Six Reasons Barack Obama is Still the Odds-on Favorite in 2012
Posted:
03/8/10


Less than six months after he took office, Barack Obama was labeled a "lame duck" president by a few overeager conservative commentators. Before his first year in the White House was up, some nervous liberals began pronouncing their hero more Jimmy Carter than J.F.K. Now, independents are apparently casting gimlet eyes at the president. In a recent Gallup Poll, Obama was losing by 14 points among these swing voters in a 2012 matchup to something called the "generic Republican."
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"The real bad news for the White House in the poll is the continued souring of independents on Obama," wrote Mark Hemingway in The Examiner. "It would be very hard to win re-election if that trend continues." True enough, but why should it continue? History is instructive, it is never static, and to those who believe President Obama will be easy pickings when he runs for re-election, I'd just say, "Wanna bet?"

So with no disrespect intended toward Mark Hemingway, or even Jimmy Carter, that human punching bag of ex-presidents, here are six reasons why the person who occupies the White House on Jan. 21, 2013 is most likely to be ... the man who occupies it now.

Reason 1: There is no such beast as a "generic Republican." To be sure, there will be a GOP presidential nominee, and that person will have a name, a history, a sex, a voting record, and -- unless the Second Coming takes place between now and the GOP convention in the summer of 2012 -- at least some of the normal human frailties. (No, Mitt Romney, despite never having a hair out of place you are not perfect!) In other words, the next Republican nominee will come before the electorate carrying baggage of his own -- or her own – whether that candidate hails from Wasilla, Alaska, or anywhere else in this big wonderful nation of ours.

In the summer of 2005, as he planned his own presidential run, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana told me he knew Hillary Rodham Clinton was a formidable front-runner and that going into New Hampshire against six or seven other Democratic candidates, most of them senators, she was likely to win. After that, the field would winnow rapidly, Bayh believed, until only one other strong contender remained. "Then it will be a binary election," he said, adding that Clinton could certainly lose a two-person race. This is indeed what happened, although it turned out to be a candidate not even on the scene at that early stage, Barack Obama, who pulled it off.

The point here is that in a "binary" general election campaign, voters won't be choosing between Obama and any idealized view of a "generic" Republican. This is important to keep in mind because we are in a politically polarized period in our nation's history. This doesn't mean that nastiness reigns in our political discourse – although polarization tends to lead to incivility -- it means that Democrats must hew to the views of their party's liberal base, as much as Republicans must pass various conservative purity tests. Thus, by the time the Republicans have chosen their standard-bearer, that candidate will almost certainly have staked out policy positions well to the right of the country as a whole. The upshot is that generic Republican numbers in 2010 are higher among independent or moderate voters than a real Republican's would likely be after surviving the cauldron of the primary season.

This is not sheer speculation on my part. That same Gallup Poll on the generic Republican issue put an open-ended question to respondents asking them to name "the leader" of the Republican Party. Officially (and unofficially) there is no designated leader, and this poll bore it out: Mitt Romney came in first at 14 percent; Sarah Palin was second with 11 percent. But neither Romney nor Palin defeat Obama in a mock 2012 matchup -- at least not so far.

Reason 2: It might not be a "binary" election, anyhow. Taking nothing away from the two winning presidential campaigns Bill Clinton ran in 1992 and 1996, each time it was a three-man race -- with Ross Perot being the third wheel. Clinton was clearly chagrined that Perot kept him from winning 50 percent of the vote in '96, but some of his top aides were more philosophical about it: They realized that Perot may have given Clinton the presidency in the first place. In 1992, Ross Perot siphoned 19.5 percent of the popular vote away from the two major candidates. That "giant sucking sound" Perot loved to talk about? That was not the sound of jobs going to Mexico. It was the sound of the twangy Texan vacuuming up disaffected Americans who likely would have shuffled into the voting booth, held their noses, and voted for George H.W. Bush.

