時事新聞:美國總統大選開打

2012年1月3日的共和黨艾奧瓦州黨團會議正式拉開美國總統大選帷幕。11月16日，美國全國選民將投票選出下一屆美國總統。12月17日，選舉人團選出總統。2013年1月6日，參衆兩院宣佈獲勝者。2013年1月20日，新總統就職典禮。

Game on
大戰開始

The campaign looks likely to sharpen America's divisions.
總統競選似乎深化了美國人的分歧。

AMERICA'S primary elections are not yet formally over, but with the exit of Rick Santorum it is at last plain that Mitt Romney will be the Republicans' nominee. After the bruising primaries, Mr Romney starts from behind. Barack Obama leads in the head-to-head polls. But there are still seven months to election day, and Mr Romney has a fair chance of victory in November. Less than half of America's voters approve of the way Mr Obama is doing his job. Six out of ten think the country is on the "wrong track". The recovery is still weak and 12.7m Americans are unemployed. America added only 120,000 jobs in March, below expectations and fewer than in previous months.
美國初選尚未正式結束，但隨着裏克·桑託利姆的退出，結果塵埃落定，米特·羅姆尼最終將成爲共和黨的提名人。在競爭激烈的初選後，羅姆尼後來居上，奧巴馬則在兩黨共同舉行的民意調查中領先。但距離選舉日還有7個月，羅姆尼仍然有在11月公平競爭，和對手一較高下的機會。美國選民中，只有不到一半的人認可奧巴馬總統的工作。他們中10個人就有6個認爲美國正處於一條“錯誤的軌道”上。經濟恢復依舊疲弱，1270萬美國人失業。3月份美國新增120,000個就業崗位，這一數字低於預期，同時也比前幾個月的少。

This fight is going to be nastier than the one in 2008. By instinct Mr Romney is a moderate, but the primaries tugged him sharply right, forcing him to boast that he was "severely conservative" by embracing policies, including deep cuts in social spending, that even the famous flip-flopper will now find it difficult to drop. After the primaries, candidates pivot towards the centre. But Mr Romney knows that to turn out a conservative base that does not love him he must mobilise their hatred of Mr Obama. In the meantime Mr Obama appears to believe that he cannot afford to present himself once more as a healer who will soar above party divisions. He is running a more partisan campaign this time round. An already polarised America therefore faces a deeply polarising election.
本次大選戰況將比2008年的大選更加難分難解。羅姆尼本質上是走穩健路線的，但是初選把他推到了極右陣營，迫使他支持一些政策來宣稱自己是“極端保守”的，這些政策包括大幅削減社會支出。然而即使是那些名氣大的牆頭草政客們也發現，削減社會開支難度很大。初選之後，候選人們的重心已經移到了中心。但是羅姆尼知道，要想在不歡迎自己的保守派陣營中取得一席之地，他必須激起這些人對奧巴馬總統的敵視。奧巴馬總統似乎認爲自己不能再以黨派分歧調停人的形象出現了。本次競選，他把更多心思花在自己的陣營上。這樣一來，社會極化嚴重的美國要面臨一場同樣極化嚴重的大選。

The second time, it's harder
再次參選，難度更大

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年奧巴馬承諾帶給美國“膽量，希望”和“可以信任的變革”。他的吸引力源於他本身的特點：他是一名年輕的新參議員，可以在腐朽不堪的布什政府後爲美國提供一個新的方向，同時他又比已經72歲的約翰·麥凱恩更加讓人放心。但是當權者不能只做承諾。這一次民衆關心他本身的特點更少一些，關心他的執政成果更多一些。

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.
考慮到美國當時的大環境，他做的已經不壞了。他可以理直氣壯地說自己已經阻止美國經濟從不景氣滑向大蕭條.他拯救了底特律的汽車製造商，同時也完成了穩定銀行的工作。羅姆尼說奧巴馬讓情況變得更糟，但要不是奧巴馬總統向一蹶不振的美國經濟投入數十億借來的錢，美國現在會有更多的人失業。重創基地組織，殺死本拉登之後，他已經粉碎了外界認爲民主黨在國家安全上軟弱無力的觀點。

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，“要是沒有我情況會更壞”可不是個振奮人心的競選口號.經濟復甦依舊不冷不熱，奧巴馬不能只靠之前執政成果來競選，這樣很冒險。因此他得表現出這是個讓人做出抉擇的大選，而不是因爲他的執政成果人們才投他的票。這就要求他把自己和羅姆尼這兩個民衆的選擇的特徵展現的一目瞭然。最近幾個月他把共和黨人描述成一羣只要能維護大富豪利益，就會去野蠻掠奪財產，不顧中產階級死活的人。羅姆尼可是個在殘酷的私募基金行業中賺了大錢的富豪，這對奧巴馬總統來說是多麼幸運的一件事。

