Poll-arama: Blow Out Ahead

All right, we know not to read too much into polls this early. We also understand that polls get kind of fuzzy when translated into votes. And we know that electoral college votes are more important than the popular vote, and the electorate is largely fixed. Still, when you start to see so much data going in one direction, you begin to wonder. Things don’t look good for Obama.

● Yeah, They Built That: Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line continues to resonate with voters. We know this because people keep talking about it everywhere. Pollsters are even asking the public about it, which means it’s entered “the mainstream consciousness.” And guess what? The public isn’t on Obama’s side. According to Rasmussen:

● 77% believe small business owners work harder that other workers. Only 2% disagree.

● 57% believe that entrepreneurs do more to create jobs and economic growth than big business or government.

● 61% believe small business provides more valuable services to local communities than big business or government.

● And Gallup found there appears to be a fundamental shift in the public’s view of government as 61% now say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and private business.

This is all really bad for Obama, whose campaign strategy is to attack business as a mere outgrowth of government. The public ain’t buying it.

● It’s Not Bush’s Fault After All: Nor are they buying Obama's attempt to avoid blame. Riddle me this: who said in 2009, “Look, if I can’t turn the economy around in three years, I will be looking at a one-term proposition”? Here’s a hint: he’s spent the last three years trying to blame all his failures on George W. Bush. Well, according to a new poll taken for The Hill, that excuse has worn thin. The Hill found that 66% of respondents blame the slow economic recovery and total lack of jobs on bad government policy. Of those people, 34% lay the blame on Obama. Only 18% continue to blame Bush. Moreover, 53% of voters say Obama took the wrong actions and caused the economy to slow. None of this is good news for Obama.

What could be upsetting people? How about this. Who said in 2003 that George Bush needed to “fix up the economy” before he did anything else? Here’s a hint, it’s the same guy who decried Bush’s $300 billion deficit as “underscor[ing] the recklessness of the George W. Bush administration and the Republican Congress.” And it’s the same man who has now given us five straight years of budgets with trillion dollar deficits. If $300 billion was reckless, what does that make a trillion five times over?

● We’ll Take the Mormon over the Moron!: All of this is adding up fast. USA Today/Gallup asked people who they trust more when it comes to managing the economy, reducing the federal budget deficit and creating jobs. Despite all the time and effort Obama has poured into his Bain Capital attacks, Romney wins this in a blowout: 63% to 29%. And it gets worse. Despite all the attacks Obama has made, including record spending on negative ads, Romney’s popularity has gone up from 53% to 54%, and the number of people who say they share Romney’s views has gone up from 42% to 45%.

But even more importantly, 18% of Republican and Republican leaning voters report being more enthusiastic about voting than normal. This compares to only 4% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners who report the same. That’s an enthusiasm gap of 14%!! Enthusiasm will be key this year because the evidence suggests that less than 10% of voters are actually swing voters. These numbers suggest a blow out in the works.

● A Cold Day In Minnesota: Finally, we have this amazing bit of new. Mitt Romney is within striking distance of winning Minnesota. Yeah, Minnesota. Obama leads 46% to 40%, but the key here is that Obama can’t get to 50% and his 6% lead is half of what it’s been in the past. If Minnesota is in play, then Obama might as well quit right now. The last Republican to win Minnesota was Richard Nixon. Even Ronald Reagan never carried that bastion of idiotic liberalism.

How do you say “blow out” in Minnesotan, eh?


P.S. Don't forget, it's Star Trek Tuesday at the film site.

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Obama Hates Us, This We Know

Back in November, the Obama election machine was brimming with love, peace, brotherhood and fair reason, promising us a government that was both transparent and nonpartisan. Kumbaya! We're all going to join hands and skip into the Promised Land. Those who did not vote for him would be welcome at the table, and a new era of fraternity would begin. To paraphrase Dinah Washington, "what a difference a year makes."

The Obamassiah has turned out to be the most thin-skinned, doctrinaire, suppressor of dissent and disagrement since the paranoid Richard Nixon prepared his enemies list. Now I've been around a very long time in the political arena, and I know that politics ain't beanbag. Any man (or woman) with the ego to run for president is not going to be your average choirboy. It's tough, it's mean, and you're going to step on toes and have your own toes stepped on. So if a president develops an animosity towards those who have treated him unfairly, or at least who he thinks have treated him unfairly, it's understandable. Any president who pretends to love everyone is a liar, and is planning on finding a way to stick the knife in if the opportunity presents itself.

