Can things get any worse for the Obama-Biden ticket?<\/p>\n
Two weeks ago the president debates the first capable opponent of his career and comes off as an empty suit.\u00a0 One week ago the vice president puts on a clownish performance in his matchup with Congressman Paul Ryan.<\/p>\n
Then the polls tanked.\u00a0 On Saturday this week, the Real Clear Politics average of polls showed Romney-Ryan up by 1.3 percentage points.\u00a0 Exactly two weeks earlier, it had Obama-Biden ahead by 4.3 percentage points, a move of 5.6 points against the Democratic ticket in fourteen days<\/p>\n
Some believe the shift wasn\u2019t just because of the two debates.\u00a0 The meltdown in Libya contributed.\u00a0 It is also possible that the supposedly stellar but actually disturbing recent job numbers did, too.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
Remember Joe Biden\u2019s line during the Democratic National Convention?\u00a0 We should reelect the president and him, because \u201cOsama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.\u201d\u00a0 That sentence may be the key to the White House\u2019s otherwise inexplicable denial over more than two weeks that the attack on the Libyan consulate and the murder of the ambassador were acts of terrorism.<\/p>\n
The administration has told us it is a stellar steward of our national security.\u00a0 Exhibit one has been its campaign of assassination against al Qaeda\u2019s leadership.\u00a0 Some critics, such as former George W. Bush chief speechwriter and Washington Post online columnist Marc Theissen, have argued that the Predator drone strike strategy has gone too far. Many of the targets should be captured rather than killed, Theissen has said, for their intelligence value. Each one who goes to his deserved reward takes with him extensive knowledge of al Qaeda, its plans and operations.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Theissen is close to the defense and intelligence communities.\u00a0 On these matters, his columns have very likely reflected concerns felt throughout the national security establishment.<\/p>\n
Perhaps because of lost intelligence, the demonstrations and attacks caught the administration completely by surprise. Even as the assault on the consulate progressed, a mob before our embassy in Cairo chanted \u201c\u201cObama, Obama, we are all Osama.\u201d Within days, protests were raging outside more than a dozen U.S. embassies in the Middle East, North Africa and heavily Muslim areas farther east.\u00a0 To acknowledge that these actions might have been at least in part an al Qaeda show of strength coinciding with the attacks of eleven years ago would have devastated a major part of the administration\u2019s case for reelection.<\/p>\n
But even as their national security case for reelection showed wobbly legs, the administration\u2019s \u201cGeneral Motors is alive\u201d case has faltered, too.\u00a0 The administration has been trying to inflate the recent jobs numbers into an economic revival.\u00a0 But if most UAW employees at GM still have work and fully funded pensions (the administration did not protect members of other unions), an appalling number of Americans have not fared so well.\u00a0 Only 63.6 percent of adults are working today, compared to 65.7 percent on the day the president took office.\u00a0 And thanks to Obamacare, reports are surfacing that many employers are reducing their full-time labor forces to reduce their exposure to the new laws mandates and penalties.<\/p>\n
So recent movement in presidential polls may have had to do with the news as well as the debates.<\/p>\n
But there can be no doubt that the debates catalyzed a change in opinion almost unprecedented in American politics. Three weeks ago, even Republicans were writing the Romney campaign\u2019s obituaries.\u00a0 Now even Democrats are writing post-mortems for their candidate.<\/p>\n
Here is a warning.\u00a0 Since March, the lead in the Rasmussen daily tracking poll \u2013 perhaps the country\u2019s most reliable poll \u2013 has switched more than thirty times.\u00a0 It could happen again.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow night will, of course, be a test. The president has said he was \u201ctoo polite\u201d last time.\u00a0 I say that if that is what he believes he did wrong in the first debate and he plans to channel his inner Biden in this one, bring it on.\u00a0 Rage and rudeness are exactly what the American people detest in candidates.<\/p>\n
That does not sound like a warning, I know. And it is true that a president who once used a TelePrompter to address school children may not have it in him to deliver a formidable performance in the give and take of a debate.<\/p>\n
But in the instability of this race and the president\u2019s clearly formidable reelection machinery, Yogi Berra\u2019s warning about baseball applies.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t over \u2018til it\u2019s over.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Can things get any worse for the Obama-Biden ticket? Two weeks ago the president debates the first capable opponent of his career and comes off as an empty suit.\u00a0 One week ago the vice president puts on a clownish performance in his matchup with Congressman Paul Ryan. Then the polls tanked.\u00a0 On Saturday this week, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[51,42,52,45,12,60,44,55],"class_list":["post-1365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politicalcommentary-campaign-2012","tag-51","tag-2012-election","tag-campaign","tag-democrats","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-obama","tag-republicans","tag-romney"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1365"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1367,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1365\/revisions\/1367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}