World leaders congratulate Obama on re-election

World leaders have congratulated US President Barack Obama on his re-election to the White House.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said he looks forward to working closely with President Obama and the US, as Ireland assumes the Presidency of the European Union on 1 January, 2013.

Mr Kenny said he sees Ireland's EU Presidency as an opportunity to seek to strengthen ties between Europe and the US, including in the area of international trade.

President Michael D Higgins has also congratulated Mr Obama on his victory, and assured him of the continued goodwill of the Irish people as he begins his second term.

British Prime Minister David Cameron sent his congratulations, saying: "I think he's a very successful US president and I look forward to working with him in the future."

Speaking during a tour of the Middle East, Mr Cameron said: "I would like to congratulate Barack Obama on his re-election.

"I have really enjoyed working with him over the last few years and I look forward to working with him again over the next four years.

"There are so many things that we need to do: we need to kick start the world economy and I want to see an EU-US trade deal."

Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent a telegram to Mr Obama congratulating him on the victory.

"We hope that the positive beginnings that have taken hold in Russian-US relations on the world arena will grow in the interests of international security and stability," Russian news agencies quoted his spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.

After a long, bitter and expensive campaign, the 51-year-old Obama struck a conciliatory tone in his acceptance speech before thousands of cheering supporters in Chicago.

"You voted for action, not politics as usual," Mr Obama said, calling for compromise and pledging to work with leaders of both parties to reduce the deficit, to reform the tax code and immigration laws, and to cut dependence on foreign oil.

US Election as it happened ¦ Election night in pictures ¦ Media Reaction

Americans chose to stick with a divided government in Washington, however, by leaving the US Congress as it has been since the mid-term elections of 2010.

Mr Obama's fellow Democrats retain control of the Senate and Republicans keep the majority in the House of Representatives.

Mr Obama secured a second term as president by a bigger margin than many had predicted.

He saw off his Republican challenger Mitt Romney in important battleground states and comfortably passed the threshold of 270 electoral college votes needed for victory.

The nationwide popular vote remained extremely close with Mr Obama taking about 50% to 49% for Mr Romney after a campaign in which the candidates and their party allies spent a combined $2bn.

But in the state-by-state system of electoral votes that decides the White House, Mr Obama notched up a comfortable victory.

In the end, he won re-election on the issue that was supposed to send him packing: the sluggish US economy.

The US is still digging out from the deepest recession in 80 years, and employers are barely adding enough jobs to keep pace with population growth.

Trillions of dollars of household wealth have vanished in the housing bubble, while the gap between rich and poor widens

But historically, voters have given a second term to incumbent presidents who preside over even modest economic growth during an election year.

That pattern appears to have held for Mr Obama. If the economy is not exactly roaring ahead, it improved steadily over the course of the year.

"It was never going to be a landslide," said John Sides, a political science professor at George Washington University. "But it was always his race to lose."

Polls show division over economic measures

The Democratic president took major steps to boost the economy, but they did not seem to help him much in the eyes of voters. Polls show deep divisions on the merits of his 2009 stimulus, his Dodd-Frank financial reforms and the auto industry bailout.

But they made a difference in one important place. Mr Obama campaigned heavily on the auto bailout in Ohio, where one in eight jobs is tied to the industry.

That may have helped him limit his losses there among white men, a slice of the electorate that Mr Romney won heavily elsewhere.

According to Reuters/Ipsos exit polls, President Obama lost white men nationwide by 21 percentage points. In Ohio, he lost white men by only 12 points.

Mr Obama was also helped by the fact that voters largely blame the recession on his Republican predecessor, President George W Bush.

Mr Obama made that a central part of his campaign message as he argued that Mr Romney would bring back policies that precipitated the crash.

If the Romney campaign wanted to focus the election on Obama's economic stewardship, the Obama campaign wanted to make it a choice between two candidates.

President Obama's campaign attacked early with a barrage of negative advertising that painted the multimillionaire former private-equity executive as a corporate raider with little concern about the fortunes of ordinary people.

The attacks drew unflattering comparisons to Mr Obama's historic 2008 run for office, but they discredited Mr Romney in the eyes of many voters.

"A lot of middle-class white people who don't have a college degree came to the conclusion that Romney's just not one of us," said Potomac Research Group analyst Greg Valliere.

Mr Obama's narrow re-election victory will not strike fear in the hearts of Republicans, who remain in control of the House of Representatives. Obama's Democrats held on to the Senate, but fewer moderates of either party will be in the mix.

That is a recipe for more gridlock and white-knuckle showdowns over taxes and spending. Reaching consensus on even the most routine legislation will be difficult.

But Mr Obama used his acceptance speech to indicate he would be looking for cross-party consensus.

"I return to the White House more determined and more inspired than ever about the work there is to do and the future that lies ahead," he said.

"You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours. And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together: reducing our deficit, reforming our tax code, fixing our immigration system, freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We've got more work to do."

Towards the end of the speech, the former Illinois senator said: "I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests.

"We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America."

Mr Romney conceded the election early this morning.

"This is a time of great challenges for America and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation," Mr Romney told supporters in Boston after calling Mr Obama to congratulate him.

"I so wish, I so wish, that I had been able to fulfil your hopes to lead the country in a different direction, but the nation chose another leader," Mr Romney said in his concession speech.

This is the second time the former Massachusetts governor has made a run for the presidency.

Mr Romney had promised to revive the nation's economy through reforming the tax code, reducing the debt and confronting China on its trade practices.

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