Which histrionic populist could play a similar role in 2012? It's hard from watching his television performances to know exactly what Glenn Beck is thinking half the time, but "Glenn Beck for President" stickers were all the rage at this year's CPAC meeting in Washington, and there's a Facebook page and even a petition of those who'd like to see the Fox showman enter the fray. Likewise, there's a "Draft Lou Dobbs" movement that exists –- at least online -– seeking to transfer anger over immigration into a third party candidacy. These men cannot be elected, but they can run if they want to. And it ain't rocket science figuring out which political party would be hurt most in 2012 by a Glenn Beck or Lou Dobbs (or any Beck-Dobbs imitators) candidacy.

Reason 3: He's already got the job. Incumbency is supposed to be a disadvantage in the current political environment, but that perception is worth a closer look. It's certainly true that people have a low opinion of Congress. A recent Gallup Poll put the percentage of Americans who approve of the job Congress is doing at 18 percent, the lowest figure in a year. A number of governors have seen the bottom fall out of their polling numbers, too. So yes, anti-incumbency is potent right now. But so is the bully pulpit. At this point in his presidency Ronald Reagan's job approval rating was in the mid-40s, lower than Obama's is now. In the 1982 midterm elections, Reagan's party lost 26 seats in the House. Two years later, Reagan carried 49 states while winning 58.5 percent of the popular vote in his re-election bid.

"In a midterm election, it's possible to get really far by just saying 'no,'" astute political observer Bill Schneider said at a breakfast meeting with political reporters last week. "In a presidential year, you have to present a real alternative."

In 1994 when I was covering the White House for the Baltimore Sun, I spent the week of the midterm elections vacationing in Arizona. It turned out I missed a pretty big political story -- the first GOP takeover of Congress in 40 years, to be precise -- and when on my return our congressional correspondent told me breezily, "While you were gone, your beat disappeared." I accepted the needle, but remember my private reaction, "I don't think the White House disappears."

As it happened, Bill Clinton had some of those same feelings: "The president is still relevant here," he said somewhat defensively in a news conference the following April. Clinton was right, even if he was mostly bucking himself up. The president appoints judges, vetoes bad legislation (and sometimes legislation that isn't so bad), manages the executive branch, and serves as the commander-in-chief. He also is the person this nation turns to when tragedy strikes. They can rise to the occasion, or not. For Reagan it was the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. In Clinton's case it was the Oklahoma City bombing.

"We needed a president," former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry recalled later. "That was a kind of a moment that turned around his presidency."

So, yes, presidents are relevant, and the past century or so has shown us that they are more than twice as likely to be re-elected (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush) than rejected after one term (Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush). Occasionally they are deemed a failure and the public tunes them out. That usually happens in the second term, not the first, and it has not yet happened to Barack Obama, who demonstrated as recently as the Feb. 25 health care summit that he can command any room of his fellow politicians, no matter how big the egos and ambitions around him.

Reason 4: The midterm elections can be cathartic. It's clear that Democrats in Congress are dragging Obama down a bit --- and that they are also paying a price for some of the disillusionment with the president. It's a mutually reinforcing problem like the drowning guy who grabs the lifeguard around the neck pulling them both toward the bottom of the lake. But nature often has a solution for this problem: There's a possibility that Obama won't have Nancy Pelosi to carry on his back after November.

If that turnaround occurred --- if the House (or the Senate) goes Republican in this year's midterms -- the Republicans would smell blood in the water. They would do well to make sure it isn't their own before letting the sharks loose. In 1954, Republicans lost both houses of Congress even though their party standard-bearer was in the White House. As it happened, this didn't do much to derail Dwight Eisenhower. It turned out that Ike could do just fine negotiating with fellow native Texans Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, and he was re-elected easily in 1956. Likewise, that GOP takeover in 1994-95 actually enhanced Clinton's political prospects: He was always best in full-throated campaign mode, and he outfoxed then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and the other GOP leaders on issues ranging from the budget to impeachment.

