Sioux City Journal: Mitt Romney Stands Out as Best Choice

In our endorsement of Mitt Romney before the Iowa Caucuses four years ago, we wrote of America's need for a president possessed of "energy, intellect, vision, charisma and experience" to lead the nation in meeting "formidable, complex, divisive, political and dangerous" challenges.

 

Since then, the nation's challenges - in particular, its domestic economic challenges - have grown still more acute.

 

Within this year's Republican presidential field, Romney again stands out as the candidate who is best prepared through experience, skills and qualities to lead the country. Today the Journal endorses the businessman, former Massachusetts governor and former Winter Olympics CEO in the Jan. 3 caucuses.

 

The 2012 election for president is, first and foremost, about the economy, jobs and the federal budget. Whether it's Barack Obama or a Republican, stark realities face the winner.

 

On Wall Street and in the banking and housing industries, red flags dot the landscape of our fragile post-recession recovery, and growth is stagnant. Unemployment remains high. In short, the nation's fiscal house is a mess. Red ink runs deep, regulation of business runs amok, and crucial overhauls of how the federal government spends, taxes and provides entitlements await action. Looming over everything is the escalating Euro-zone debt crisis.

 

Polarized and paralyzed, our leaders in Washington appear incapable of engaging in the compromises and making the difficult choices necessary to turn our economic ship before it strikes the iceberg.

 

As a result, the national mood is a mixture of anxiety, frustration and anger. According to an October Gallup poll, just 13 percent of Americans are "satisfied with the way things are going" in the country.

 

Through successful, executive decision-making experience in both the private and public sectors, Romney understands economics and fiscal principles in a real-world way. In other words, he's walked the walk. In this year's Republican field, he is the candidate most capable of not only articulating a blueprint for a stronger economy and the restoration of fiscal sanity in Washington, but of assembling a high-caliber team of advisors, forging consensus within Congress and rallying the nation in support of it.

 

Romney founded his own venture capital and investment company, turned the once-troubled 2002 Winter Olympic Games into a profit-maker and led a state in which registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans nearly three to one and 85 percent of the Legislature was Democratic at the time from a $3 billion budget deficit when he took office in January 2003 to a $700 million budget surplus by the end of 2004. He knows how to build success, achieve reform and forge consensus in support of goals.