Truman publicly denounced anyone who didn't think his daughter was the greatest opera diva of all time. Eisenhower was a vocal foe of the military-industrial complex. JFK had an ongoing grudge against the Washington Post. LBJ was a notorious slapper-downer of those who got in his way. Carter could be very nasty toward those who didn't take his piety seriously enough. Reagan was extremely affable, but he was not above the use of "there he goes again" when confronted with an opponent who spouted left wing nonsense. Clinton had an ongoing donnybrook with The American Spectator and anyone else who accused him of serial womanizing. Bush II was not above insulting or temporarily banishing news reporters whom he considered to be falsely undermining his war efforts.

But Obama and Nixon are the only ones in my memory where the dislike translated into the concept of "enemies." The enemies are out to get them, professionally, politically and personally. And Obama seems to go even one step farther. His lock on the mainstream media is almost perfection, but there are still a few enemies who just won't go away, and they need to be gotten rid of by any means necessary. So Fox News Channel has been marginalized as an enemy, and not even a legitimate news organization. Rush Limbaugh is an enemy who speaks in no uncertain terms of hoping Obama fails (meaning he hopes his policies fail). News radio is an enemy which must be destroyed by curing it with a "fairness" doctrine and back door maneuvering to kill the free speech of those who oppose the president.

Obama has "community organizations" working hard to silence the nay-sayers, threatens lawsuits and even criminal prosecutions against those who disagree with his politics, and has even gone so far as to set up a national e-mail snitch list to get citizens to rat on each other in order to ferret out the enemies who would bear false witness.

All those other presidents knew that it was all politics, and that if someone got personal about it, they'd hit back personally whenever possible. But they never saw an opponent as an enemy of both the president and the state. And they never spent so much valuable time and presidential currency on trying to deligitimize the enemies they imagined in their paranoid heads. Only Nixon and Obama have made this so personal, so vicious, and so dishonest. They both exhibit an absolute lack of comprehension of the concept of a "loyal opposition."

The problem has become so acute that Senator Lamar Alexander, a very gentle sort of moderate/conservative Republican actually addressed the issue on the Senate floor. He urged Obama to lay off on the assaults on those who disagree with the White House. Alexander pleaded with the president to quit squandering every opportunity to "work together on the truly presidential issues--creating jobs, reducing health care costs, reducing the debt, creating clean energy." And then he dropped the comparison bomb: "I have an uneasy feeling only ten months into this new administration that we are beginning to see the symptoms of this same kind of animus displayed by Nixon developing in the Obama administration."

As Gary Andres at The Weekly Standard has said: "After ten months in office, a clear pattern has emerged. Instead of hope and change, it's blame and attack. Obama rarely gives a speech about a pressing national problem without blaming George W. Bush. For many Americans, it's getting old. It makes the president look small and petty. Does he want America's respect or its pity?"

Nixon developed his paranoid style during the McCarthy era, taking a real issue of communists in government and using it to tar his political rivals as enemies. He won his Senate Seat in California from Helen Gehagan Douglas by accusing her of communist sympathies even though all proof was that she was nothing more than a lifelong liberal. He had deep feelings of inadequacy because he wasn't part of the Ivy League intelligentsia which he so often had to face with his Duke University credentials. Obama has the Ivy League record, but his real credentials remain obscure, his academic career a complete secret and therefore a complete mystery, and seems to be covering up his own feelings of inadequacy by high-falluting speeches and pretensions to elegance. Underneath, he's just another sneaky politician who got his political training in the dirty politics of Chicago. Not exactly the Harvard Yard. Add a belief in the concept that if you don't agree you're dangerous and out to get me, and you have a formula for enemies lists.

Presidents with this kind of philosophy regarding the opposition hire aides who see things the same way and are willing to do what the president wants to rid the nation of the enemies. Nixon had John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, Obama has Rahm Emmanuel and Valerie Jarrett. This president even considers people in his own party to be enemies if they disagree with his pet projects. "We routinely hear about phone calls from the president's staff to congressional Democrats expressing White House dissatisfaction if someone says anything out of line with Obama's policies," said an unidentified Congressional aide to Gary Andres in his Weekly Standard article.

I can't tell you about hope, but I am pretty sure that this style of ad hominem politics isn't going to change while Obama remains in office. His inability to compromise or see the other guy's point of view is deeply ingrained and probably unalterable. It will be interesting to see at what point in the Obama presidency the situation will have deteriorated so badly for him that he announces to the American public "I'm no socialist (despite all the mounting evidence to the contrary)." And considering his nearly open hostility to Israel, I am even left wondering if he will blame the failure of his administration on "a group which stabbed us in the back."
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