2012 elections – Page 2

#rsrh QotD, You And Me Both, Scott Edition.

(H/T: Instapundit) Scott Rasmussen is getting a little vexed with the punditry’s apparent need to settle the field now:

“I am somewhat irritated with the desire to pick a winner now,” says Rasmussen. “Most voters still have the quaint notion that the election will be held in 2012, not 2011…My view of the GOP race is that Romney has won the establishment semi-finals by beating Pawlenty and Huntsman. Now, the outsider candidate has to be selected. GOP voters would prefer to vote for an outsider, but want to make sure it’s the right outsider, and no one has closed that sale yet. Establishment Republicans (and some Democrats) seem puzzled that GOP voters aren’t flocking to Romney, and that’s probably causing some of the stories you’re hearing about.”

Admittedly, Scott runs a business that’s pretty explicitly politics-based and politics-driven, so take his vexation – and mine, come to think of it – with a grain of salt. Still, this is why we have primaries, folks: just because nine is too many up there on the debate podium doesn’t mean that we have to winnow the actual field down to one quite just yet.

Why is Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012 only now in doubt?

I should note right from the start that I like Stu Rothenberg as a pundit and a political handicapper: he’s a pretty bright person and he has a lot of experience. But Rothenberg is also very much plugged into the professional political establishment… and sometimes, it shows. Case in point: Rothenberg’s otherwise spot-on analysis about the travails of Barack Obama these days has what I will charitably call a ‘howler.’

This president, like Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush before him, learned the lesson that every investment fund manager knows: Evidence of past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.

And now the president, who is expected to raise close to $1 billion for his re-election campaign, who faces a Republican field widely mocked as undistinguished and who can rely on the same team of brilliant political gurus who masterminded his 2008 victory, suddenly finds his re-election in doubt.

Two howlers, actually: the first is the frankly unsupported-by-historical-evidence assumption that Barack Obama ever learns a lesson on anything. The second is that Barack Obama’s past performance should have justified any expectations in the first place. Continue reading Why is Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012 only *now* in doubt?

#rsrh NYT notices that small donors aren’t into Obama right now.

Which apparently is news to the New York Times. What it is not news to is anybody who happens to be on Barry Obama’s OfA mailing list: the tone of the begging emails has gotten steadily less ‘hope and change’ and steadily more ‘hope you’ll spare some change.’ Hard to tell that from the usual ‘give us money or the universe will end’ that you get from these kinds of email solicitations, but these days the Obama campaign seems particularly eager to get as many individual donors as possible. Which makes sense, given that said campaign is essentially trying to bluff the country into thinking that their man-god is just as popular in 2011 as he was in 2008…

#rsrh Constant Reader BigGator5 puts money where mouth is…

…by running for office. Specifically, he’s running for Supervisor of Elections for Lake County, Florida – which is, of course, one of the kinds of jobs that we always need candidates for, and we always will. No election or donation site yet, but BG5 is of course a long-time reader both here and at RedState, so I’m sure that he’ll let us know when that changes.

Obviously, I wish him luck and success, and I look forward to hearing from him (and anybody else doing the same thing) about what it’s like to run for office on the county level.

Moe Lane

PS: Seriously, the GOP and conservatism in general needs more like this; people who will run for offices. We can’t win if we can’t show up. I’m not saying that people are bad people for not doing that – after all, I’m not running for anything right now, either – but if you have the time and the inclination, tossing your hat in the ring would be a mitzvah.

#rsrh Aww, Ed Kilgore’s all worried about us…

…and [expletive deleted].

I wanted to quote something from it, but this has to be one of the whiniest whines from what has become one of the whiniest whining magazines on the Whining Left (yeah, repeat that word enough times and it looks weird to me, too). The gist?

Just wait! Whichever person beats Obama next year...

[Yup, that means that Ed Kilgore thinks that Obama’s going to lose. Oops.] Continue reading #rsrh Aww, Ed Kilgore’s all *worried* about us…

#rsrh A head’s-up on the Obama fundraising thing.

I’ve noticed that folks like Jim Geraghty and Legal Insurrection are pointing out that the President’s fund-raising team is currently acting as if they’re absolutely desperate for last-minute contributions to Obama’s reelection campaign. Like Jim, I’d like to remind folks that back in 2008 the Obama campaign notoriously poor-mouthed its fundraising every month… so don’t be surprised if they try this sort of thing again. As I’ve noted before, these people aren’t what you’d call real original. We’ll know in a couple of weeks what the real totals are.

Not that it matters as much this go-round, thanks to the Supreme Court reestablishing some basic free-speech sanity with Citizens United…

#rsrh The failure of the Activist Left…

…in one handy sentence:

Their questions, about Obama’s economic appointments and about his messaging problems, all began with some variation of “I’m going to vote for Obama again, and work for him, but …”

Let me channel the administration’s effective response to any question that starts in such a fashion:

Really?
Then shut up.
Get out your wallet.
Sit down.
Do as you’re bid.
Say “Thank you” afterward.

Continue reading #rsrh The failure of the Activist Left…

QotD, But the Grey Lady Isn’t Bitter edition.

Nope. Writing this sentence did not cause nigh-physical pain for its author.

A group including former White House officials, union leaders and one of Hollywood’s biggest producers have joined forces to start an outside effort to help President Obama and Congressional Democrats in 2012 by using the very sort of anonymous, unlimited donations from moneyed interests that the president has so deplored.

Nope. Not at all, nosireebob. That thin screaming that you’re hearing? Nope, that’s not the death of hope and innocence in the battered soul of a newspaper reporter who has realized that he has been implicitly working for a political faction who has been secretly laughing at him for his stupid naivete. Not all: it’s actually just gas.

It’s just gas, blast your eyes.

Via RCP.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

RCP’s Sean Trende: Obama’s not in great re-election shape.

He ain’t so tough.

Mind you, Sean’s not saying that Obama’s in bad re-election shape, either: he’s currently scoring the President at essentially 50/50, with the slightest edge against the man. But he’s definitely out to demolish some of the current Democratic talking points. Short version (and this is only Part One):

The popular correlation between incumbency and re-election falls apart if you look at it too long;
If the economy is rebounding, it is not rebounding quickly enough to give the President sufficient wind at his back; and
Even the favorable polls for the President are not showing hard support for him – and certainly not for his policies.

Continue reading RCP’s Sean Trende: Obama’s not in great re-election shape.

Gallup: Obama slips with African-Americans, Hispanics…

…unexpectedly.

Gallup mentions the most obvious point – the President has slipped from his historical approval rating among African-Americans (usually around 92%) all the way down to 85%* – but it kind of obscures a detail on the graph with regard to Hispanic voters. They acknowledge that the President is currently at a low with 54% of those voters, but Gallup does not point out that Obama’s approval rating dropped by double digits with those voters over a year ago and hasn’t really come back since. For that matter, the real story from that graph is that the President has a 39% approval rating among whites; his approval rating among those voters at the beginning of his term was somewhere just above 60%.

Andrew Malcolm is right to couch all of this in terms of it merely being worrisome for the President; after all, it’s early days yet. But he’s also right that Obama should be worrying about this, given that hyper-enthusiasm is precisely what his campaign needs if they seriously plan to raise a billion dollars for the 2012 campaign. In fact, i think that the billion-dollar number is going to end up being a bit of an albatross for the President: it will require a constant, probably grueling, emphasis on fundraising in order to work, and it has already forced the President to formally re-enter the electoral arena months early. In other words, the President may have been better off if he had decided not to try to beat his high score. Continue reading Gallup: Obama slips with African-Americans, Hispanics…