All about Obama - It's obvious that the
liberals are
pretty upset about this debt deal and feel betrayed by Mr. Hope & Change. But they should have seen it coming. The Republicans gained power in 2010 thanks to independent voters and President Obama desperately needs them to swing back to his side for the 2012 election. Barack is betting that the ol' "
Yes We Can!" battle cry can whip up the left wing in a year but for now he
needs to win back independents if he has a prayer for a second term.
11 comments:
Quite the opposite, actually. Presidential election years don't play out like midterm election years. It's the GOP that needs the swing to occur, when everybody's voting.
Don't fall for those polls featuring Generic von No-Name vs. the bum who's in office, either. Bush was losing to Unknown Faceless Democrat in 2003, and Clinton was losing to Republican to Be Named Later in 1995.
That's true and you won't see me with the "Obama's toast" banner flying since anything can happen in 16 months.
However, nobody believes unemployment will be significantly below 9% by November 2012 and no President in the modern era has won re-election when unemployment was over 7.2%.
Obama's slogan of "I got Osama!" isn't going to cover up 1% growth rates.
Sitting Presidents who lost reelection bids in the modern era: Ford, Carter, Bush Sr.
That's the whole list. You might have a little "sample size" issue there.
Also, in those elections, the public wasn't blaming ex-Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan for causing the bad economy by a 2-to-1 margin. That skews the usefulness of the projection ever so slightly.
The tea party is pulling the GOP to such unpopular extremes that it's hard to imagine a presidential candidate emerging the primary melee with any potential for broad nationwide appeal. Unless the country decides they really want even more obstructionist, self-destructive, partisan grandstanding, Obama will be re-elected by default.
Did MSNBC tell you that?
Smaller government, less debt, more freedom.... Crazy extremes!
I know a few die hard statists who hate us - and a whole lot of normal people who are fed up.
Translation: If you're against hard right policies, you're abnormal!
Or as Pauline Kael supposedly said in 1972, "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don't know anybody who voted for him."
Here's what the official Republican Party website, GOP.com, predicts for the 2012 election.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/picture-of-the-day-gop-site-touts-jan-2017-as-obamas-last-day/242881/
Polling guy: Sometime before the midterm election "shellacking" I urged Obama and the Democrats to keep blaming the Republicans and especially Bush. "People love that!" I think I wrote.
Now even Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg is telling the Dems to cool it:
"Against this backdrop, Greenberg warns the Obama administration and Democrats that "the past is a trap." Political messages about who was more responsible for the financial crash or about the merits of the recovery effort, "tested dismally" in the survey."
But, as we know, blaming "someone else" is Obama's stock and trade.
Tons of non-partisan economic analysts assign the majority of blame for the fiscal hole to Bush's Iraq/tax cuts/free pills trifecta.
No non-partisan election analysts propose that the 2010 midterms were tilted by voters sending a message that it's time for those finger-pointing Dems to leave Dubya alone.
Polls continue to show that the American public isn't taking Stan Greenberg's advice.
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1295.xml?ReleaseID=1624
http://www.businessinsider.com/people-still-blame-bush-more-than-obama-for-the-economy-2011-6
No polls show the opposite. Any politician would be foolhardy to abandon an advantage that broad and persistent. Particularly a politician who has already carved his 50/50 persona in stone, and continues to profit off of it.
Stan Greenberg isn't just claiming the past is a trap because his sparkly new research suddenly told him so. He was one of the drivers behind the "let bygones be bygones" PR campaign for British Petroleum. He advised John Kerry to wait for the Swift Boat attacks go away. He advised Al Gore not to tout the Clinton-Gore economic boom. This is his big idea. It's an idea that always works, whenever it works. Greenberg would probably have told me not to reply to your post which, after all, is in the past.
Will Obama follow Ford, Carter and Bush 1, thereby increasing the paradigm by a third all by himself? Don't bet on it. He has one attribute those three Presidents didn't have: he's liked.
Obama also has a second piece of good fortune: there ain't nobody in 2012 who compares with New Carter, Reagan or Clinton. Intrade has it right.
"Tons of non-partisan economic analysts assign the majority of blame for the fiscal hole to Bush's Iraq/tax cuts/free pills trifecta."
I'm sure Americans will understand the important and principled distinction of Obama's Afghan surge/Libya, extending tax cuts/Obamacare trifecta.
Heaven help Obama if this election is a referendum on his non-governing (see Paul Ryan above). Therefore, there must be a weak GOP field the same way that Bush Sr. must have wondered "who has ever heard of this yokel governor from Arkansas?"
Perhaps your optimistic eye spots a rising superstar and formidable opponent in the 2012 GOP dung heap. Happy hunting.
Even when equating sunk costs to estimated future bills as you've done, the Bush fiscal case loses. Still, it’s a little jarring to see conservatives using tax cuts and war expenditures as pieces of the liberal spending spree. Truly the end of a rhetorical era.
To date, all of the examples you cite, combined, have contributed less to the current deficit than the prescription drug care bill had already added by the morning of Obama’s inauguration.
In four weeks’ time, the FAA shutdown will have cost the taxpayers more than the entirety of the Libya campaign.
Economists know better, and the public doesn't buy it. The distinction you scoff at has already been drawn. But if you want to keep selling this line, you’ll always find a credulous audience at Little Green Footballs.
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