US choice - a gamble or the devil we know - FT.com On Wednesday morning the US will probably awaken to wonder what the fuss was about. In all probability, Barack Obama will be the next president, the Senate will remain narrowly Democratic and the House will still be comfortably Republican. Which is to say that after the better part of two years - and $6bn in election spending - roughly 130m American voters will barely have tinkered with the worst gridlock in recent history. It might feel as if an elephant has just given birth to a mouse. But in terms of the White House, it will still be by far the least bad outcome. Having secured a second term, Mr Obama will have a chance to show that experience is indeed better than hope. And Mitt Romney will have all the time in the world to reflect on how badly he - and his party - have gone astray. Edward Luce Such is the level of invective nowadays that some readers may read support for Mr Obama as a defence of euro-socialism. So it is worth stressing that the US sorely lacks the type of conservatism practised by the Republican party's avowed hero, Ronald Reagan. While professing to follow Reagan, Mr Romney in practice embraced the worst side of George W. Bush - all the pugilism and faith-based flag waving but none of the humour (or indeed support for immigration). In 2012 America was ripe for a genuine debate about its economic future. Instead, it was presented with a choice between fantasy and the status quo. On fiscal policy, all Mr Romney offered was a preposterously self-negating set of promises. Like Mr Obama, the Republican nominee stoked the myth that the US budgetary challenge could be solved without asking for any sacrifice from the bottom 98 per cent of Americans. But Mr Romney went much further in pledging a return to cold war Pentagon budgets while cutting everyone's taxes and yet somehow returning to fiscal balance. Voters were asked to trust him on how he would fill in the blanks. Contrary to folklore, President Reagan was a pragmatist to his fingertips. Mr Romney's party believes that he won the cold war because he sharply increased defence spending. But the USSR was a spent force long before he came to office. Reagan's greatest gift was to ignore the hawks and take Mikhail Gorbachev on trust. In spite of being surrounded by highly educated Kremlinologists, Reagan got it right and they got it wrong. The world was incalculably better off for it. Today's Republicans would lump Reagan with Mr Obama as an apologist for America. The only pity is that Mr Obama has felt unable to emulate America's 40th president in his dealings with America's worst rivals. As Sun Tsu wrote and Reagan clearly grasped, the best way to defeat your enemies is to divide them. Try applying that to Mr Romney, who agglomerates every possible Muslim dissident group, whether democratic or theocratic, Sunni or Shia, into one large, inchoate threat against America. Having on several occasions signed bills that raised taxes (although he called them "user fees"), Reagan also showed the kind of fiscal pragmatism that is now all but extinct in the Republican party. Mr Romney and all except a handful of Republicans have signed Grover Norquist's pledge to oppose tax increases of any kind. With the fiscal cliff looming, the party's rigid stance all but guarantees another round of Russian roulette in the next few weeks that will risk another recession and credit rating downgrade. Mr Romney will not even consider agreeing to one dollar of tax increases for every 10 dollars of spending cuts. In the same vein, Reagan gave amnesty to three million illegal immigrants, while Mr Romney wants them to "self-deport." Reagan saved the US semiconductor industry by setting up a partnership with it to rebut unfair Japanese competition, while Mr Romney tarnishes any suggestion of a government role in boosting US competitiveness as "picking winners." And so on. And that is without getting into social policy. As governor, Reagan legalised abortion in California. Mr Romney believes it should be illegal in all cases except rape and incest. None of which means Mr Romney lacks the nous to be a competent president - I suspect he would be far more pragmatic in reality than the "severely conservative" persona he adopted for the primaries. That is a hunch, however. And this is no time to gamble. Which means that Mr Obama finds himself in the still odd situation of being the devil we know. It is not a role he plays very well - the angel we didn't know suited him so much better. But elections are about choice. And on foreign policy alone, there was not much of one to be made. Mr Obama is highly unlikely to risk starting real or currency wars. Mr Romney keeps promising to. The same applies to the economy: Mr Obama would phase in a sensible medium-term fiscal consolidation without doing anything to jeopardise the recovery. Mr Romney invents numbers and hopes no one will take him literally. This is not the place to repeat where Mr Obama went wrong in his first term. However, it is a good place to remind readers that the most important events of 2012 will not occur on November 6. America's fiscal reckoning starts on November 7. All kinds of outcome are possible. If he wins, Mr Obama will begin his second term with far lower expectations than his first. It would be like night and day. Perhaps he could turn that to his advantage.