Updated November 7, 2012, 1:28 pm
On November 8, 1960, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon for the presidency.
On Nov. 8, 1900, Margaret Mitchell, the American author of “Gone With The Wind”, was born. Following her death on Aug. 16, 1949, her obituary appeared in The Times.
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On This Date
By The Associated Press
1889 Montana became the 41st state. 1892 Former President Grover Cleveland beat incumbent Benjamin Harrison, becoming the only president to win non-consecutive terms in the White House. 1923 Adolf Hitler launched his first attempt to seize power with a failed coup in Munich, Germany. 1932 New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president over incumbent Herbert Hoover. 1966 Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California. 1971 The album “Led Zeppelin IV,” which included the song “Stairway to Heaven,” was released. 1987 A bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army exploded as crowds gathered in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, for a ceremony honoring Britain’s war dead, killing 11 people. 1988 Vice President George H.W. Bush won the presidential election, beating Democrat Michael Dukakis. 1994 Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. 1997 Chinese engineers diverted the Yangtze River to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. 2000 A statewide recount of presidential election ballots began in Florida. 2004 Thousands of U.S. troops attacked strongholds of Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, Iraq. 2010 n engine fire aboard the Carnival Splendor cruise ship left nearly 4,500 aboard without electricity during a three-day tow to San Diego. 2010 Talk show host Conan O’Brien made his debut on TBS. Current Birthdays
By The Associated Press
Broadcast journalist Morley Safer (“60 Minutes”) turns 81 years old today.
AP Photo/Peter Kramer
Actress Gretchen Mol turns 39 years old today.
AP Photo/Evan Agostini
1927 Patti Page, Singer, turns 85 1944 Bonnie Bramlett, Rock singer, actress, turns 68 1949 Bonnie Raitt, Rock musician, turns 63 1950 Mary Hart, TV host (“Entertainment Tonight”), turns 62 1952 Christie Hefner, Former CEO of Playboy Enterprises, turns 60 1952 Alfre Woodard, Actress, turns 60 1954 Rickie Lee Jones, Singer, songwriter, turns 58 1961 Leif Garrett, Singer, turns 51 1967 Courtney Thorne-Smith, Actress (“According to Jim”), turns 45 1968 Parker Posey, Actress, turns 44 1975 Tara Reid, Actress, turns 37 1985 Jack Osbourne, TV personality (“The Osbournes”), turns 27 Historic Birthdays
Margaret Mitchell 11/8/1900 – 8/16/1949 American author; wrote “Gone With The Wind”.Go to obituary »
37 Gustav X Charles 11/8/1622 – 2/13/1660
Swedish king (1654-60)85 Edmond Halley 11/8/1656 – 1/14/1742
English astronomer and mathematician64 Bram Stoker 11/8/1847 – 4/20/1912
Irish author; wrote “Dracula”76 Gottlob Frege 11/8/1848 – 7/26/1925
German mathematician and logician74 Herbert Austin, Baron Austin 11/8/1866 – 5/23/1941
Enligh automotive engineer; founder and first chairman of Austin Motor Company37 Hermann Rorschach 11/8/1884 – 4/2/1922
Swiss psychiatrist78 Esther Rolle 11/8/1920 – 11/17/1998
American actress
Month: November 2012
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Barack Obama Is Re-elected President of the U.S.: Let the Next Four Years Begin
Brooks Kraft / Corbis for TIME
Supporters of U.S. President Barack Obama celebrate his victory in the presidential election at his election night rally in Chicago.
A hurricane couldn’t stop it. Two billion dollars couldn’t buy it. A weak economy couldn’t swing it. Americans re-elected Barack Obama on Tuesday, affirming the goals of the President’s tumultuous first term and giving him a second. This wasn’t 2008. Not as many states went his way. Fewer of his supporters wept. This time, it wasn’t about change.
By 10:45 p.m. E.T., gongs were ringing at Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago as key states were called for the incumbent. New Hampshire. Bong. Pennsylvania. Bong. Wisconsin. Bong. In Boston, home to Mitt Romney’s campaign, a glum crowd of Republicans began to thin. Half headed to the bars, the other half to the exits. A few hours later, it was all over. “I pray that the President will be successful in guiding our nation,” Romney told the crowd in a short, dignified concession speech.
In Chicago’s Grant Park, the scene of his historic 2008 victory, Obama took his time addressing the nation that had extended his lease on the White House. “Tonight in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up. We have fought our way back,” he said. “We know in our hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to come.”
(PHOTOS: Election 2012: Photos from the Finish Line)
The election once looked as if it would turn on the U.S. economy, still experiencing aftershocks from the 2008 financial crisis. And maybe it did — just not in the way Republicans had planned. Romney’s blue-chip business background seemed the perfect credential with which to challenge Obama, who entered the White House just as the depths of the recession became apparent. But after catastrophic downturns in employment, consumer confidence and the housing market early in Obama’s first term, the economy stabilized in the past year. The result: a frustratingly slow but palpable recovery that gave an unlikely edge to the incumbent. The revitalization of the auto industry in particular, enabled by a 2009 bailout that Romney opposed, might have been the difference in industrial Ohio.
Romney began the general election with a simple pitch: Obama tried to fix the economy and failed. But by August, the Republican had changed tacks. Rather than pluck a humdrum GOPer from a swing state, he named as his running mate Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, a budget-slashing crusader with dramatic ideas about how to reform federal health entitlements. It wasn’t enough to flip Wisconsin in the end. But Romney’s selection of Ryan was never a narrow electoral play. It was a signal that he saw his challenge in a different light. The base might rally to him. His aides started to talk about a “choice election” in which Romney offered not just an indictment of Obama’s policies but also the promise of a brighter future under bold Republican leadership.
