美国总统大选选战开打

The second time, it's harder
再次参选，难度更大

In 2008 Mr Obama promised audacity, hope and "change we can believe in". His appeal sprang from who he was: a fresh young senator offering a new direction after the clapped-out administration of George Bush and a safer pair of hands than the 72-year-old John McCain. But incumbents cannot run on promise alone. This time he will be judged less on who he is and more on what he has done.
2008年奥巴马承诺带给美国“胆量，希望”和“可以信任的变革”。他的吸引力源于他本身的特点：他是一名年轻的新参议员，可以在腐朽不堪的布什政府后为美国提供一个新的方向，同时他又比已经72岁的约翰·麦凯恩更加让人放心。但是当权者不能只做承诺。这一次民众关心他本身的特点更少一些，关心他的执政成果更多一些。

Considering the circumstances, he has not done badly. He can justly claim to have prevented a great recession from turning into a great depression. He rescued Detroit's carmakers and finished the job of stabilising the banks. Mr Romney says he made a bad situation worse, but if Mr Obama had not used billions of borrowed dollars to stimulate the sagging economy, even more Americans would be out of work today. By battering al-Qaeda and killing Osama bin Laden, he has disproved the notion that Democrats are soft on national security.
考虑到美国当时的大环境，他做的已经不坏了。他可以理直气壮地说自己已经阻止美国经济从不景气滑向大萧条.他拯救了底特律的汽车制造商，同时也完成了稳定银行的工作。罗姆尼说奥巴马让情况变得更糟，但要不是奥巴马总统向一蹶不振的美国经济投入数十亿借来的钱，美国现在会有更多的人失业。重创基地组织，杀死本拉登之后，他已经粉碎了外界认为民主党在国家安全上软弱无力的观点。

Still, "it could have been worse" has never been an inspiring re-election slogan. The recovery is still so tepid that Mr Obama cannot risk running on his record alone. He has therefore to cast the election as a choice, not a referendum on his performance. That requires him to make the choice as stark as possible. For months he has portrayed the Republicans as ruthless asset-strippers who care nothing about the middle class so long as they can promote the interests of the super-rich. How lucky for Mr Obama that the super-rich Mr Romney made his fortune in the cut-throat business of private equity.
然而，“要是没有我情况会更坏”可不是个振奋人心的竞选口号.经济复苏依旧不冷不热，奥巴马不能只靠之前执政成果来竞选，这样很冒险。因此他得表现出这是个让人做出抉择的大选，而不是因为他的执政成果人们才投他的票。这就要求他把自己和罗姆尼这两个民众的选择的特征展现的一目了然。最近几个月他把共和党人描述成一群只要能维护大富豪利益，就会去野蛮掠夺财产，不顾中产阶级死活的人。罗姆尼可是个在残酷的私募基金行业中赚了大钱的富豪，这对奥巴马总统来说是多么幸运的一件事。

This is the electoral logic behind the speech last week in which Mr Obama claimed that the Republicans had embraced a form of "thinly veiled social Darwinism" that would deprive needy children of healthy food, slash cancer research, close down national parks and eliminate air-traffic control in swathes of the country. It sounds scary, and it contains more than a grain of truth—but in fact the Republicans have proposed none of these specific cuts. Mr Obama's dystopian predictions are based on his own extrapolations from the broad spending cuts proposed by the Republicans in Congress.
这就是上周奥巴马总统演讲中背后的竞选逻辑，演讲中他宣称共和党人支持一种“露骨的社会进化论”，这一行为将夺去贫困儿童的健康食物，阻碍癌症研究，使国家公园关闭，同时取消美国许多地方的航空管制。这听起来很可怕，这当中包含的不止一丝真理--但是实际上共和党没有建议过削减上述特定开支。奥巴马总统这一反乌托邦式的预言基于他自己的推断，他的推断又来源于共和党在国会中提出的大范围削减开支的提案。

Mr Romney's retort is that the president is attacking policies nobody is proposing, "setting up straw men to distract from his record". Coming from the Republicans, this is rich. They have attacked a straw man since the day Mr Obama was inaugurated. They labelled his conventional Keynesian response to a deep recession "socialist". They called "Obamacare" unAmerican, even though this market-based scheme to extend health cover to 30m uninsured Americans is almost identical to the one Mr Romney adopted as governor of Massachusetts.
罗姆尼反驳，称总统正对没人提议过的政策进行抨击，罗姆尼此举是“创造一个假想敌，让选民不去注意奥巴马的执政成果”.很多共和党人都这样反击。从奥巴马就职的那天起，他们就一直在攻击一个假想敌。他们用奥巴马传统的凯恩斯式的回应给奥巴马贴上一个“深度衰退社会主义者”的标签。他们称“奥巴马医保方案”不符合美国人利益，尽管这一基于市场，将医保覆盖至30万未投保的美国人身上的方案和罗姆尼当马萨诸塞州州长时采取的方案大同小异。