People surveyed in 21 countries overwhelmingly favor President Obama over Mitt Romney. What's behind that landslide? President Obama and Mitt Romney are locked in an incredibly tight race at home, but overseas, the vote isn't even close. A BBC World Service opinion poll found that residents of 21 foreign countries overwhelmingly support Obama, with an average of 50 percent hoping that he wins a second term and only 9 percent favoring Romney. France is Obama's biggest booster — 72 percent of respondents support him. The only country where Romney enjoyed greater support than Obama? Pakistan. So why are foreigners in the bag for Obama? 1. Obama's foreign policy works Overseas, the president has an undeniably strong record, says Jeffrey Simpson at Canada's Globe and Mail. Obama has shown he's capable of "mixing muscularity with restraint," extricating the U.S. from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, avoiding direct intervention in Syria, and resisting "the push to recklessly attack Iran" — all while relentlessly going after terrorists and playing a limited but key role in forcing regime change in Libya. Meanwhile, the world sees Romney displaying "the hubris of the powerful and the ignorance of the uninformed," thumping his chest and scaring folks overseas. 2. The world is associating Romney with Bush In many ways, this isn't really a reflection on Romney, says Max Fisher at The Washington Post. In Pakistan, for example, people aren't embracing Romney so much as protesting Obama's drone program in areas near the Afghan border. And more broadly, Romney's overseas poll numbers "are consistent with [Sen. John] McCain's in 2008, suggesting the possibility that many foreign publics associate Republicans with George W. Bush, whose administration was deeply unpopular abroad." 3. Soaking the rich is popular overseas The fact that France is more pro-Obama than anyone else says it all, says Matthew Balan at News Busters. France is a leftist nanny state, and socialist President Francois Hollande is trying to slap a 75 percent marginal income tax on people earning more than 1 million euros a year, a move the Heritage Foundation's Nile Gardiner called "economic suicide." Such proposals "line up nicely with the president's platform." No wonder he polls so well there. Link
If Romney = Bush, I would guess that Romney would have near 90% support throughout Africa where Bush single handedly decimated the AIDS epidemic. Sadly, Romney is not Bush, but it is comic to see the French come in so heavily for Obama after electing their own Socialist to the presidency. All told, the article seems like a strong list of reasons Americans should elect Romney.
Barack Obama phoned Colin Powell Thursday to thank him for endorsing him for a second term, a White House official said. Powell, the former Secretary of State under Republican president George W. Bush, endorsed Obama in 2008 and told CBS in an interview Thursday morning that he still supports him. "The president is very appreciative of the endorsement," White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer told reporters on a plane ride from Tampa, Florida, where Obama held a rally. "He called Colin Powell this morning before the event to thank him." The president did not discuss a possible endorsement with Powell before Thursday's announcement and was unaware he would give it, Pfeiffer said. "We did not have a heads-up that he was going to do this," he said. "The president spoke to Colin Powell recently and Colin Powell did not give us any indication what he was going to do." Powell said he was impressed with Obama's record on the economy and criticized Republican challenger Mitt Romney for his positions on foreign policy. Link
He's entitled to an opinion, but frankly I have a better education on the topic of economics than Colin Powell.
Not to mention Powell is largely to blame for the second Iraq war. Had he not advised against removing Saddam in 1991 when we had a large coalition, the world would be a much different place. That is what happens when you take political advice from a military adviser. He should stick to the Powell doctrine, an obvious but important military strategy taken directly from Sun Tzu, before he loses all credibility like Wesley Clark.
Really Powell endorsed Obama ? Now that's a surprise Powell endorsed Obama for the same reason that Morgan Freeman did , guess why the racisms he did that .
You bet the world wants Obama to win. All together now "No more Republicans, no more Republicans!" You go Obama, You Go - and he is - soaring to the front. http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/romney-vs-obama-electoral-map A little Romnesia: "And the race is vice-tight because Romney's a marvel. Never in modern memory has a presidential candidate so brazenly contorted himself, switching positions to suit the moment and pushing claims, like about Obama's imaginary ''apology tour'', that have been debunked." Romneys Foreign Policy "Forgoing his Klingon rhetoric, Romney played cling-on to Obama's Spock, suddenly clutching on to the President's positions on China, Iran, the Afghanistan deadline, drones and ousting Hosni Mubarak. Romney was running so far to the left of Obama that he never even mentioned the tangled White House response to the Benghazi consulate slaughter, which Republicans on the Hill have been working tirelessly to tee up for him." ""If Romney gets to the Situation Room, will we see Cipher Mitt, the vessel of the neocons? Or will we see Moderate Mitt, chastising the hawks - who are eager to pick up where they left off bombing, in Iran and Syria - with a variation on the line he used about al-Qaeda at the debate: ''We can't kill our way out of this mess''? It's impossible to know. Romney may have made so many compromises to get the prize that he doesn't have a true self any more. And that's the scariest thought of all." Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/polit...e-real-mitt-20121025-2884s.html#ixzz2ALbinZoZ
A small nonpartisan research center operated by professed “geeks†has found itself at the center of a rancorous $5 trillion debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney. No white paper or policy manifesto put out during the presidential campaign has proved more controversial than an August study by the Washington-based Tax Policy Center, a respected nonprofit that issues studiously detailed tax analyses. That study found, in short, that Mr. Romney could not keep all of the promises he had made on individual tax reform: including cutting marginal tax rates by 20 percent, keeping protections for investment income, not widening the deficit and not increasing the tax burden on the poor or middle class. It concluded that Mr. Romney’s plan, on its face, would cut taxes for rich families and raise them for everyone else. The detailed paper proved kindling for a political firestorm. Mr. Romney criticized the center as performing a “garbage-in, garbage-out†analysis and his campaign accused it of partisan bias. The Obama campaign used the center’s numbers to argue that Mr. Romney had proposed