A.B. Stoddard

President Obama has just days to decide, or reveal, whether he will be Santa Claus or the Grinch as an anxious nation speeds past our Christmas of crisis toward the fiscal cliff. 

Democrats are feeling fine these days. Polls show them winning a clash with the GOP over tax increases, they believe President Obama’s reelection victory has provided him a mandate and they enjoy watching stunned Republicans writhe as they grapple with painful questions about how the party not only lost the White House, but lost badly with key groups necessary to win the presidency.

Somebody better tell the Democrats they can’t have it all.

Seven years later, just a mention of Harriet Miers, by all accounts one of the nicest people on the planet, still makes the Bushies cringe.

Barack Obama, a historic president, defied history again Tuesday night to be reelected amid a climate of 7.9 percent unemployment, the kind that usually shows incumbent presidents the door.

Next week at this time Americans will have reelected President Obama — or fired him. There will be no shortage of post-mortems and exit-poll analyses, and the palpable anger of roughly half the nation that inevitably will follow — no matter who wins. There will be no inspiration or joyful weeping on either side, no matter who wins, as we all face a crisis the following day, no matter who wins.

The “fiscal cliff,” which combines deep spending cuts to military and domestic programs known as “sequestration” with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax cut, the Medicare “doc fix” and unemployment insurance, threatens to plunge the economy into a tailspin and cause damage that would take years to undo. It can and must be avoided, but no one yet quite knows how. Despite bipartisan outrage over the state we’re in, most Democrats like our broken entitlement systems the way they are and most Republicans won’t raise taxes even for a 1-10 ratio with spending cuts to help reduce the deficit. The fiscal cliff was created by Congress in the summer of 2011 when both parties raised the debt ceiling with the promise (aka punt) of doing the hard work another day. Nearly one and a half years later the day of reckoning is here, and Congress has just six weeks to solve the thus-far unsolvable. Are you laughing or crying?

It's almost certain that President Obama released his agenda, titled "The New Economic Patriotism," the night before a Donald Trump blockbuster announcement designed to derail Obama's reelection. He had to have been hoping dearly the Trump stink-bomb would take all the oxygen away from any second-day stories about the "plan for jobs and middle-class security" the campaign published. It's not just that the plan is the first voters have heard of any Obama has for his second term — two weeks before Election Day — but that the brochure is about as cheesy a cheap shot as they come.

President Obama is losing. So says the latest Gallup poll, and so do those swelling numbers in key states like Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia and Ohio.

Vice President Biden survived a moment that could have taken President Obama’s reelection campaign down with him.

As we head into the final stretch of campaign 2012, what many will call the most consequential election of our lifetime (always true until four years later), let us gird for the disappointment that awaits us.