Detailed Instructions: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Q: By Ed Kilgore 
  
 In a Bloomberg column, Ramesh Ponnuru makes an argument for Mitt Romney’s election that you are going to hear a lot more of soon: it’s the only way that partisan gridlock in Washington can be broken. The basic theory is that Republicans will not change from their current savage ideological course (which will actually get more savage if they lose this election they think themselves destined to win) and are very unlikely to lose enough congressional support to reduce their veto power over legislation. So if you want something new to happen, a President Romney and a Republican-controlled House and Senate (presumably using reconciliation to do whatever they want without Democratic support) are the only ticket. 
  
 Here’s Ponnuru’s response to those (including the President) who have suggested an Obama victory will humble Republicans: 
  
 Republicans famously failed to react to their drubbing in 2008 — after which, let’s recall, Time magazine was running cover stories on their impending extinction — by softening their line on anything. Why would they react that way after an election that goes better for them? Especially when they will be looking forward to the gains that the party out of the White House typically makes in midterm elections. 
  
 Not to mention the nomination of a real conservative, not some flip-flopping wimp like Romney, in 2016, eh? 
  
 So as a cap to four years of political hostage-taking, a final general election pitch from Republicans this year is to hold the next four years hostage as well: give us total power to begin implementing our agenda and start dismantling this silly, expensive New Deal/Great Society system and this European-style progressive tax code, or nothing at all happens. We’ll get our way eventually, so why not get started now? 
  
 This will be a seductive argument for certain elements of the “centrist” MSM commentariat. There’s a big piece up at Politico this very morning about how disillusioned political reporters are about the viciousness and pointlessness of this election cycle. When will the gridlock end, they implicitly ask, and the wondrous Washington romance of movers and shakers moving and shaking return? Before long, we’ll hear ostensibly “neutral” voices making the case for one-party government—Republican one-party government, as it happens—as an oasis of clarity and productive activity after all the nasty divisiveness we’ve experienced. For the history-minded, it may even start sounding a bit like the famous fatigue of the European elites about the weakness and pettiness of parliamentary democracy during the 1920s. 
  
 For the record, there’s at least one area of highly significant, powerful activity that will occur automatically if Barack Obama is re-elected, even if Republicans make congressional gains and convince themselves to go even crazier: the Affordable Care Act will be implemented, and 30 million or so Americans without health insurance will be covered, making the big step back towards “individual responsibility” for health care conservatives crave that much less likely. If everything the Wall Street folk like to tell us is true, the resolution the election will bring will also have a beneficial effect on markets. Even if there is no perceived “mandate,” the President’s hand will be greatly strengthened in the negotiations over how to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff.” And whatever they say, conservatives will have to accept that the Great Counter-Revolution they saw on the near horizon after 2010, which they’ve been pursuing since 1964, has receded into the distance once again. 
  
 But while that may be the reality, beware the hand-wringing talk down the home stretch of the Awful Specter of Still More Gridlock if Obama wins. It’s not really true, and in any event, there are worse things than gridlock so long as one of the two major parties will accept nothing short of total power. ||||| Ben Feller of the Associated Press asked President Barack Obama a good question recently. If Obama wins re-election, Feller said, Republicans are still likely to have a majority in the House. “How is that any different from what we have now? Why wouldn’t a voter look at that and say that’s a recipe for stalemate? How would you do anything differently?” 
  
 Obama responded, “Well, there are a couple things that I think would change. No. 1, the American people will have voted. They will have cast a decisive view on how we should move the country forward, and I would hope that the Republican Party, after a fulsome debate, would say to itself, we need to listen to the American people.” 
  
 In another recent interview, Obama likened the Republican opposition to him to a “blister” that will be “popped” by the election (an image for which I will not soon forgive him). 
  
 If the president believes anything like this would happen in his second term, he is kidding himself. If Obama wins re-election, the Republican Party will react by moving right, not left. It will become less likely to compromise with Obama, not more. 
  
 If Obama wins, he will almost certainly win with a smaller majority of the vote than he got in 2008, in defiance of the usual trend: Incumbents who win re-election usually do better the second time around. Republicans will almost certainly add to their ranks in the Senate, and may take a majority. No way would they see this set of election results as a “decisive” statement of support for Obama’s views. 
  
