The Washington Post Endorses Obama

Damon Winter/The New York Times President Obama held a morning rally at Ybor City Museum State Park on Thursday in Tampa, Fla.

President Obama picked up the endorsement of The Washington Post, which said the president would be better at helping put the country on a sound, economic footing.

“President Barack Obama is better positioned to be that navigator than is his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney,” The Post writes.

The newspaper, which endorsed Mr. Obama four years ago, writes that its eyes “are open to the disappointments of Mr. Obama's first term,” which it said included his failure to push for a bipartisan budget deal. The Post said he runs a White House that is “arrogant and thin-skinned.”

But the paper says that Mr. Romney has embraced “his party's reality-defying ideology that taxes can always go down but may never go up.” While calling his business record “impressive,” the paper calls his political resume “thin” and concludes that “there is no way to know what Mr. Romney really believes.”

The editorial, which was posted online Thursday afternoon, praises the president for his early efforts to stabilize the economy and for passage of the Affordable Care Act. It lauds him for the battle against terrorism, but says he was “hesitant and inconstant” in dealing with the upheaval in Arab countries.

On balance, though, the paper says that Mr. Obama deserves a second term.

“The president understands the urgency of the problems as well as anyone in the country and is committed to solving them in a balanced way,” th e paper writes. “In a second term, working with an opposition that we hope would be chastened by the failure of its scorched-earth campaign against him, he is far more likely than his opponent to succeed. That makes Mr. Obama by far the superior choice.”

Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.