Stick a fork in Obama — he’s done
By Dr. David Hill
TheHill.com
On life support. Dead man walking. Down for the count. He’s toast. Stick a fork in him; he’s done. Pick your own metaphorical cliché as long as it acknowledges that this president is a goner. If you need proof, consider Gallup’s recent assessment of the president’s job-approval numbers: “Only one elected president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, had a lower 11th-quarter average than Obama.” And we all know what happened to Mr. Peanut. Gallup brings the president’s lousy numbers to the bottom line by showing that Obama is losing to a generic Republican in its surveys, as well as in a head-to-head with the leading Republican, Mitt Romney.
The killer data point, in my view, is that the decline in Obama’s job approval has been so systematic and lockstep, declining in Gallup’s surveys by an average of about 3 points per quarter, never increasing outside the margin of error from one quarter to the next and staying below 50 percent since his fourth quarter in office. This means that most Americans have lingered over his failures for seven or more quarters, deepening and reinforcing their malaise about the man. Once you get into a groove like that, it’s hard to get out.
Facing such odds, what do the Obama strategists recommend? First, they have to get their candidate’s partisan base back. Right now, using Gallup’s numbers, 9 percent of registered Democrats defect to a generic Republican and 13 percent of Democrats vote for Mitt Romney. There is simply no way to formulate a minimum winning coalition scenario for Obama if more than 5 percent of Democrats defect. So they decided to play peacenik and Santa Claus all at once, bringing the troops home from Iraq for Christmas. Normally I would say this is well-played, but when Christmas comes, the media will dutifully interview troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere, reminding everyone that the Iraq withdrawal was mostly a symbolic cover-up of the fact that war continues. And when terrorists blow up one of the few Christian churches still operating in Iraq on Christmas Eve, the potential Democrat defectors will realize that this president needs to go. Playing the peace card also blocks Obama from using a national-security ruse, or even benefiting from one, if a major foreign or terrorist threat develops.
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