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Commentary on the election. (See 1 and 1a  below.)

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As previously reported. (See 2 below.)

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Dick

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Governing will be difficult after Obama's polarizing campaign

By:John Kass

With the economy still in shambles and millions out of work or underemployed, President Barack Obama was still able to celebrate re-election on Tuesday. But the man from Chicago paid a price.

You could see the exhaustion in him leading up to Election Day. He's gone gray before our eyes. There are lines in that once-youthful face. He still flashes the smile, but it's a hard smile and his eyes don't smile much.

But who wouldn't be exhausted in that job, while running that kind of campaign?

It could have been easier if he'd listened to the Chicago political guys and focused on putting people back to work rather than stubbornly ramming a massive nationalized health care plan through Congress with his former Democratic majority.

But he held to principle. Like me, you may disagree with him and his yearning for all that hideous federal muscle. But to be fair, you have to credit the man. He risked it all to do what he thought should be done. And he won.

Now, though, it gets worse, not better. He's going to have a difficult time governing after the kind of campaign he's run. 

Obama's re-election proved one thing true about American politics:

Negative campaigning really works when you don't have a record to run on.

He didn't even attempt to unify the nation in 2012. Instead he chopped it into pieces in order to reassemble a winning political map. Gone was the optimistic young fellow of 2008, soothing a nation with soaring, messianic rhetoric, talking of great ideas. This time it was all about class warfare and race and gender cards and anger.
So President Gandhi became President Revenge.

"Don't boo, vote!" he shouted to a campaign crowd that was booing his opponent, Republican Mitt Romney. "Voting is 

the best revenge!"
Revenge? That's so Chicago.

If he had lost, a thousand villains would have been flogged by his adoring acolytes in the media. Racism, not his abysmal, job-killing economic policies, would have been blamed. Others would have cried "voter suppression," as former Democratic Chairman Howard Dean shrieked Tuesday, using fear to get out the Obama vote in Ohio. But Obama won.

Yet what did he win, exactly, except a second term?

"This has been the most polarizing, divisive campaign in history," Democratic pollster Doug Schoen told Jake Hartford and me before the election on WLS-AM 890, where we're filling in as weekday co-hosts from 9 to 11 a.m. "It's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for him to govern, given the polarization and division that this election has occasioned."

The president's victory means that the few remaining centrist Democrats won't be able to redefine the party for 2016. The centrists have been cast adrift. The Democrats rule from the left now. It's the triumph of Roosevelt over Reagan.
Obama's whipping boys, the congressional Republicans, won't be eager to reach any sort of compromise with the man who vilified them. They're up for election in just two years. Big-government GOP moderates will now face off against conservatives and libertarians hoping to reclaim their party from the establishment pro-war corporatists.

Obama was ripe for the picking, yes, but Romney ran a terrible campaign. Historians will trace it back to the pungent "Etch A Sketch" comment by Romney strategist Eric Fehrnstrom.

After Romney campaigned as a conservative in the primaries, Fehrnstrom announced the candidate would hit the "reset button" to become a moderate.

"Everything changes," Fehrnstrom told CNN months ago. "It's almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again."

The Republican grass-roots blanched. Who was this man, a conservative, a flip-flopper? Or just another establishment Republican corporatist without a core.

If Romney didn't know what he was, President Obama knew where he was going: at the Republican jugular.

His surrogates accused Romney of all but infecting that steelworker's wife with cancer, and things got even more negative after that. So how much cynicism will it take to forget the president's campaign?

"It's going to take a lot of cynicism," Schoen said. "If you look at how the politicians are reacting to the polarization and division, it's not good and I don't see any indications or plans suggesting we're going to be able to put this election behind us anytime soon."

Obama will have to walk across his own political scorched earth on the way to governing in a second term.

He might consider wearing a brown robe, a rope belt and sandals, and try again to invoke that gentle, messianic persona of 2008, the political St. Francis from Chicago, while he wanders the ravaged landscape in search of friends across the aisle.

His first election was an elegant appeal for unity to a war-weary nation. Obama belittled negative campaigning as the refuge of the small-minded. This time around, he wanted what they all want: a second term.

So it was revenge politics. Class war. Race politics, by proxy. A ginned-up "war against women," all of it so that he could rip the American quilt he sewed in 2008 into pieces, and stitch it back together to win on Tuesday.

Savaging the other guy early — as Obama did to Romney in Ohio and other battleground states — was remarkably effective. He spent his money wisely.

He'll trumpet Obamacare as his legacy, yes, but politically, it's this:

1a)Groundhog Day in America

By Victor Davis Hanson

Barack Obama won a moderately close victory overMitt Romney on Tuesday. But oddly, nothing much has changed. The country is still split nearly 50/50. There is still a Democratic president, and an almost identically Democratic Senate at war with an identically Republican House, in a Groundhog DayAmerica.

Obama's win did not really reflect affirmation of his first term, given that the president made only halfhearted efforts to defend Obamacare, the stimulus, huge Keynesian deficits and his attempts to implement cap-and-trade. So if there is a second-term agenda, even Obama supporters don't quite know what it will be

Unlike the hope-and-change campaign of 2008, Obama this time around ran on the theme that George W. Bush had been awful and Mitt Romney would be far worse -- spending almost$1 billion to brand the latter as a veritable felon who callously let people suffer without health insurance.

In textbook community-organizing fashion, Obama won the election by brilliantly cobbling together factions with shrill warnings of supposed enemies everywhere. Young women were threatened by sexist Neanderthal males. Minorities were oppressed by neo-Confederate tea partiers. Greens were in danger from greedy, smokestack polluters. Gays were bullied by homophobic evangelicals. Illegal aliens were demonized by xenophobic nativists. And the 47 percent were at the mercy of the grasping 1 percent. Almost any American could fall into the category of either an Obama-aligned victim or a Romney-aligned oppressor.