Reason 5: Youth will be served. For four decades, it was the Democrats' recurring fantasy that young voters would buck their elders and put a hip liberal in the White House. Lowering the voting age to 18 gave George McGovern and his campaign brass visions of riding a tide of youthful disaffection into the White House. This hope proved to be delusional. Turns out young people voted like old people -- only less frequently. To the consternation of liberals, when a generational gap finally did emerge it helped Ronald Reagan, the oldest and most conservative candidate in memory. Young voters recoiled from the Carter malaise and embraced Reagan's aspirational appeal.

But that has all changed --- and Obama is the beneficiary. The trend began in 2004. Remember the old line about not trusting anyone over 30? If the only people who could vote in 2004 had been the 18-29 crowd, John Kerry might be president: He carried the Millennial Generation by some 9 points, the only demographic group the Democrats won. In 2008, this trend became a tsunami of support. It evidenced itself in the primaries, when young people probably made the difference for Obama -- and it crested in November when the Democratic ticket of Barack Obama and Joe Biden defeated the GOP tandem of John McCain and Sarah Palin by a stunning 2-1 margin.

Much was made last month when a study by the Pew Research Center showed that the Democrats' support among Millennials had shrunk from a 32-point advantage to 14. Their love affair with Obama has tempered some, too. Pew's study, one of the most ambitious ever done of the so-called "We Generation," shows approval for Obama's job performance declined from 73 percent to 57 percent in just a year. It's not a great trend, for sure, but that's still solid support -- and it seems poised to rebound if conditions in the country improve. Young Americans still like Obama better than anyone else. Also, they are an uncommonly optimistic crowd: Although unemployment has hit the young disproportionately, they have a sunny view of their own futures.

The most immediate beneficiary of that positive outlook may be Barack Obama -- three years from now. Another in-depth survey of under-30s that will be released Tuesday by Harvard's Institute of Politics also found general slippage in support for Obama, and dissatisfaction about the president's job performance on the economy and health care. But, like the Pew poll, the IOP survey finds a residual reservoir of support for the president that ought to concern Republicans. "Among the Millennials who told us that they volunteered on behalf of the Obama campaign in 2008, 85 percent said they'd be likely to engage in similar activities in 2012," John Della Volpe, IOP's director of polling told me this weekend.

Reason 6: Bad news is driving the public dissatisfaction. This president inherited two wars and an abysmal economy. For a while, the public didn't blame him: But Iraq seems to have settled into a slog where progress is elusive -- and Obama's delay in forging a new Afghanistan strategy didn't help him either. Moreover, economic conditions worsened markedly during his first year in office while the president seemed obsessed with health care. But, again, nothing stays the same forever. Health care reform legislation will either pass or it won't, and either way Obama will likely be better off on this issue than he is now. If it passes, by 2012 the public is likely to have learned to live with it -- and may discover it actually likes elements of the new law. If it is not enacted, the failure is no more likely to be the campaign's driving narrative than it was in 1996, two years after the Clinton plan went nowhere.

As for the economy: If it goes up, so inevitably will the president's popularity. Like Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama is presiding over a deep recession in his first two years in office. Reagan famously vowed to "stay the course," which served him well when the economy came roaring back in late 1983 and 1984. Obama's critics have noted dryly that Obama has pointedly not told Americans he'd stay the course, perhaps because it's not clear what that course would be. Nor did Obama achieve the kind of legislative success in his first year in office that Reagan did. Still, the president of the United States retains the microphone even in times of trouble -- perhaps especially in times of trouble -- and if the chief executive keeps cool, makes sound decisions, and things actually get better, so do the president's own political prospects.

History offers no guarantees, of course. Most prominent economists seem confident that economic conditions will be much better in 2012. If that's true, Obama should be in good shape. If not, well, then this is no longer the Great Recession. It's the second Great Depression, and Obama won't be Reagan or Clinton -- or even Jimmy Carter. He'll be Herbert Hoover, and we'll all be in the soup (or soup kitchens) and Barack Obama's re-election chances will be the least of our worries.


http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/08/hold-for-mon-a-m-six-reasons-why-barack-obama-still-favorite/

Well, it is a little hope for those of us who are true patriots of this country and want what is best for our children and our children's children.

