The Bottom Is Dropping Out of the Obama Presidency | USNews.com | 10.29.12

Last week, we may have seen the bottom beginning to drop out of the Obama presidency.

Even the MSMosphere is starting to feel the good Mitt Romney (or maybe it’s bad Barack Obama) vibrations. Last Friday, ABC News’s Terry Moran tweeted, “Obama’s campaign seems small-bore, predominantly negative, and downright weird (Lena Dunham)—a candidate off-stride in the closing days.”

I’ll say.

Let me see: Around the world al Qaeda is resurgent in the Middle East. Russia is treating us with menacing contempt. Murderous Mexican drug war mayhem is spilling into the United States. Meanwhile unemployment, underemployment, and poverty are on a trajectory that would have the networks and the New York Timescalling for removal of the president from office if the president weren’t Obama. And the economy is growing at…well growth is not a word that in any real sense you can apply to the American economy.

So in the midst of these multiple crises, what does the president’s crack re-election team come up with as a big theme? A defining television spot that launches the last days of the campaign and points the way to a brighter future?

Do they put out an economic revival policy that offers anything other than more spending here, more spending there, more spending, more spending everywhere? No. Not on your life. Forget about that.

Oh, wait, that’s right, he’s going to take the Navy from the current 287 ships to fewer than 230—when the Defense Department’s every-four-year strategic review found that essential American interests cannot be defended without 346. And that’s just one branch of our armed services.

And he’s going to tax the rich, when, according to Treasury Department figures, you could tax 100 percent of the income of those making $250,000 a year all the way up to Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and you’d come up with $2.5 trillion. Lunch money compared to the national debt of $16 trillion, unfunded liabilities (another form of debt) of $47 trillion, and an annual deficit of $1 trillion.

In other words, the president has nothing serious to say about the economy, the nation’s finances, or national security.

All his campaign can produce is that Lena Dunham business—a young woman advising other young women that first time voting is no different than first time sex with a really great guy.  Now don’t misconstrue what I am about to say, but that ad was on a par with the one about Big Bird. What are these people thinking? I am all for humor in politics, but their stuff is not funny. Just juvenile. Does Team Obama know the difference?

We are facing one national crisis after another. Is this the best the president and his campaign can do? If not, they don’t deserve another term, if only for reasons of insulting all of our intelligence and grossing us out.

I said the bottom may have started to drop out for them. Not for sure. But it could be starting. Look at the Real Clear Politics sample of polls. For nearly a full week the Rasmussen and Gallup trackers have put Romney up with 50 percent of the vote. Every day. These are the two largest samples in the Real Clear Politics lineup. The next tier down in numbers surveyed comprises ABC News/Washington Post, Politico/GWU/Battleground and Monmouth/SurveyUSA/Braun. The first two have Romney at 49 percent, the third at 48 percent with a three point lead over the president.

Still there’s Ohio. In a panel at the American Enterprise Institute, political analyst Henry Olson speculated that Romney would not be able to bring blue-collar whites without college degrees over to him and would lose the Buckeye State.

You can hear that view all over Washington and its corollary: Whoever wins Ohio wins the presidency.  There has been serious speculation around Washington the last few days that Romney will win the popular vote and not the Electoral College, giving the president a second term.

Hold on a minute. We have seen a wave develop in public opinion. Why would we believe it stops now? Doesn’t the bizarreness of the president’s campaign tell us what he and his managers believe—that things are going south for them and they have no plausible ideas for stopping the collapse?

Also, Team Obama is surely looking at the same polls that I am.  It is inching close to a certainty that Romney has an alternative to winning Ohio. With Colorado and Missouri moving his way, Wisconsin should put him over, too.

Yup, the bottom may be dropping out for the Obama presidency. Stay tuned.