How, then, can a re-elected President Obama put the fractured American Humpty Dumpty back together again after it has been shattered by such a nasty campaign? Certainly, it will no longer work for the president merely to wax eloquently on the need for more civility. Instead, his congressional opponents will expect more hardball Chicago politics and will probably reply in kind.

Yet Obama is going to need bipartisan help to solve a number of menacing crises. Four years of Obama's $1 trillion deficits cannot continue without wrecking the country. A staggering national debt of nearly $17 trillion must also be reduced before our currency is rendered worthless and the interest on the vast borrowing overwhelms the budget. Sequestration looms, with massive cuts in defense and entitlements on the immediate horizon, reminding us that we can neither live with the disease of massive borrowing nor apparently with the medicine of radical cuts and higher taxes.

If most Americans are willing to consider allowing paths to citizenship for law-obeying illegal aliens, then they should be equally adamant in using such discretion to deport those who are have broken the law or who become wards of the state. But does anyone believe such balance will really be the basis for compromise?

The dread of Obamacare has already helped to spike insurance premiums. No one yet quite knows how the massive wave of new regulations will affect patients, doctors and hospitals. Nearly three years after the bill's passage, the public is still not happy with even the idea of it.

Abroad, most believe that Iran will either become a nuclear power or have to be stopped during Obama's second term. Obama's choices are bad versus worse: a nuclear-armed Iranbullying the Middle East with a sword of Damocles permanently suspended over Israel's head, or a preemptory war to defang the theocracy, leading to an almost certain Middle East wave of terrorism and a flaming Persian Gulf.

There soon must be truth-telling over the September terrorist killing of our ambassador and three Americans in Libya. A mostly pro-Obama media postponed questioning the preposterous administration narrative of a spontaneous demonstration gone awry over an obscure video -- in fear of endangering the president's re-election bid.

But the facts of the worst terrorist attack on Americans since 9/11 remain stubborn things and won't go away. Al-Qaeda is not dismantled, but still killing Americans. Libya is not a model of a democratic Arab Spring, but mired in tribal chaos.

Key administration officials -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, especially--will have to explain why prior warnings from Libyawere ignored with fatal consequences. Others, like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, Vice President Joe Biden and perhaps the president himself, must tell us why for so long they claimed that the violence was spontaneous, when they knew, or should have known, it was preplanned terrorism.

Yet not everything ahead is bleak. Vast new gas and oil finds could soon make America energy-independent. The American economy is cyclical and may finally rebound on its own -- if Obama just leaves it alone and stops regulating and borrowing.

Popular lore attests that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Let's hope that the same Democratic president, the same polarized Congress and the same divided country do something differently from the last lost four years

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2)Obama aims to start nuclear talks with Iran next month

After winning a second White House term, US President Barack Obama aims to start direct, fast-track nuclear talks with Tehran as soon as December, even before his January swearing-in, on the assumption that Iran’s window of opportunity is very narrow – just three months.

White House go-betweens with the office of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warn that Iran’s campaign for the June 14 presidential election gets going in March. After than,  it is estimated in Washington, that Khamenei, whose ill health keeps his working-day short, will be fully absorbed in a struggle to purge Iran’s political hierarchy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his clique.

But Tehran would prefer nuclear diplomacy to be delayed for eight months until after that election. “We waited for the US election campaign to be over, so why shouldn’t the Americans wait for ours?” a senior Iranian official asked rhetorically.

For now, the supreme leader is looking for a suitable candidate for the presidency. This time, the supreme leader is not expected to make the mistake of choosing a charismatic, ambitious and competent figure like Ahmadinejad, but rather one who is satisfied with acting as a representative titular figure and play second fiddle to Khamenei whose bureau will administer the executive branch of government.

The supreme leader is believed in Washington to be weighing another alternative: having parliament abolish the post of president and transferring its powers to the new post of prime minister, who would be chosen from among the 290 Majlis lawmakers.

Speaker Ali Larijani and his brother, head of the judiciary Sadeq Larijani, have in the past year performed the spadework of sidelining Ahmadinejad’s parliamentary faction.

Ali Larijani himself is a front-runner for the job of Revolutionary Iran’s first prime minister.
The view in Washington today is that if nuclear talks do start in December and roll on into March, Khamenei will be compelled to cut the process short to escape potential accusations led by Ahmadinejad that he is handing to America concessions excessive enough to stall Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

The supreme leader can’t afford to have the Iran’s military establishment, the Revolutionary Guards and the street turn against him on this issue.

But in the last few days, Tehran appears to have taken a large step back from direct negotiations with Washington in principle. Just hours after Obama’s election victory was announced on Nov. 7, the official Iranian news agency quoted  Sadeq Larijani as condemning US sanctions as “crimes against the Iranian people.” He said relations with America “cannot be possible overnight” and the US president should not expect rapid new negotiations with Tehran. “Americans should not think they can hold our nation to ransom by coming to the negotiating table,” was the Iranian judiciary head’s parting shot for Obama.

The gap between Washington and Tehran is as wide as ever: Obama wants the talks to last no more than three months and end in an agreed settlement of the nuclear dispute, whereas the ayatollah prefers a low-key process to be dragged out past the eight month-month period while also gaining more time for Iran’s nuclear program to race forward.

This tactic would additionally help Tehran erase yet another Israeli red line, the one set by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in his UN September speech when he said that the spring or early summer of 2013 would be the critical date for Israel to act.