In fact, Americans do not need a new political party with Obama s reelection, voters have endorsed precisely that credo of pragmatic idealism.

The phenomenon of quasi constitutional reelection has become so widespread in Latin America that Georgetown University professor Héctor Schamis has dubbed it the new authoritarianism in the region.

NEW DELHI In his victory speech to a rapturous crowd in Chicago following his reelection, President Barack Obama affirmed that America s decade long conflict in Afghanistan will now end. The line was greeted with prolonged applause and understandably so.

In Ecuador, Correa used the same trick right from the start his 2008 constitution explicitly stated that the time Correa had served as President under the previous constitution did not bar him from seeking reelection, enabling him to remain in office until 2017.

President Bush regards his reelection as an endorsement of his policies, and feels reinforced in his distorted view of the world. The accountability moment has passed, he claims, and he is ready to confront tyranny throughout the world according to his own lights.

The money spent to win elections (often including the purchase of a party s nomination) is recouped many times over once the winner is in office. Half of India s legislators who stood for reelection this time around had tripled their assets in the last five years.

Even if President Bush wins reelection, it is highly unlikely that the US will make another outright grant to a sovereign Iraq. Theoretically, international loans could be an alternative, but who would lend to an unstable government, let alone a government whose legitimacy has not been fully established?

Likewise, restrictions and ambiguities continue to plague the institutional arrangements sought by the framers of the country s political and electoral reforms. Reelection is permitted only for candidates nominated by the same party for which they originally ran, and the enabling legislation for independent candidates, ballot initiatives, and referenda remains unclear.

Obama s reelection sends a message, but one that will resonate widely including at home only if rhetoric does not depart from reality, as was too often the case during Obama s first term. America cannot continue to live with the injustices of its health care system or with crumbling and obsolete infrastructure.

TIRANA In an era characterized by political polarization and policy paralysis, we should celebrate broad agreement on economic strategy wherever we find it. One such area of agreement is the idea that the key to inclusive growth is, as then British Prime Minister Tony Blair put in his 2001 reelection campaign, education, education, education.

The disqualification of Mashai and Rafsanjani reveals, once again, the schism embedded at the heart of Iran s political structure by the dual executive of Supreme Leader and President. When Khamenei publicly supported Ahmadinejad s controversial reelection in 2009, no one could have predicted the unprecedented tensions that would subsequently emerge between the country s two main authorities.

But the left wing populists influenced by Chávez who ruled Venezuela for 14 years have perfected a particularly illiberal practice bending constitutional rules to allow themselves to be reelected again and again. In Bolivia, President Evo Morales s new 2009 constitution banned reelection to a third consecutive term, but now the Constitutional Court has allowed him to run, arguing that the Bolivian state has been refounded.

Princeton If anyone wanted evidence that we are not in the mental and political world of the interwar Great Depression, the German election result and its outcome a stable government of the center right should be a clincher. In interwar Germany, the Depression destroyed German democracy and led to the rise to power of Hitler and the National Socialists in today s Germany, the most severe economic crisis since the Second World War produced the reelection of Frau Merkel.

Princeton 45 45 If anyone wanted evidence that we are not in the mental and political world of the interwar Great Depression, the German election result and its outcome a stable government of the center right should be a clincher. In interwar Germany, the Depression destroyed German democracy and led to the rise to power of Hitler and the National Socialists in today s Germany, the most severe economic crisis since the Second World War produced the reelection of Frau Merkel.