8. It is the economy. But Republicans now have some culpability for any economic slowdown.
The American people have never blamed Congress instead of the President for the economy. You're dreaming if you think that approach is going to work.
Besides, you think the American people forget that Obama had 2 years of a super majority in Congress? By Nov 2012 unemployment is going to be >10% and the deficit is going to be around $2T/year.
(Spelling errors or typos, and an inappropriate abbreviation altered. Please use spell-check!)
(my stuff deleted for brevity)
I don't think Obama can hold a candle to Harry Truman. As the old saying goes " I knew Harry Truman, and Barack Obama is no Harry Truman"
Truman was far more accomplished and smarter than Obama is at this stage of his life and service.
I just think its naive to think that just because Truman barely survived re-election, that means that Obama will just barely survive re-election.
When, in fact, it proves that despite Truman's accomplishments, he just BARELY survived.
Now compare Truman to Obama, and there is no comparison, Obama will lose under the same circumstances if he was in Truman's place.
The fact is that GOOD Presidents get re-elected, and Dumb Presidents don't get re-elected.
Jimmy Carter and GHWB were just incapable of serving the all encompassing role and responsibilities of the presidency. In fact, I would argue that Carter and Bush 1, were just plain lucky to win the presidency in the first place, NOT on their own merits, but based on National circumstances that had nothing to do with them, but other politicians.
Carter (1 term governor) became the "Evangelical Savior" after the Nixon/Ford criminal debacle.
GHWB became president solely on riding the coattails of Ronald Reagan's popularity.
Barack Obama became the poster boy for the "Anti-Bush/Anti-War" crowd, and his election was more of a repudiation of the Iraq War, than anything Obama did in his professional service or personal life.
All 3 of these men were not prepared to handle the crises of the presidency, but won based on luck in being at the right place at the right time.
One thing that President Obama is not is "dumb". You might have more of a case if you were to say that the President drew the wrong conclusions from his learning as Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter were both technically trained and poor fits for the Presidency; both were brilliant, but both had the wrong learning for the Presidency. The astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a brilliant fellow, but he would be an incompetent politician. Richard Nixon had most of the traits that make a superb politician, but he had some questionable characteristics that manifested themselves in the moral failures of his Administration.
Barack Obama is unique among the Presidents of the United States. People can see anything that they want in him; they can see FDR if they wish and they can see Jimmy Carter. If they despise his policies and ideology they see him as Jimmy Carter or Herbert Hoover.
The 2010 election suggests the 1946 election and Harry Truman, a politician that the Republicans thought that they had defeated decisively and discredited. "To err is Truman" was a commonplace smear. Of course that is no good analogue in some respects; Truman had never been elected President, he had a much longer political career, and he had far lesser formal education. It would be nearly impossible for someone like Truman to miss out on college; he would have been more polished as a politician for having gone through a four-year university. Truman had military experience and private-sector experience as an entrepreneur (good officer, unsuccessful entrepreneur). Truman followed the most successful President in American history; Barack Obama follows what may be the worst.
I look at 2010 and I see 1946 in some respects. The big difference of course is that the Democrats lost House and Senate majorities that they had held for sixteen years; the Republicans in 2010 had been in the political wilderness for only four years. Truman couldn't hold a candle to FDR who had generally been beyond criticism from the Pearl Harbor attack to his death; Truman got caught up in the loose ends of a faulty settlement of the war. In contrast President Obama could never undo the damage of two bungled wars for profit and the collapse of a corrupt bubble-economy. Americans got impatient when everything did not go right all at once and did Phase I of turning America into a right-wing plutocracy in 1946 and 2010 alike. As in 1948 I expect the American electorate of 2012 to be impatient with Phase I of turning America into a right-wing plutocracy. This time the Republicans are far less subtle than they were in the 1940s, and many of the 'winners' of 2010 would not be re-elected. Take a good look at the approval ratings for Congress, especially of Congressional Republicans, and imagine how President Obama could be dense enough to not recognize the one strategy that can rescue him. Hint: every House seat will be up for grabs.
Truman did not 'barely survive'. He won 49.55% of the popular vote against the 45.07% of the popular vote of Thomas E. Dewey. He won 303 electoral votes (57.1%) despite two dissenting wings of the Democratic party (Henry Wallace's Progressives who thought that Harry Truman hadn't gone far enough on socialism and had gone too far in confronting Stalin and the racist movement of Strom Thurmond). If you figure that supporters of both Wallace and Thurmond would have never gone for Dewey, then you figure that without those dissenting wings, the President would have had an electoral landslide. Truman won with a 4% plurality over Dewey nationwide.
That will not quite be imitated in 2012. So far there is no left-wing alternative to President Obama, and there is no racist wing of the Democratic Party likely to defect (the political descendants of the Dixiecrats are now a core constituency of the
Republican Party).
Take a good look at 1948 again; add the votes of Truman and Wallace in Michigan, New York, and Oregon; Truman, Wallace, and Thurmond in Maryland and he gets another 80 electoral votes there, and the 39 electoral votes that Thurmond got, and Truman wins a clear majority of the popular vote and 424 electoral votes...
Back when the President's approval was in the low forties the President still seemed to be winning matchups with Mitt Romney in Wisconsin (which Kerry came close to losing) and Ohio (which the GOP nominee absolutely must win to have a chance). The Republican nominee for President still has to face the slickest campaign apparatus in American history, one that will stop at nothing to register as many new voters as possible. The Obama campaign succeeded in 2008 in turning not-so-likely voters into voters, and I expect it to try again what it did in 2008. We all know the limitations of this President, but at least we have a good idea of who will be the VP nominee. We don't know who the Republican nominee for VP will be. If Mitt Romney gets an ideological attack dog as a running mate so that the GOP can satisfy the Hard Right base, then whatever credibility Mitt Romney has among moderate independents goes down the drain. That's before you suggest Perry, Palin, or Bachmann.
A RINO would now defeat President Obama. But after the effective purge of Republican moderates, what remains of them?
How much
you despise this President means nothing any more than people who thought much the same of Ronald Reagan in 1983 meant anything.
You cannot convince people who think that President Obama is better the GOP alternatives that the President is a moral failure out of touch with some purported truth that emanates from Rush Limbaugh, FoX Newspeak Channel, or sold-out think-tanks of the Right. Your side has gone as far as it can with a strategy good for winning one election, but it has shown that it has nothing that didn't fail in the recent past.
We are not going to have another speculative boom for a very long time, but the GOP seems to suggest that the way to create new prosperity is to return to the economic principles that underpinned the Dubya-era boom in real estate.
