Posted on 04/04/2011 8:42:28 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
President Obama’s re-election bid announcement was pro forma. There was never any doubt whether he’d run again, and if the GOP has anything to do with it, the odds are looking better every day that he’ll win in a walk away. It didn’t start out that way, though.
The first year of his White House tenure, things looked shaky for re-election. There was double digit unemployment, home foreclosures soared, the GOP scored wins in key governor and senate races, the war without end in Afghanistan raged at a staggering cost.
There were hordes of livid, screaming Tea Party activists tromping around the Capital. There were defections of key administration staffers rising. And the carping, hectoring, and even fury from liberal Democrats and progressives of Obama at what they considered and his timid, cautious, conciliatory, even back slide on issues and polices rose to a higher pitch with each passing day.
The president’s precipitous slide in the polls and popularity came crashing to a head with “shellacking” the Democrats took in the November mid-terms.
But in the months since then the GOP came to the rescue. In rapid succession it has ticked off millions with its bellicose threat to meat ax spending on every vital government program around and if it didn’t get the cuts it wanted shut down government.
Its parade of would be presidential candidates sounded more bizarre, contradictory, and downright goofy on everything from spouting the phony Birther line about Obama’s birth certificate to flailing away with inconsistent, and confused statements about Libya.
Polls have consistently shown that even while Obama’s popularity has edged down mostly over the handling of the economy, more Americans than not said they were disenchanted, even fed up with the Tea Party’s antics, bluster and intransigence. Even if House Republicans pull back from making the colossally stupid mistake of padlocking government for a few days to get the budget slashes they want and the likelihood is they will, they have gone even further to imprint in the public mind that the GOP is the party of pig-headed, nay-saying, whining, intransigence.
Then there’s Sarah Palin. She has gone from at best a political curiosity to a downright embarrassment. Her popularity poll numbers, never anything to write home about even in her best days, are hurtling toward single digit numbers. Even she’s had enough sense to stop the hint, no tease, mostly for the media, that she’s a serious contender for the GOP presidential nomination. But Palin almost rises to the stature of Lincoln and FDR when compared to the clownishness of real estate mogul Donald Trump, Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachman and African-American businessman Herman Cain.
Both have made themselves and worse the GOP into even bigger laughingstocks by conning the press and the party into thinking that they have a clue about politics and the presidency. Trump especially has worked the con to a tee with his high profile media appearances slamming Obama’s birth certificate and offering a few canned soup bromides about his plan for America. Bachman has gone to prodigious lengths to try and top herself in seeing how many Tea Party and media grabbing odd ball quips she can make about whatever comes in her head. Cain just by being black, and getting some paper cheers from Tea Party leaders, has managed to keep himself in the media limelight for a minute. The three of them send chills up the spine of GOP mainstream leaders at the sight of them gabbing away on talk shows while wearing the tag of the GOP.
Meanwhile, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman have been repeatedly mentioned as GOP presidential challengers. Not one of them has a prayer. In major polls since January, none has cracked the 40 percent mark against Obama. Two real possibilities to make a race against Obama competitive: Mitt Romney and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee are playing it cautious, and close to the vest. They are watching the political winds, hoping for a fatal mistake by Obama, and banking that their political credibility and name identification will be enough to propel them to the GOP nomination. That won’t be nearly enough to beat a sitting president.
In the past century, only one sitting Democratic president has lost his re-election bid. That was Jimmy Carter in 1980. And even the one Democratic president who suffered a massive defection and split within his party, a troubled economy, and voter fatigue at the Democrats for holding office for a seeming eternity, he still steam-rolled his Republican challenger. That Democrat was, of course, Harry Truman in 1948.Overall, only nine sitting presidents in American political history have been defeated.
Just think of the GOP names that immediately come to mind when the 2012 presidential campaign is mentioned, Trump, Cain, Palin, Bachman, Newt Gingrich, Pawlenty and then think this. The GOP makes Obama’s re-election easier by the day.
The author
well hell, if this is true then I say let’s just nominate Palin or Bachman and have some fun!
No need to read past the headline to get the truth here. What else is new? :)
Where’s the barf alert from this lamebrain idiot liberal?
Before you shoot the messenger, just remember who the GOP nominated last time.
From the current list of wannabes, most of the top tier and 2nd tier would lose to Obama about as badly as McCain did.
