Romney Pulls the NY Daily News, Obama Grabs the FT

So far, Mitt Romney has managed to get eleven major newspapers who endorsed Obama in 2008 to swing over to the Red Team this season. According to Breitbart, they are:

• The New York Daily News;
• Long Island Newsday;
• Houston Chronicle;
• Fort Worth Star-Telegram;
• Orlando Sentinel;
• Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel;
• Nashville Tennessean;
• Des Moines Register;
• Illinois Daily Herald;
• Los Angeles Daily News;
• Los Angeles Press-Telegram.

In contrast, only the San Antonio Express-News has switched from GOP nod in 2008 over to Obama for 2012.

This weekend’s surprise endorsement from the New York Daily News is getting a lot of attention.  The column is notable in that it’s a mainstream New York paper that isn’t Murdoch’s post going hard at Obama’s economic policy failure:

Four years ago, the Daily News endorsed Obama, seeing a historic figure whose intelligence, political skills and empathy with common folk positioned him to build on the small practical experience he would bring to the world’s toughest job. We valued Obama’s pledge to govern with bold pragmatism and bipartisanship.

The hopes of those days went unfulfilled.

It should be noted that this is the specific reason why I’m personally rooting for Romney. I dislike both choices here but sometimes I think you just need to give the ball to someone else, especially when it’s become apparent that you aren’t a QB after all.

Obama, on the other hand, just nabbed the endorsement from the Financial Times of London. This will not do much for him amongst the US electorate outside a handful of cosmopolitan cities and the FT’s readers have already made up their minds months ago anyway. Even still, it makes the case that Obama’s presidency may not have been quite as disappointing below the surface as many believe. More than this, it paints Mitt as a foreign policy dilettante and a fiscal phony from a policy standpoint…

The more serious objection to Mr Romney is that he has gone through so many contortions to win his party’s nomination that it is hard to see how he would govern in practice. His wishlist includes an aspiration to raise Pentagon spending by a fifth while cutting everyone’s taxes and still somehow balancing the books. Such fiscal alchemy is an exercise in evasion, not a recipe for sustainable economic recovery.

Mr Romney’s latest positioning as a pragmatic centrist appears to fit far better than his earlier incarnation as a rock-ribbed conservative Republican beholden to the Tea Party. The trouble is that it is impossible to be sure. His protean persona relies more on market research than any innate political philosophy.

This election is like choosing between Diet Mountain Dew or Tab. Either way, we have to take a four year sip of one or the other even though it’s hard to get excited either way. But these editorials offer a fairly accurate picture of what we’re gettingonce we’ve chosen.

Sources:

Our choice for America’s future: The Daily News endorses Mitt Romney for president (NYDN)

Obama is the wiser bet for crisis-hit US (FT)

Eleven Newspapers Switch To Romney, Just One to Obama (Breitbart)