 No Mandate 
  
 The kind of campaign Obama is running militates against his credibly claiming a mandate after getting re- elected. He is, for the most part, banking on getting reelected by tearing down Romney rather than attracting voters with his own second-term agenda. Sure, an Obama victory would reasonably be interpreted as a sign that the public isn’t wild about restructuring Medicare the way Republicans want. But Republicans wouldn’t make any serious effort to act on that idea without an ally in the White House anyway. Obama will have fulfilled most of his mandate -- not to “end Medicare as we know it,” not to let a job- outsourcer become president -- the minute he wins. He won’t get extra leverage on live legislative issues before the Congress, because his campaign isn’t even asking the public for it. 
  
 Republicans, especially at the grassroots level, would react to Obama’s re-election by assuming that Romney failed because he was too moderate. That’s a very widespread view among Republicans about why Senator John McCain lost in 2008. During the primaries, many of Romney’s opponents argued that he would lose because he would fail to energize conservatives. This interpretation of 2008 is probably wrong, and it will probably be the wrong explanation for a Romney defeat, if it happens. It will nonetheless be an appealing theory for conservatives. 
  
 In the same AP interview, Obama suggested that Republicans would feel pressure “to cooperate on a balanced package” on the budget: that is, one with tax increases. Republicans famously failed to react to their drubbing in 2008 -- after which, let’s recall, Time magazine was running cover stories on their impending extinction -- by softening their line on anything. Why would they react that way after an election that goes better for them? Especially when they will be looking forward to the gains that the party out of the White House typically makes in midterm elections. 
  
 More Gridlock 
  
 The Republicans aren’t going to change. Judging from the interview, neither will the president. He said that after the election he would tell Republicans “you no longer need to be focused on trying to beat me; what you need to be focused on and what you should have been focused on from the start is how do we advance the American economy.” He would reiterate that he has always been open to compromise. And he would “look at how we can work around Congress,” if needed. 
  
 In other words, after winning he will lecture Republicans about how their positions are insincere and adopted purely for political reasons; he will insist that his existing positions are already a compromise with them; and he will try to govern unilaterally. These tactics seem unlikely to produce the desired results. Obama has, after all, adopted all of them, and they haven’t worked. 
  
 If the public renders a split verdict -- returning Obama to the presidency and giving Republicans more power in Congress -- both parties will insist that it’s the other that needs to “listen to the American people.” The choice before those people is looking more and more like one between Romney and a unified Republican government, or Obama and four more years that look a lot like the last two. 
  
 (Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior editor at National Review. The opinions expressed are his own.) 
  
 Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View. Subscribe to receive a daily e-mail highlighting new View editorials, columns and op-ed articles. 
  
 Today’s highlights: the editors on the Democrats’ hard task and on addressing West Nile virus and dengue fever in the U.S.; Jeffrey Goldberg on confronting potential genocides; William Pesek on this weekend’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference; Cass R. Sunstein on how voters can escape from their political cocoons; John H. Cochrane on Keynesian assumptions at the Congressional Budget Office. 
  
 To contact the writer of this article: Ramesh Ponnuru at rponnuru@bloomberg.net 
  
 To contact the editor responsible for this article: Timothy Lavin at tlavin1@bloomberg.net |||||
A:
If you're tired of the last few years of DC gridlock, brace for more if President Obama wins re-election, writes Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg. Republicans probably will still control Congress, and they're bound to react to a Romney loss by shifting more to the right, argues Ponnuru. Neither side will be able to claim a mandate, meaning that the real choice for voters in November is "one between Romney and a unified Republican government, or Obama and four more years that look a lot like the last two." Expect to hear this argument a lot in the coming months, writes Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly, who dismisses it as more GOP "political hostage-taking." It boils down to Republicans saying, "Give us total power to begin implementing our agenda and start dismantling this silly, expensive New Deal/Great Society system and this European-style progressive tax code, or nothing at all happens." Remember, though, that at least one big thing will happen if Obama wins: His health care reform will survive. Besides, gridlock is OK if "one of the two major parties will accept nothing short of total power." Read Kilgore's full column here, and Ponnuru's here.