And now for something from the 'other side of the pond' ... this liberal/Leftist rag was a former champion of 'The ONE' Who Can Do No Wrong ... no longer ... the scales, finally, have fallen from their eyes - but don't count on reading this kind of story in the State-controlled 'media' here ...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/7396358/The-end-of-the-road-for-Barack-Obama.html

The end of the road for Barack Obama?

Barack Obama seems unable to face up to America's problems, writes Simon Heffer in New York.

By Simon Heffer
Published: 8:16AM GMT 08 Mar 2010

It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama's regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.

Despite the efforts of some sections of opinion to talk the place up, America is mired in unhappiness, all the worse for the height from which Obamania has fallen. The economy remains troublesome. There is growth – a good last quarter suggested an annual rate of as high as six per cent, but that figure is probably not reliable – and the latest unemployment figures, last Friday, showed a levelling off. Yet 15 million Americans, or 9.7 per cent of the workforce, have no job. Many millions more are reduced to working part-time.

Whole areas of the country, notably in the north and on the eastern seaboard, are industrial wastelands. The once mighty motor city of Detroit appears slowly to be being abandoned, becoming a Jurassic Park of the mid-20th century; unemployment among black people in Mr Obama's own city of Chicago is estimated at between 20 and 25 per cent. One senior black politician – a Democrat and a supporter of the President – told me of the wrath in his community that a black president appeared to be unable to solve the economic problem among his own people. Cities in the east such as Newark and Baltimore now have drug-dealing as their principal commercial activity: The Wire is only just fictional.

Last Thursday the House of Representatives passed a jobs Bill, costing $15 billion, which would give tax breaks to firms hiring new staff and, through state sponsorship of construction projects, create thousands of jobs too. The Senate is trying to approve a Bill that would provide a further $150 billion of tax incentives to employers. Yet there is a sense of desperation in the Administration, a sense that nothing can be as efficacious at the moment as a sticking plaster. Edward B Montgomery, deputy labour secretary in the Clinton administration, now spends his time on day trips to decaying towns that used to have a car industry, not so much advising them on how to do something else as facilitating those communities' access to federal funds. For a land without a welfare state, America starts to do an effective impersonation of a country with one. This massive state spending gives rise to accusations by Republicans, and people too angry even to be Republicans, that America is now controlled by "Leftists" and being turned into a socialist state.

"Obama's big problem," a senior Democrat told me, "is that four times as many people watch Fox News as watch CNN." The Fox network is a remarkable cultural phenomenon which almost shocks those of us from a country where a technical rule of impartiality is applied in the broadcast media. With little rest, it pours out rage 24 hours a day: its message is of the construction of the socialist state, the hijacking of America by "progressives" who now dominate institutions, the indoctrination of children, the undermining of religion and the expropriation of public money for these nefarious projects. The public loves it, and it is manifestly stirring up political activism against Mr Obama, and also against those in the Republican Party who are not deemed conservatives. However, it is arguable whether the now-reorganising Right is half as effective in its assault on the President as some of Mr Obama's own party are.

Mr Obama benefited in his campaign from an idiotic level of idolatry, in which most of the media participated with an astonishing suspension of cynicism. The sound of the squealing of brakes is now audible all over the American press; but the attack is being directed not at the leader himself, but at those around him. There was much unconditional love a year or so ago of Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama's Chief of Staff; oleaginous profiles of this Chicago political hack, a veteran of that unlovely team that polluted the Clinton White House, appeared in otherwise respectable journals, praising the combination of his religious devotion, his family-man image, his ruthless operating technique and his command of the vocabulary of profanity. Now, supporters of the President are blaming Mr Emanuel for the failure of the Obama project, not least for his inability to construct a deal on health care.