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.
這就是上週奧巴馬總統演講中背後的競選邏輯，演講中他宣稱共和黨人支持一種“露骨的社會進化論”，這一行爲將奪去貧困兒童的健康食物，阻礙癌症研究，使國家公園關閉，同時取消美國許多地方的航空管制。這聽起來很可怕，這當中包含的不止一絲真理--但是實際上共和黨沒有建議過削減上述特定開支。奧巴馬總統這一反烏托邦式的預言基於他自己的推斷，他的推斷又來源於共和黨在國會中提出的大範圍削減開支的提案。

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.
羅姆尼反駁，稱總統正對沒人提議過的政策進行抨擊，羅姆尼此舉是“創造一個假想敵，讓選民不去注意奧巴馬的執政成果”.很多共和黨人都這樣反擊。從奧巴馬就職的那天起，他們就一直在攻擊一個假想敵。他們用奧巴馬傳統的凱恩斯式的迴應給奧巴馬貼上一個“深度衰退社會主義者”的標籤。他們稱“奧巴馬醫保方案”不符合美國人利益，儘管這一基於市場，將醫保覆蓋至30萬未投保的美國人身上的方案和羅姆尼當馬薩諸塞州州長時採取的方案大同小異。

Mr Romney also accuses Mr Obama of drowning the American dream in a sea of red ink. But on this issue there is plenty of blame to go round. Although Mr Obama has yet to come up with a serious plan to tame entitlements, he did try last summer to negotiate a "grand bargain" on the deficit. And when that failed, Congress voted for an automatic deficit-reducing spending cut (the "sequester") of $1.2 trillion over the next decade that is supposed to kick in at the end of this year.
羅姆尼還控告奧巴馬把美國夢拖入赤字的汪洋大海里。但在這件事情上，奧巴馬有許多讓人指責的地方。儘管奧巴馬至今尚未出臺重要的計劃來削減國民福利(這裏真心不會翻譯)，但他去年夏季確實試着在財政赤字上做出“大妥協”。當那失敗之後，國會自動對在未來十年內用削減1.2萬億美元開支來填補赤字的方案進行投票，今年年底這一方案應該會通過。

Elections that offer clear choices can be good things. Isn't that politics as usual? But American voters are in danger of being forced to choose in November between a Republican Party that is allergic to needed tax rises and a Democratic Party that lacks the courage to make the spending cuts required for America to live within its means. The prospect is for a shouting match that pushes the parties ever further apart and threatens to make the whole system of government seize up.
要是大選能讓人做出明確的選擇，那可是好事。這不正是和以往一樣的政治嗎？但是美國選民正面臨這樣一種風險，他們被迫在共和黨和民主黨中做出選擇，前者對必不可少的稅收提高過於敏感，而後者則缺乏勇氣盡可能地削減可以讓美國渡過難關的開支. 大選估計要演變成一場罵戰，讓兩個黨派分歧更加嚴重，同時兩黨彼此威脅要讓政府停擺。

This is not politics as usual
這不是和以往一樣的政治

Indeed, the system is already dangerously close to seizing up. The present Congress is the most polarised of modern times. The Republican landslide in the 2010 mid-terms swept a new breed of conservative zealot into office, destroying the middle ground and making legislating next to impossible. The Supreme Court is polarised, too—so much so that it might strike down Obamacare, the president's flagship achievement, on the deciding vote of a single judge.
實際上，政府已經有停擺的危險。美國近代歷史中，現今的美國國會現極化最嚴重。2010年美國中期選舉共和黨取得大勝，國會涌入一羣新的保守主義狂熱者，破壞了國會的中間立場，同時讓立法變得近乎不可能。最高法院也極化嚴重---因此它可能會因法官的決定票而否定奧巴馬這個一流的醫改方案。

In short, America is in dire need of the sort of comity Mr Obama promised in 2008. We are not red states and blue states, he said then, we are the United States. What a pity that he is changing tack this time, bashing the rich via gimmicks such as the "Buffett rule" (which is supposed to make millionaires like Mr Romney pay at least the same tax rate as their secretaries) and galvanising his base by brushing aside even the sensible part of the Republican argument that something radical must be done to curb entitlement spending. He may feel he has no choice. But it is a miserable portent for the future.
總而言之，美國亟需奧巴馬總統在2008年所承諾的禮讓。當時他說“我們不是共和黨人，也不是民主黨人，我們是美國人”。這次他改變了戰略，用諸如“巴菲特法案”（這一法案將讓像羅姆尼這樣的百萬富翁和他們的祕書以同樣的稅率納稅）一類的花招來打擊富人，同時漠視共和黨觀點中的明智之處（如在削減福利開支方面必須要激進）來鞏固自己，這讓人頗爲遺憾。或許他覺得自己已經別無選擇。但是這預示着美國不樂觀的未來。