a $5 trillion tax cut. Economists jumped on the bandwagon too, flinging analyses back and forth and picking apart the projections and assumptions in the report. At the Tax Policy Center itself, responses ranged from irritation at the partisan nature of some attacks to incredulity over the political hysteria. “There was this résumé-hunting, White-House-visitor-log†searching feel to the response, said the center’s director, Donald Marron, a former Bush administration economist. “That was unanticipated,†he added dryly. In many ways the report did just what the center was created to do: inject some solid numbers into a shifty, accusatory, raucous political debate. The decade-old center — a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two nonpartisan grandes dames of the Washington world — was founded precisely to “fill that niche,†Mr. Marron said. “A lot of tax policy discussions are — how to describe them? — people yelling at each other,†he said. “We believe that good information leads to better policy discussions and ultimately better policy outcomes.†The center’s claim to provide reliable, nonpartisan information comes in part from its staff makeup. It has about four dozen affiliated staff members and scholars — most are economists, several are considered top experts in their fields, and a number have experience in either Republican or Democratic administrations. It also is derived by virtue of its ownership of a highly sophisticated tax modeling system, one that took about two years to build and has a small coterie of specialists to tend it. The model resembles those used by government offices to forecast the effect of changes to the tax code, and it relies on about 150,000 anonymous tax returns and a wealth of data on pensions, education, consumer expenditures and economic growth. “They’re one of the few groups that have this very big, very accurate model,†said Martin A. Sullivan, the chief economist and a contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a specialty publisher. “What they’re doing is just making the best computations available†for others to interpret, he said. That includes so-called distributional analyses that show how changes to the tax code would change the relative burden on high-income and low-income families — a dry tax topic yet one of the most politically potent ones of the campaign, given the broader debate about tax fairness and inequality. The analysis of the Romney proposal has proved highly controversial not just among politicians, but also among some economists. Researchers including Martin Feldstein of Harvard and Harvey S. Rosen of Princeton have argued that Mr. Romney’s tax math might work if he raised taxes on families making more than $100,000 a year — not $200,000 to $250,000 a year, as he currently promises — or if his plan gave a strong jolt to economic growth. “Reasonable economists disagree on†the growth effects of plans like Mr. Romney’s, said Alan J. Auerbach, a tax expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who added that he did not see the math working out as currently described. “It matters a lot what kind of reductions you’re making or how you’re paying for tax cuts.†Others have argued that the Tax Policy Center filled in too many of the holes in Mr. Romney’s light-on-detail proposal — making a full analysis impossible and skewing the center’s paper’s results. “It is not an analysis of Governor Romney’s plan,†said Scott A. Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation. a nonprofit research group also based in Washington. “It has been, I think, mislabeled as such and misinterpreted as such. We don’t think there are enough details to analyze,†he said, adding that he believed that it was possible to devise a distributionally neutral, revenue neutral tax reform that cut rates in the way Mr. Romney described. The Tax Policy Center said that it had sought as many details as possible from the Romney campaign. (Its economists said it has a cordial back-and-forth with the economic policy teams in both campaigns, as it did in 2008.) Given the numbers available, it had tried to perform the analysis in the most generous way possible, and still did not see how Mr. Romney’s rate cuts could square with his other goals. “We wrote a technical, accurate paper given the available information,†said William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution, one of the paper’s main authors, in a recent interview. “The criticism that you can’t analyze the Romney tax plan because there isn’t one? That hasn’t stopped other economists from analyzing its growth effects. I like to have substantive discussions about tax policy. The uproar about the paper has not been substantive.†Many economists across the political spectrum have said they found the report’s conclusions convincing, like Alan D. Viard, a tax expert at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Sullivan of Tax Analysts said: “I like tax reform. I want to broaden the base. It’s something I’ve devoted my life to. And I welcome Governor Romney and the Republicans’ strong push, but the plan doesn’t work out. It’s not mathematically possible.†Link
Letting those that like us the least tell us who to elect is like letting 4 yr olds set the price of candy. Not happening, but entertaining to see them cry for the chance.
SO the countries that were polled are those that "least like us". UK, Australia, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, France, Pakistan, Spain, Canada, India, Peru, Turkey, etc Gees the US is in trouble if their biggest allies "least like us". No wonder Mittie wants to increase the Defence budget which is already equal to the rest of the world combined.
Founders had good reason for setting the system up in a way that prohibits ANY non-citizen from voting. I'm sure your system has the same rule for the same reason. As for the amount of our defense budget, really not your business. Speaking of Borat... obamas lackeys, known for voter fraud, whined to the UN, asking them to come protect the vote. Thatd be the UN that already endorsed their boss. The Texas AG sent word that if one UN bozo gets within 100 ft of a polling place, he will be arrested. Texas Rangers arent as nice as the ones on TV, and theyd love nothing more than tossing some UN toadie in the slammer. Theyd consider it sport.
Lol. You know zip about Texas. Shall I assume i know all about Australians because I saw Crocodile Dundee? I consider the UN a boil on the ass called New York. They should make them all pay their overdue parking tickets then deport them to the cesspools they came from, then flatten the place and build a parking lot.
The real comedy of it is that the people putting those inspectors out mostly represent countries that have partial or no democratic process whatsoever. This is America under Obama.
I hear Serbia is in the crew they invited in. Nothing like having the egalitarian geniuses that spawned Milosevic around to keep things on the up and up.
Yes, out of the 7 billion humans, it would probably a landslide... however... only up to maybe 250,000,000 are voting.