This went down badly with friends of Mr Emanuel, notably with Mr Emanuel himself. His partisans, apparently taking dictation from him, have filled newspaper columns and blogs with uplifting accounts of the Wonder of Rahm: as one of them put it, "Emanuel is the only person preventing Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter". They attack other Obama "sycophants", such as David Axelrod, his campaign guru, and Valerie Jarret, a long-time friend of Mrs Obama and a fixer from the office of Mayor Daley of Chicago who now manages – or tries to manage – the President's image.

These "sycophants" have, they argue, tried to keep the President above politics, letting Congress run away with the agenda, and gainsaying Mr Emanuel's advice to Mr Obama to get tough with his internal opponents. This naïve act of manipulation has brought its own counter-counterattack, with an anti-Emanuel pundit drawing a comparison with our own Prime Minister and ridiculing the idea that Mr Obama should start bullying people too.

The root of the problem seems to be the management of expectations. The magnificent campaign created the notion that Mr Obama could walk on water. Oddly enough, he can't. That was more Mr Axelrod's fault than Mr Emanuel's. And, to be fair to Mr Emanuel, any advice he has been giving the President to impose his will on Congress is probably well founded. The $783 billion stimulus package of a year ago was used to further the re-election prospects of many congressmen, not to do good for the country.

America's politics remain corrupt, populated by nonentities whose main concern once elected is to stay elected; it seems to be the same the whole world over. Even this self-interested use of the stimulus package appears to have failed, however. Every day, it seems, another Democrat congressman announces that he will not be fighting the mid-term elections scheduled for November 2. The health care Bill, apparently so humane in intent, is being "scrubbed" (to use the terminology of one Republican) by its opponents, to the joy of millions of middle Americans who see it as a means to waste more public money and entrench socialism. For the moment, this is a country vibrant with anger.

A thrashing of the Democrats in the mid-terms would not necessarily be the beginning of the end for Mr Obama: Bill Clinton was re-elected two years after the Republicans swept the House and the Senate in November 1994. But Mr Clinton was an operator in a way Mr Obama patently is not. His lack of experience, his dependence on rhetoric rather than action, his disconnection from the lives of many millions of Americans all handicap him heavily. It is not about whose advice he is taking: it is about him grasping what is wrong with America, and finding the will to put it right. That wasted first year, however, is another boulder hanging from his neck: what is wrong needs time to put right. The country's multi-trillion dollar debt is barely being addressed; and a country engaged in costly foreign wars has a President who seems obsessed with anything but foreign policy – as a disregarded Britain is beginning to realise.

There are lessons from the stumbling of Mr Obama for our own country as we approach a general election. Vacuous promises of change are hostages to fortune if they cannot be delivered upon to improve the living conditions of a people. The slickness of campaigning that comes from a combination of heavy funding and public relations expertise does not inevitably translate into an ability to govern. There is no point a nation's having the audacity of hope unless it also has the sophistication and the will to turn it into action. As things stand, Barack Obama and America under his leadership do not.

it does seem that he is having a hard time accepting even a small defeat . I hope he doesn't pick up his marbles and go home , I was just getting to like him .

Do you know that Obama caught more important alqeada terrorists than Bush did in his whole 8 years?

Do you know that Obama stopped us from going into depression so far?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/29/obamas-first-100-days-10_n_192603.html

1. Health Care: The Obama White House cleared an important hurdle in the health care reform debate when it appropriated $19 billion in the stimulus package to help implement an electronic medical record system. The money is paltry compared to the hundreds of billions set aside for an overhaul of the health care system in the budget. But officials inside and out of the White House say its significance is hard to overstate.

"We need to have health IT so we have a better idea both of what works but also... so people can share information," Zeke Emanuel, Obama's health care adviser told the Huffington Post in mid-March. "We are on our way in a way that we have never committed ourselves before."

2. Communications: A presidential campaign built on innovative messaging and advanced technology has, naturally, become a White House defined by similar characteristics. As such, the reach of the administration's new media efforts - from hosting online question-and-answer sessions with the president to publishing the first White House blog - has been as expected as appreciated. It's unfortunate, said one tech savvy Democrat, because the new policies have had tangible impacts. "The White House streams every event with the president on its website, even press events," he said. "It's remarkable because, this Sunday they held a swine flu press conference that ordinary people [including many who may have been personally nervous about the topic] were able to watch online... Before you had to wait for a readout or hope that CSPAN would cover it. This is one of those things that people don't quite understand the significance of."

