Story #1 looks at the latest Rasmussen generic Republican vs Democrat and finds the difference +10% for the Republicans. #2 is a demonstration of the desperation in the Obama camp. #3 has the third straight poll that has Romney ahead of Obama. #4 is a reminder of how many things have gone wrong for the president. It seems the hope and change of 2008 looks like a farce from the view of 2012. #5 talks about Obama’s likeability. The question is whether it will hold up after a few months of negative campaigning. I don’t think it will. #6 is a list of the green job promise that Obama has failed to deliver on.
Today’s thoughts
Why has Harry Reid not been able to bring a budget to the floor of the Senate for over 1000 days yet he can find time to bring the Buffet Rule to a vote even though no one expects it to pass?
Dick Cheney hasn’t had a change of heart regarding Barack Obama. He sees a second term for Obama as a disaster for the United States.
How has been a greater embarrassment to the United States? James Hansen acting like a hooker for climate change or the Secret Service Officers who hired the hookers in Colombia?
Geithner’s comments that Obama’s economic policies have been “remarkably successful” reminds me of the old joke, “Other than that, how did you like the play Mrs. Lincoln?”
1. Generic Congressional Poll
Republicans, as they have for nearly three years now, continue to lead Democrats on the Generic Congressional Ballot, this time for the week ending Sunday, April 15.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 46% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Republican in their district’s congressional race if the election were held today, while 36% would choose the Democrat instead. This is the largest gap between the two parties since the beginning of 2011. It also doubles the gap found a week ago when the Republican led by five points, 45% to 40%...
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/generic_congressional_ballot
This is probably an outlier, but it certainly reinforces the 5-6 percentage point lead by the Republicans as being accurate. This is not good news for the Democrats.
2. Lefties try to crash Romney event
Progressive activists stormed the Franklin Institute this evening. They clashed with tea-party organizer Don Adams, who blocked them from entering. It was a wild, tense scene, just minutes before Mitt Romney appeared here. Adams, who is the man at the door in this video of the incident, tells NRO that the “nasty” exchange is an example of what Romney will face this fall.
Lefties always seem extreme, but this seems to indicate a sense desperation.
3. And perhaps this is the reason for Desperation
The first Gallup tracking poll shows that Mitt Romney, after having emerged from an at-times brutal primary process, holds a slight lead over President Obama, 47 percent v. 45 percent. That must be disconcerting to those on the left, who believe that Obama is nearly a lock for re-election.
He’s clearly not.
To make matters worse for the president, 2012 will — in the words of former Clinton aide William Galston – be a “referendum, not a choice.” But most ominously for Obama is this paragraph:
Obama is no longer the master of his fate. During the 2008 campaign, Obama could and did seize the initiative in the face of unexpected events. His agile response to the mid-September financial meltdown propelled him into a lead that he never surrendered. In 2012, by contrast, he will be at the mercy of events that he cannot control. The Supreme Court will decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act. A military confrontation between Israel and Iran would put the administration in the no-win situation it has struggled to avoid, with incalculable consequences for our national security as well as our politics. If job creation returns to the strong pace of the late winter and remains there through the fall, he will be reelected with room to spare. But if the middling March employment report is a harbinger of things to come, the electorate’s evaluation of his performance will be harsh, and the road to reelection very steep indeed.
The problem with this statement is that the “strong pace” it refers to isn’t really a strong pace. People react to the numbers, but the unemployment numbers buoyed up by people leaving the workforce will be dragged down if hiring picks up and people come back into the workforce. In other words, more jobs could equal more unemployment.
4. What’s going wrong for President Obama? All of the Above
… The Obama campaign problems go beyond the tone-deaf community-organizer politics on the stupid Buffett Rule, the Rosen flap, and the naughty boys at the Secret Service. It's all of the above -- and then some. It's the stupid stimulus, which is turning into a real bust now that all those female schoolteachers are losing their jobs. It's the corrupt green energy swamp, where the latest scandal has green corporate officers loaning themselves the company green. It's the war on Big Oil, just as we are entering a new era of fossil-fuel exploration. It's the death sentence on Big Coal just as coal is getting priced out of the market by fracking natural gas. It's the utter stupidity of ObamaCare when everyone knows it's going to raise health care costs.
