Obama for president

After months of a seemingly never-ending election season, it is finally time to choose our next president. We’ve cringed at the gaffes, read the op-eds and watched the debates. Now we get to reap the reward: casting our ballot for either Gov. Mitt Romney or President Barack Obama. For many young Americans, the decision to reelect President Obama is an easy one because, contrary to Republican claims, the president has come through on his 2008 promise of change.

Regarding college students in particular, the Obama administration has taken steps to ensure that higher education is affordable and accessible for all who seek it. In March 2010, the president signed legislation that made significant changes to the way people receive and pay back federal student loans, which will create $60 billion in savings over the next 11 years. These funds will be used to increase funding for Pell Grants, a need-based program that helps low-income Americans afford college. Progress has also been made in other areas. In September 2011, the military’s discriminatory Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy was fully repealed by the Obama administration. The president’s commitment to achieving true equality for the LGBT community was further reflected in May of this year when he became the first sitting president to personally support the legalization of same-sex marriage. In the field of environmental protection, the Obama administration recently announced new fuel efficiency standards that are expected to almost double the fuel economy of our vehicles by 2025. I could go on about ways in which Obama has moved the country forward. He responsibly ended the war in Iraq, reformed our healthcare system for the better, issued an executive order protecting young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation and signed legislation making it easier for women to fight pay discrimination in the workplace. However, even in the face of all these important accomplishments, many young people are not yet convinced that Obama deserves their vote.

The Republican Party has responded to these concerns by portraying Romney as the go-to candidate on economic matters, a man with private-sector experience who understands free enterprise. Romney repeatedly promises that under his business-savvy policies 12 million new jobs will be created by the end of his first term. Though creating 12 million jobs in four years seems like an ambitious undertaking, independent economists, including Moody’s Analytics and Macroeconomic Advisors, have determined that this is the number of jobs that will be created by 2016 regardless of who is president. On the subject of jobs, Romney is basically making promises that would be very difficult not to keep. And though few, if any, Republicans will openly admit it, our nation’s economic situation has improved under the current administration. Unemployment recently fell below 8 percent; factory orders, construction spending, personal incomes and consumer confidence increased in October. It appears that the president’s lack of private-sector experience has not doomed us. Why should it? Our federal government is not a corporation; in fact, many of the actions taken by Congress and the White House are necessary precisely because market mechanisms have failed us. Of course, as Obama has expressed multiple times, there is still work to be done, which is exactly why he needs our votes.

I’d like to end by considering one of the first issues that will be faced by the president we elect today: our nation’s debt problem. Romney and Obama have made suggestions about how we can deal with this issue. Both proposals lack a certain degree of specificity, leaving us with many questions about how many trillions will actually be saved and which programs will be eliminated or changed. This uncertainty is an inescapable part of budgeting, a process that involves not only the president but also hundreds of legislators and interest groups. However, while fuzziness in the numbers is expected and perhaps even acceptable during the campaign season, there is a component of the process that is much clearer: the values and goals of the person sitting in the Oval Office. This is what we’re deciding today. Both privately and publically, Romney has made his views clear: He places ultimate importance on the risk-taking entrepreneur. The belief seems to be that in an economy tailored to them we will all flourish, even the 47 percent of Americans who, as Romney put it, “are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.” Like Romney, Obama has shown himself to be a friend of the businesses that form the foundation of our economic system — he lowered small businesses’ tax burden through credits and incentives, for example. However, Obama has never lost sight of the fact that to move this country forward, investments have to be made elsewhere as well. Most importantly, he refuses to simply write off the least fortunate among us. Sacrifices will need to be made as we work toward lowering our deficits and debt. I trust President Obama to make these choices, which is why I will be voting for him this Election Day. I hope you will too.

Natalie Sanchez is the president of College Democrats. She is a Wilson School major from Escondido, Calif. and can be reached at nsanchez@princeton.edu.