3. Transportation: Since the passage of the economic stimulus package in mid-February, the Obama Department of Transportation has approved 2,500 highway projects. The movement of stimulus money out the door has been as swift as it has been effective: $9.3 billion has been spent in all 50 states. Touting its impact, DOT officials say 260,000 jobs are expected from this investment. And with competition for contracts fierce, the department is set to approve even more projects than previously envisioned. "There will be more money for additional transportation projects," said the official.

4. Education: Maligned for its handling of the financial and banking crises, the Obama Treasury Department has nevertheless implemented policies with real qualitative and quantitative impact on debt-burdened families. Chief among those was a $2,500 tax credit to help offset the cost of tuition (among other expenses) for those seeking a college education. Nearly five million families are expected to save $9 billion, according to Treasury officials.
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5. Cars: The automobile industry at the White House and Congress's behest has undergone seismic structural changes, managerial reorganization, and massive cuts in employment. But for all the tough love, the president has put in place the framework for an industry recovery. Perhaps the most significant of steps was to allocate $2 billion in stimulus cash for advanced batteries systems. One high-ranking Hill aide called battery technology "the next big frontier" in the automotive world, adding that if the U.S. could dominate this market it would reclaim its perch as the world's premier car manufacturer.

6. Pakistan: Cognizant of a destabilizing situation in Pakistan, the administration's diplomatic team, with a major assist from Japan, secured $5 billion in aid commitments "to bolster the country's economy and help it fight terror and Islamic radicalism" within the country. The money, as Pakistan observers -- notably Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry - note, will prove instrumental in bringing the nation away from the brink of failure and increased Taliban control.

7. Cities: More than any prior president, Obama has put a spotlight on America's struggling cities, even creating an office of Urban Policy in the White House. It is the Justice Department, however, that lays claim to one of the most consequential of urban affairs achievements. Through the Recovery Act, DOJ secured $2 billion for Byrne Grants, which funds anti-gang and anti-gun task forces. The money, cut during the Bush years, is expected to have massive ramifications on inner-city crime and violence.

8. Engaging the Muslim World: While certainly discussed, foreign affairs experts insist that Obama's engagement with the Muslim world has been at once remarkable and under-appreciated. From the first interview with Al Arabiya to his Nowruz address to the Iranian people, to his proclamation that "American is not at war with Islam" during an appearance in Turkey, seasoned observers have been routinely impressed. "Through these [statements and interviews]," said one Democratic foreign policy hand, "He has been able to dramatically change America's image in that region."

9. Forests: Since taking office, the White House has put under federal protection more than two million acres of wilderness, thousands of miles of river and a host of national trails and parks. The conservation effort - the largest in the last 15 years - came with the stroke of a pen when Obama signed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 in late March.

10. Tone: Leaving a meeting at the White House on Tuesday a progressive member of the House of Representatives commented to the Huffington Post just how impressed she was with the president's manner. "He is so calm," said the member, "and has a great ability to make you feel like you're being respected and listened to."

Obama's non-braggart policy allows all this misinformation to be believed as true when it isn't.

His first year was by no means a failure by any means.

'Non-braggart policy' ... ? Oh please. SURELY you jest. If he can't talk about himself and his plans to destroy the country that was gulled into electing him to its highest office, he's at a loss for words. As the malignant narcissist he is, he is the quintessential braggart because nothing matters except HIM. Want an easy amusement? Listen to any of his speeches - I prefer calling them 'diatribes' ... count the number of times he uses the personal pronouns 'I', 'me', 'my', 'mine' ... he's not into words like 'we', 'us', 'ours' ... they're not about him. If you don't consider his first year a failure, I shudder to consider what your definition of 'success' must be ...