Winning ugly

The Wall Street Journal has one of the best election post-mortems I have seen.

Mr. Obama's campaign stitched together a shrunken but still decisive version of his 2008 coalition—single women, the young and culturally liberal, government and other unions workers, and especially minority voters.

He said little during the campaign about his first term and even less about his plans for a second. Instead his strategy was to portray Mitt Romney as a plutocrat and intolerant threat to each of those voting blocs. No contraception for women. No green cards for immigrants. A return to Jim Crow via voter ID laws. No Pell grants for college.

This was all a caricature even by the standards of modern politics. But it worked with brutal efficiency—the definition of winning ugly. Mr. Obama was able to patch together just enough of these voting groups to prevail even as he lost independents and won only 40% of the overall white vote, according to the exit polls. His campaign's turnout machine was as effective as advertised in getting Democratic partisans to the polls.

Mr. Obama also benefitted from his long run of extraordinary good luck. Hurricane Sandy devastated the Northeast a week before Election Day, letting him rise for a few days above the partisanship that has defined his first term. The storm changed the campaign conversation and blunted Mr. Romney's momentum. The exit polls show that late-deciders went for the incumbent this year when they typically break for the challenger.

The President owes a debt as well to a pair of Republican appointees in government—John Roberts and Ben Bernanke. By joining four liberals on the Supreme Court in upholding ObamaCare in June, Chief Justice Roberts provided a salve of legitimacy to the President's deeply unpopular health-care law. It also helped him unify his party around something to protect in an otherwise aimless second term.

As for the Federal Reserve Chairman, Mr. Bernanke's latest round of quantitative easing was an invaluable in-kind contribution to the President in the final election weeks. It helped to lift asset prices, including the stock market, which contributed to rising consumer confidence and helped to counter the damage to investment and hiring from Mr. Obama's policies.

Mr. Romney is one of the least natural politicians of our era, but he is a laudable man who ran a spirited campaign on a reform agenda, especially after the first debate on October 3. He took the risk of putting Paul Ryan on the ticket, and the Congressman proved to be a campaign asset, even if he couldn't overcome the strong Democratic turnout in Wisconsin.

 Read it all.