By, Andrew Hucks |Staff Writer|
The results are in: President Barack Obama scored a seemingly decisive 303-206 victory in the electoral college vote to beat the GOP candidate Mitt Romney and remain our president for another term.
This draws an end to a long and hard fought battle between the two candidates in one of the most controversial and, according to the Associated Press’ Calvin Woodward, “most ideologically polarized elections in years.”
Though the President won the electoral vote by what appears to be a landslide victory, the popular vote was much closer at 61,164,405 to 58,159,408 (50 percent to 48 percent) as posted by USA Today.
Meaning almost half of the nation felt Obama wasn’t the man for the job.
The president won nearly 70 percent of Latino and 90 percent of black votes while he lost in every age group of white voters according to Yahoo.com.
With the growing numbers of Hispanic voters it was enough to push him over the top.
But Democracy doesn’t take into account the margin of victory, only the victory itself, leaving Americans to put aside their differences and move forward with reconstructing America and our unstable economy.
Obama said Wednesday that America is, “more than a collection of red and blue states,” though this election didn’t necessarily reflect that statement with all of the party-motivated hatred it generated.
“It’s going to take a while for everyone to come around because of how different the candidates views were,” said RCC student Eric Hall, an Obama supporter, “but we have to come together as a nation and embrace the leadership we have in order to grow as a country.”
This sentiment is felt by many and may be the key to our future as a country.
If we can’t get past the differences we have no chance of success.
Some people such as Ryan Stukey, a small business owner from Moreno Valley, feel that, “The media creates these polar opposites and drives a wedge between the people.”
He continues by saying that, “You almost get chastised as a member of one political party if you even slightly agree with the policies of the opposing party.”
And here might be the problem; people to find a middle ground so we are grid locked on almost every issue with the bipartisan system we have now.
The president and the senate are controlled by the Democrats while the House remains Republican which causes legislation to move at a steady pace.
Obama is president and if we rally behind him, we could possibly avoid the impending “fiscal cliff” and start digging ourselves out of the hole of unemployment and economic decline, regardless of who we voted for and what party lines we follow.
We can commend Obama for not letting the U.S. slip into another Great Depression, trying to keep us out of war (though we have been on the brink), and for being a friendly face for our nation in the international community.
Barack Obama is still the president of the United States of America for the next four years and needs our support.
“One nation … indivisible.”