How many issues can you get wrong in four years, Mr. President? Are you going for the Guinness Book of Records?
Chuck Todd didn't mention the Trayvon Martin case and the unjust overcharging of accused murderer George Zimmerman. I don't know whose brilliant idea this was, whether the Justice Brothers' or the Obama campaign's, but it contains nothing but land mines for the president. What does it say to the white working class if they can't defend their neighborhoods against teenage hoodies without permission from Reverend Al Sharpton? What does it say to Latinos when it seems that the Democrats will always side with blacks against "white Hispanics"? The president and his people are sending a message to independent voters that they'd better not put a foot wrong on race, or their lives will be ruined like George Zimmerman's….
For six months Romney was getting hammered by his rivals for the Republican nomination. The fact that Obama has dropped so quickly against Romney once Santorum dropped out of the race is the bottom line here. Obama has so many problems that the chance for him to be reelected is almost zero.
5. How likable is Barack Obama?
Very likable, it seems, at least in contrast to his GOP rival. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released a few days ago, Americans by a more than 2-to-1 ratio say the president is more "friendly and likable" than Mitt Romney.
Many Republicans, and especially conservatives, can find these numbers hard to credit. Some note that the poll sampling favors Democrats and thus artificially inflates the president's numbers. Still others have come to dislike President Obama so much that it makes them suspicious when they read numbers indicating they are in the minority.
The focus on likability is a mistake. It's a mistake, first, for Democrats if they believe likability will be enough for Mr. Obama to win re-election come November. It's even more of a mistake for those Republicans who believe that the only way to defeat the president is to get fellow Americans to dislike him as much as they do.
At its core, the confusion over likability has to do with an inability to see the world as the other side sees it. Hilary Rosen gave us a perfect example of this phenomenon recently when she suggested that Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life." The folks at the White House immediately threw Ms. Rosen under the bus: They feared the administration would be tarred with the same unwitting arrogance Ms. Rosen exhibited when she failed to see how her remarks might be viewed by millions of American women who have made the same choice as Mrs. Romney.
Republicans ought not make this mistake with Mr. Obama…
…Now, the president's likability doesn't mean Mr. Romney shouldn't go on the offensive. It does mean he ought to attack hardest where Mr. Obama is at his weakest: his failed policies. For all the carping about Mr. Romney, this part he gets. We can see it reflected in both his embrace of the opportunity-oriented Republicanism of Wisconsin's Paul Ryan—and his repeated refrain that Mr. Obama is simply "in over his head."…
The Republicans need to attack the President with his own words (something they appear to be doing very well so far). A video of a promise or a stance he took in 2008 and then talking about his current position. Obama cannot win voters if he has to keep explaining why it could be worse or why after almost four years he hasn’t solved the problem. It’s a losing position for even a likeable guy.
6. Green Jobs: More broken promises
A recent lengthy report by Reuters confirms what many conservatives have long known: President Obama's promise to create millions of so-called "green jobs" has been a colossal and expensive failure.
A few highlights from the report:
· Since 2009, the wind industry has lost 10,000 jobs, even as the energy capacity of wind farms has almost doubled. By contrast, the oil and gas industry have created 75,000 jobs since Mr. Obama took office.
· "A $500 million job-training program has so far helped fewer than 20,000 people find work, far short of its goal." The program was so bad that "the Labor Department's inspector general recommended last fall that the agency should return the $327 million that remained unspent." They didn't. And now, the department "remains far short of its goal of placing 80,000 workers into green jobs by 2013."
· According to the Labor Department's own figures, the push for so-called "green jobs" has been an abysmal failure. "By the end of 2011, some 16,092 participants had found new work in a "green" field, according to the Labor Department - roughly one-fifth of its target."
The article also highlights the degree to which Obama's big jobs promises have fallen flat. For example, in 2008, Obama promised that "investing" $150 billion taxpayer dollars would create 5 million jobs over 10 years….
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/15/reuters-obamas-green-collar-jobs-have-been-a-bust
This is the reason Obama doesn’t want to talk about his record or his promises from 2008. And it is the reason Romney doesn’t need to go negative, he only has to go truthful.
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