In a comment to an earlier post about politicizing the anniversary of killing Osama, I speculated that there might well be no bump in Obama’s numbers at all. I was both right and wrong. Both daily tracking polls showed a bump in Obama’s approval rating to as much as 51% approval. Those numbers are slightly off their peak today, but that may be sampling noise. Reminding voters that Osama is dead as a result of his decisions appears to improved voters perceptions of his job performance. So I was wrong about public reaction.

So where was I right? The daily head to head polling between Obama and Romney tell a different story and it is not one that bodes well for Obama’s reelection. When Obama’s job approval numbers improved, his head to head numbers against Romney did not. Yesterday Gallup showed Obama’s approval at 51% approve / 43% disapprove. However his head to head numbers against Romney were 46%/45%. His performance for reelection under performing his job approval numbers by 5%. Today his approval is at 50% approve / 44% disapprove and his he is tied with Romney 45%/45%. Again he is under performing his approval number by 5%. Assuming that his approval numbers will erode as the bump from the anniversary fades, it will be interesting to see it his under performance gap shrinks or remains.

It is a very bad sign when an incumbent is under performing his job approval by this kind of margin and is under 47%-48% of the head to head vote. It appears that, with the reminder of the killing of Osama, a small segment of voters have changed their overall assessment of his job performance, but these same voters have not changed their minds about his reelection, and were the election to day would not vote for him. This indicates that those who do not support his reelection, are not easily swayed.

In the midst of answering angsty questions from ultra-liberals, Journolist Dave Weigel manages to make a good point:

…historically, Obama has been debate-shy. Remember McCain challenging him to seven forums right after he won the nomination? Yeah, that didn’t happen.

The Romney-Obama debates (assuming Obama agrees to more than one) should be interesting.

One college student’s struggle:

I remember going through the heinous college application process about a year and a half ago. As I struggled to figure out whether I should check off “Asian” or “White” on my application, I kept on thinking to myself, “Why does mentioning race even matter?”

After stating that I was an Asian-American female on my application to Smith College, a predominately white women’s school, I was stunned when the college gave me a $20,000 scholarship just for being a “minority of academic merit” — as if, for some reason, minorities weren’t supposed to be worthy of academic merit. In high school, I had a pretty good GPA, decent test scores and involvement in extracurricular activities, but then again, so did everyone else who applied to Smith.

[...]

As much as I appreciated getting a scholarship, receiving one based off of my racial status felt like a slap in the face. Obtaining a scholarship or acceptance into a school partially based off of racial background tells me society doesn’t think I can get accepted on my own. Because I am a “minority,” I somehow naturally lack the strength and academic talent of the majority. Because Smith referred to me as a minority, the admissions officers automatically assumed I had a tough background, in which I had been discriminated against and attacked. The funny thing is, I lived a perfect life. I lived in an upper-middle class household, I was rarely discriminated against and, honestly, I knew of many white males who had an entirely worse upbringing than I did. But they never got scholarships.

As the end of the year approaches, seniors are hearing back from graduate schools and employers. It’s just a matter of time before I’m in their shoes. But will deciding between marking myself as “Asian” or “White” factor into my acceptance into a law school or a business firm?

And hiring:

Could it be that Warren’s years of sending self-promoting smoke signals helped her hunt down a cushy Harvard job?

As evidence, Bedard notes that, during the time she was at Harvard Law, only one of the approximately 100 professors and assistant professors hadn’t graduated from a Top 10 law school. Who?

Wahoo. As in “Wahoo” Warren. Her degree was from Rutgers Law, ranked 82nd by Top-Law-Schools.com.

Bedard then expanded the search to all Ivy League law schools. Did any of the 350 or so law professors have a degree less prestigious than “Dances With Truths?”

Just one. “A Yale professor who attended the University of Nebraska Law School, ranked 89,” Bedard reports.

Snagging a Harvard Law gig with such a mediocre curriculum vitae — and no preferential treatment? Wow — a woman this lucky should open a casino!

Say goodbye to the Senate’s most liberal Republican.

Then and now:

“The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states . . . ”
– Barack Obama, rising star, Democratic convention, 2004

Poor Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. Once again he’s been pilloried for fumbling a historic Supreme Court case. First shredded for his “train wreck” defense of Obamacare’s individual mandate, he is now blamed for the defenestration in oral argument of Obama’s challenge to the Arizona immigration law.

The law allows police to check the immigration status of someone stopped for other reasons. Verrilli claimed that constitutes an intrusion on the federal monopoly on immigration enforcement. He was pummeled. Why shouldn’t a state help the federal government enforce the law? “You can see it’s not selling very well,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

But Verrilli never had a chance. This was never a serious legal challenge in the first place. It was confected (and timed) purely for political effect, to highlight immigration as a campaign issue with which to portray Republicans as anti-Hispanic.

Hispanics are just the beginning, however. The entire Obama campaign is a slice-and-dice operation, pandering to one group after another, particularly those that elected Obama in 2008 — blacks, Hispanics, women, young people — and for whom the thrill is now gone.

Nate Silver crunches the numbers, and comes up with this:

In fact, he is more popular than expected, and consistently so throughout these three years. His quarterly approval ratings are, on average, nine points higher than expected.

Dick Lugar has scrubbed the DREAM Act from his official Senate web site.

Now Peggy Noonan tries to do the same, by defending him in an article which never mentions the DREAM Act.

And she says:

And in a practical sense, conservatives might note that the senior senator from Indiana has just had the scare of his political life. He’s never been primaried before. It is likely that he will return to Washington, if he’s allowed to return, newly alive to certain conservative needs and concerns. There, he will be able to take what might be called a refreshed sense of where people are, combine it with a veteran’s knowledge of how to move things forward, and help make the kind of progress conservatives long for.

Really??

Consider what Lugar did in December 2010, after Republicans had just won the biggest landslide since 1938, and many incumbent senators had lost their primaries:

• He voted for the DREAM Act, along with just two other Republican senators – Lisa Murkowski and Bob Bennett, who had just lost their primaries!
• He was the deciding vote to eviscerate America’s missile defenses, voting for the START treaty. Only three Republicans who voted for the treaty are up for re-election this year – Olympia Snowe (who’s retiring), Scott Brown (who’s from Massachusetts), and Lugar.
• And this was all capped off by Obama’s gratitude: “I told him how much I appreciated the work he had done.”

If Lugar was willing to spite conservatives shortly after the 2010 landslide, why on earth would he change if he’s re-elected??

Remember those Greenland glaciers they’re always talking about? Well:

A decade-long, eye-in-the-sky study of nearly 200 major outlet glaciers found that they haven’t been tumbling into the ocean with the dramatic acceleration once feared — and that means these colossal rivers of ice might not contribute as much to a catastrophic sea-level rise as predicted by some worst-case scenarios.

Some climate studies had suggested that Greenland’s coastal glaciers were poised to produce enough fresh water to raise the global sea level by 2.5 to 6.5 feet over the next 90 years.

But their tidewater meltdown — if it doesn’t speed up beyond the rates seen during the past 10 years — will likely deliver a sea level boost measured in inches rather than feet, according to a new study published this week in the journal of Science.

“Our wide sampling of actual 2000 to 2010 changes shows that glacier acceleration across the ice sheet remains far below (the high-end) estimates, suggesting that sea level rise associated with Greenland glacier dynamics remains well below the low-end scenario (of about four to five inches by 2100) at present,” wrote lead researcher Twila Moon and three co-authors.

53-43.

44-42. Very poor for a 6-term incumbent senator; he’s probably finished.