitations that went with them. Romney and the Republican Party, as well as Obama and the Democrats, each raised about $1 billion in donations, totals that did not include the tens of millions spent by “super PACs,” the political action committees that—as a result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—were allowed to accept unlimited donations from wealthy individuals, corporations, and unions, provided that the PACs operated independently of the candidate’s campaign.

Obama and Romney both presented themselves as champions of the middle class and those who aspired to join it. While the president offered a vision of American prosperity that spread centrifugally from the middle, his Republican challenger believed that economic well-being was initiated at the top by “job creators” and flowed down, an approach that Obama claimed had been tried in the past and failed. In highlighting the importance of tackling the deficit, Obama emphasized the need for spending cuts but proposed returning tax levels on the wealthiest Americans to those that were in place during the Bill Clinton administration. Romney advocated maintaining the Bush-era tax cuts, including those for people at the top of the economic pyramid, as well as providing additional cuts, while promising to reduce the deficit with spending cuts and the elimination of tax loopholes. He accused Obama of being unsympathetic to business while citing his own success as an entrepreneur as a prime qualification for the job of setting the economy right as president. Much of Romney’s campaign was grounded in a criticism of the handling of the economy by Obama, whom Romney blamed for the slowness of the recovery and the consequent hardships endured by the middle class, especially those who were among the long-term unemployed. Obama was quick to acknowledge the suffering of many Americans brought about by the Great Recession and the gradualness of recovery, but he was equally quick (too quick according to many Republicans) to point to the “bad hand” he had been dealt by the Bush administration. Some of the president’s supporters believed that he had not been adamant enough in emphasizing how his own policies had helped forestall much-greater economic calamity. Romney also promised to revoke the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which he referred to derisively as “Obamacare,” a term the president proudly owned as he trumpeted the benefits of the act on the campaign trail. Reversing the advantage Republicans traditionally had enjoyed on defense and security issues, Obama repeatedly noted the elimination of Osama bin Laden on his watch. He also highlighted his successful removal of American forces from Iraq and his promise to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2014.

Despite his earlier political missteps, Romney stole Obama’s momentum and reenergized his campaign on October 3 with a commanding performance in the first presidential debate, in which he showed himself to be the president’s equal in terms of stature and presence. To some ears, Obama’s plea for patience with his policies sounded apologetic, and his performance was generally agreed to have been lackluster. Biden breathed new life into the Democratic effort by taking the offensive in his debate with the Republican vice presidential nominee, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a key spokesman for some of the most conservative elements within his party. Obama regained his stride in the second, town hall-style debate by engaging more forcefully with Romney, as he would again in the third and final presidential debate. Despite those strong performances, however, Obama seemingly had, at best, pulled even with Romney nationally. In the final weeks of the campaign, the candidates primarily focused on a handful of “battleground” states, whose electoral votes, it was believed, would determine the outcome of a razor-close election in the electoral college.

In the last week of October, Sandy, a hurricane-turned-superstorm that had ravaged parts of the Caribbean, brought widespread destruction to the East Coast and Mid-Atlantic states. New York City and New Jersey were particularly hard hit, and the image of Obama and New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie—up to that point one of the president’s most vocal critics—touring devastated areas in his state and bringing promises of rapid aid was a remarkable demonstration of bipartisan leadership by both men.

On November 6, 2012, Obama won a narrow victory in the national popular vote but triumphed in almost all the battleground states to win a second term, garnering 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206. “Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated,” he said in his election-night victory speech, adding that “we are not as divided as our politics suggest. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions.”

After the election, Obama and Boehner entered into negotiations to try to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, which involved either the expiration or enforcement of a series of economic measures set to transpire at the turn of the new year. They included the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, temporary payroll tax cuts initiated by the Obama administration, and some tax breaks for businesses, along with the automatic application of across-the-board spending cuts to the military and nonmilitary programs required by the Budget Control Act of 2011, which came to be known as sequestration. Although the president and the speaker of the House were unable to reach a workable compromise, Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell cobbled together a last-minute agreement that passed the Senate 89–8 and House 257–167 (with 85 Republican votes in the lower chamber) on January 1, 2013. The bill preserved the Bush-era income tax cuts for individuals earning $400,000 or less annually and couples earning $450,000 or less (Obama had campaigned on setting those limits at $200,000 and $250,000, respectively) but raised taxes on those earning more than that from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the first federal tax increase in two decades. While it also raised taxes on dividends and inheritance for some, it did not extend the payroll tax cut. Obama signed the bill on January 2.

The gun-control debate and sequestration

At the top of the president’s agenda in 2013 was the introduction of gun-control legislation, an issue that again had taken center stage in the aftermath of a mass shooting at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, which resulted in the deaths of 20 children and 6 adults. (The shooter also killed himself and his mother that day.) Obama called upon Congress to enact legislation that would institute universal background checks for gun purchases, ban the sales of assault weapons and high-capacity (more than 10-round) magazines, provide for greater protection in schools, and place a renewed focus on treating mental illness. He also took the issue to the public, passionately advocating legislation in a series of campaign-style events at the same time that supporters of gun rights (most notably the National Rifle Association [NRA]) vehemently opposed his proposals. Despite polls that showed overwhelming public support for universal background checks, a bill focusing on a measure that would have greatly expanded background checks failed to receive sufficient support when it was considered by the Senate in April 2013. Conscious of the threat of filibuster, both parties had agreed that a supermajority of 60 votes would be required to move the bill or any amendments to it (including a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines) to a formal vote on passage. Although some Republicans (whose party generally opposed the legislation) voted for the measure calling for expanded background checks, some Democrats (whose party generally supported the legislation) voted against it, and it failed (54–46), as did all other proposed amendments, prompting withdrawal of the bill. As the NRA and other supporters of gun rights celebrated, Obama said the bill’s withdrawal marked “a pretty shameful day for Washington.”

January’s budget compromise had delayed automatic cuts on military and social spending for two months, but, when the new March 1, 2013, deadline passed without Democrats and Republicans reaching an agreement on an alternative approach to deficit reduction, sequestration began. It took a while for most Americans to feel the effects of the across-the-board cuts. However, as spring progressed, air-traffic delays ballooned as a result of short-staffing caused by forced furloughs of air-traffic controllers. Congress quickly allowed the Federal Aviation Administration to shift funds earmarked for facility improvement to salaries. At the same time, Air Force officials bemoaned a lack of preparedness that they felt was a consequence of reductions in flight practice and maintenance necessitated by the sequester cuts to military spending, and officials from a wide range of government-funded programs and agencies—from the Meals on Wheels program for seniors to the National Park Service—began to warn of looming problems.