The economic and electoral realities that prompted Romney’s strategic shift did not change. Polling in late summer showed Obama with a narrow edge where it counted. And despite a spike for Obama after his party’s September convention and a swoon the other way after his sleepy showing in the first debate, the race remained remarkably static, a noisy spat over the loyalties of a few undecided voters who hadn’t paid enough attention to get sucked into the partisan tribalism that is modern American politics. After the two parties spent more than $2 billion on the most technologically complex campaign in history and an unprecedented wave of third-party groups spent hundreds of millions more, Obama won Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa — just as the polls predicted.
With his victory Tuesday night, Obama maintained command of a country with real potential for growth as it escapes the pull of the worst economic crisis in generations. But the obstacles are many. Congress remains divided, with control of both houses unchanged by an election that upheld an uneasy status quo. Deadlock threatens to turn routine budget negotiations into a fiscal emergency, with deep cuts to the military and social services scheduled to go into effect in January unless Congress finds a solution. Obama’s agenda for his second term — reordering the bloated tax code, reforming the nation’s immigration laws and brokering a deal to control the explosion of long-term deficits — looks no easier to achieve now than it did before Tuesday.
How Republicans react to Romney’s loss will likely determine the country’s path. After John McCain’s defeat in 2008, a splenetic conservative base formed the Tea Party to oust the moderates and establishmentarians who had failed them. The result, aided by a tanking economy, was a midterm sweep in 2010 that strengthened the party’s right wing and delivered the House of Representatives to the Republicans, who used it to oppose Obama at every turn. If the GOP blames Romney for this election’s outcome, another conservative retrenchment could mean more gridlock and more primary bloodletting. But if the fault falls on conservative candidates like Missouri’s Todd Akin and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock — a group that not only weighed down the top of the ticket but also may have cost the GOP control of the Senate — things could be different. Republicans might rethink the wisdom of playing to a shrinking coalition, as Democrats run up margins with women and Latinos. More important, they might resign themselves to work with the President they couldn’t get rid of.
— With reporting by Michael Scherer / Chicago and Alex Altman / Boston
On This Day: November 7
Updated November 6, 2012, 1:29 pm
On Nov. 7, 1917, Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution took place as forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.
On Nov. 7, 1867, Marie Curie, the Polish-born French physicist twice awarded the Nobel Prize for her work on radioactivity, was born. Following her death on July 4, 1934, her obituary appeared in The Times.
Go to obituary » | Other birthdays »
On This Date
By The Associated Press
1893 Passage of a referendum made Colorado the first state to grant women the right to vote. 1911 Marie Curie became the first multiple Nobel Prize winner when she was given the award for chemisty eight years after garnering the physics prize with her late husband, Pierre. (She remains the only woman with multiple Nobels and the only person to receive the award in two science categories.) 1916 Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress. 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in office, defeating Thomas E. Dewey. 1962 Richard M. Nixon, who failed in a bid to become governor of California, held what he called his last press conference, telling reporters, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” 1962 Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt died at age 78. 1972 President Richard M. Nixon was re-elected in a landslide over Democrat George McGovern. 1973 Congress over-rode President Richard M. Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Act. 1991 Basketball star Magic Johnson announced that he had tested positive for the AIDS virus and was retiring. 1998 House Speaker Newt Gingrich resigned following an election in which the Republican House majority shrunk from 22 to 12. 2000 Republican George W. Bush was elected president over incumbent Democratic Vice President Al Gore, though Gore won the popular vote by a narrow margin. The winner was not known for more than a month because of a dispute over the results in Florida. 2000 Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, becoming the first first lady to win public office. 2006 Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, became the first Muslim elected to Congress. 2009 The Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed, 220-215, landmark health care legislation to expand coverage to tens of millions who lacked it and placed tough new restrictions on the insurance industry. Current Birthdays
By The Associated Press
CIA director David Petraeus turns 60 years old today.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Actress Yunjin Kim (“Lost”) turns 39 years old today.
AP Photo/Marco Garcia
1918 Billy Graham, Evangelist, turns 94 1942 Johnny Rivers, Rock singer, turns 70 1943 Joni Mitchell, Singer, songwriter, turns 69 1957 Christopher Knight, Actor (“The Brady Bunch”), turns 55 Historic Birthdays
Marie Curie 11/7/1867 – 7/4/1934 Polish-born French physicist.Go to obituary »
85 Andrew White 11/7/1832 – 11/4/1918
American educator and diplomat; founder and first president of Cornell University89 Lise Meitner 11/7/1878 – 10/27/1968
Austrian physicist60 Leon Trotsky 11/7/1879 – 8/21/1940
Russian revolutionary63 Eleanor Medill Patterson 11/7/1884 – 7/24/1948
American publisher82 Sir Chandrasekhara Raman 11/7/1888 – 11/21/1970
Indian physicist55 Herman Mankiewicz 11/7/1897 – 3/5/1953
American screenwriter85 Konrad Lorenz 11/7/1903 – 2/27/1989
Austrian zoologist46 Albert Camus 11/7/1913 – 1/4/1960
French novelist
A Second Term: Bigger and Better Than the First
Broccoli Irresistible: Almost a Distraction from Election Results