The GOP list of wannabes just does not create much inspiration.
In several recent straw-type polls ‘Other’ was getting 80%.
and the sad thing is the nation is crying out for a good GOP candidate to get rid of obama- its not just conservatives...
Hey, I know that guy. He played the villain in the blaxploitation remake of “Flash Gordon”, “Flash Johnson”. Mingus the Merciless. Yeah, that’s it.
As the PowerLine guys (oh no, a blog. Quick somebody call the blog cops) analysed, the Republicans are proposing triming one third of a french fry from the Big Mac value meal that is the federal budget. And they don't even touch entitlements.
This idiot describing minuscule (and ineffectual) micro surgery like that as "meat ax", only demonstrates the outlandish extent of his demagoguery, not to mention stupidity. Or maybe he just got the same DNC memo that Ried and Schumer got.
IF the republican party shoves Romney down our throats, Zero will win again! Too many conservatives against Romney, we need someone fresh with solid conservative ideas who will stand behind them & NOT reach across the aisle!!!!
At this point, I resent that we are even having to purchase the toilet paper the Obamas use.
We won't have the media, of course, in '12. It goes without saying that they'll be all-in for Obortion, enough that it'll make their campaign for Clinton a piker by comparison. But we may have a recession/bankruptcy/dollar collapse, and if a decent GOP candidate emerges, one with the guts to say and do what has to be done, we may, just may, have a chance, but given the sheeple are what they are, I am inclined to doubt.
Name one time ever in the history of the nation that the list of opposing party candidates supposedly inspired. 1991 maybe? Nope. Go read the clippings from the time. "There is nobody decent running" is the most predictable, vapid, and downright silly thing people say every four years.
Everybody looks small in a crowd. Barry looks small alone on the stage. Pawlenty, for one, would mop the floor with him.
1. Cuts to the federal budget -- one main reason why GOPers were elected in such huge numbers in the first place.
2. The GOP wants to shut down government? Uh.. no, genius. If you've paid attention, it's the DEMS who welcome a shutdown in government.
3. If the sheeple are so concerned about the GOPers actually fulfilling their campaign promises, then they can vote in 2012 to unseat them and reinsert the democrats who they defeated in November... because those dems had done such a stellar job while in power.
I agree with your assessment. I sure didn’t nominate McCain last time though. The media helped him get nominated. You watch this time, the media will be behind Romney.
It is a little embarrassing for her supporters that Palin presently appears to be digging a candidacy vaccum for herself with both hands, exemplified by her myriad of examples, which by now are clear as a bell to all observers. She is not running. And the continuing coyness about that fact is looking less and less attractive, especially as the energy aura around her wains more and more.
Now to this article. It could be turned on a dime and aimed squarely at the socialist/marxist candidate Obamarak. Communists are not always geniuses themselves, and these particular ones have no plan whatsoever, beyond voting “PRESENT” with great urgency. No plan, after a year gone by where they presented no budget, but cheerfully formed a deficit commission, presented its findings, and with much ceremony followed it up with absolutely no further interest, and certainly no implementation. Now that’s entertainment.
Is there a single line of this blustering column that could not just as well be reversed, to finger the nitwits of the democrat party? I think not.
The GOP are still in the driver’s seat for now.
With this list he's exactly right...
We cannot let the Democrats choose our candidate for us. That’s what they’re trying to do, with the MSM’s full compliance. Sadly, it appears that the Beltway/Elite Republican Establishment has seemingly all but conceded the election already.
Every one of them, even Speaker Gingich and Gov. Pawlenty (my two least favorite in that group) is HEAD AND SHOULDERS above the current de facto president. Or are you buying what the jourbalists are selling? Every one of them, save for Reps. Bachmann and Gingrich, has run a state or a large corporation. Mr. Obama hadn’t run so much as a sno-cone stand before he was elected to the White House.
I agree with the author. Obama has this next election in the bag and so does the entire democrat party. As a matter of fact, they should just take it easy. Why even bother to campaign? Just relax and read the teleprompter and continue to pursue a radical leftist agenda all the while knowing full well that the next election isn’t about the incumbent and his performance. Oh no, its a referendum on the Tea Party. Who is up after Libya?/s
You’ve never heard of Earl Ofari Hutchison before?
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