Bleak Midterms for Democrats are coming

Official Seal of the Democrat Party

Democrats abandon House progressives

As the election nears, the party throws its weight behind unreliable centrists


Grasping to keep control of Congress, Democratic leaders are turning their backs on some of their staunchest supporters in the House and propping up stronger candidates who have routinely defied them on health care, climate change and other major issues.


Raw politics -- the drive to win a House-majority 218 seats, no matter how -- is increasingly trumping policy and loyalty in these decisions, as Democrats shift money and attention in the closing days of the campaign toward races they can win and pull back from those seemingly lost.


The Democrats are shelling out $40 million in 59 congressional districts in the last three weeks of the campaign for TV advertising. Republicans, boosted by well-funded outside groups, are working to expand the political battleground by pouring money into 82 races next week alone.

If you want to know how the election is going, you need to read articles like these. The money is with the Republicans as well as the polls.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/10/16/us_democrats_trumping_loyalty/index.html

Democrats and Obama in a fight of their lives

Barack Obama hit the campaign trail again today in a desperate effort to save Democrats facing a Republican avalanche in next month's mid-term elections.


An Associated Press poll published today showed a quarter of those surveyed who had backed Obama in the 2008 White House election were considering voting Republican. Obama, addressing a crowd of 10,000 in Boston yesterday, acknowledged the problem. "There is no doubt that this a difficult election. That's because we've been through an incredibly difficult time as a nation," he said.


The Democrats, accepting political reality, are cancelling millions in advertising planned for Congressional candidates they no longer believe are capable of winning, and transferring the cash to shore up seats previously regarded as safe Democratic.

More of the same as the previous article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/17/obama-campaigns-to-avert-defeat-in-elections-next-month


President Obama’s faithful losing hope as the magic fades

Sometimes embellishing a story doesn’t help it or you. What’s the old saying? Sometimes it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Barack Obama offered up this metaphor yesterday: America’s a car that Republicans drove into a ditch.


Then along came Obama and the Democrats. “We put our boots on and went down into the ditch, and we started pushing that car out,” the president told the cheering crowd. “It was hot down there and muddy, but we kept on pushing. And every once in a while we looked up and the Republicans are standing up there tanning themselves, sipping Slurpees, and we say, ‘Hey, are you gonna help?’ ”


But the Republicans told us, said Obama, “You’re not pushing the right way.”


You’re not pushing the right way.


I don’t think the president meant to undermine anybody’s confidence with his wrong-way-out-of-the-ditch story yesterday. But that’s the nagging question — isn’t it? Even among the once-Obamified, like me? We’re afraid he’s not really getting us out of our ditch. And the ditch is getting deeper. And it’s very scary stuff

Poll: Those craving for change now look to the GOP

More nails in the Democrat coffin. Now it looks like a lot of Obamaniacs are defecting.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's winning coalition from 2008 has crumbled and his core backers are dispirited. It's now Republicans who stand to benefit from an electorate that's again craving change.


Nearly two years after putting Obama in the White House, one-quarter of those who voted for the Democrat are defecting to the GOP or considering voting against the party in power this fall. Just half of them say they definitely will show up Nov. 2, according to an Associated Press-Knowledge Networks poll released two weeks before Obama's first midterm elections.


Yet in a reflection of broad dissatisfaction with politics, just as many people who backed Republican presidential nominee John McCain are either supporting Democrats now or still considering how to vote.


Still, McCain voters — to borrow Obama's campaign rallying cry — are far more "fired up, ready to go." Two-thirds say they are certain to vote next month.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iKmo4HyVujR3h6CDP6985hPJ2UnQ?docId=078b9051ec1d48ff94faf9b19f81360b
Obama: Dems are in trouble because Americans aren't thinking clearly


I remember watching a movie HEAD OFFICE that was a spoof on Big Business. In it one characters, Howard Gross, was good at only one thing: denying responsibility for any actions his department took. This story reminds me of his saying, “It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.”

At a Saturday-evening fundraiser held in the home of a wealthy Massachusetts hospital executive, President Obama suggested Democrats are having difficulties in midterm campaigning because Americans simply aren't thinking clearly. Seeking to explain his party's troubles, the president focused not on controversial legislation like national health care and the stimulus but on evolutionary psychology. "Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared," Obama told the assembled Democrats, who paid $15,200 a person to attend. "And the country is scared."


To "break through the fear and the frustration that people are feeling right now," Obama told the crowd, will require high-end donors not just to "write checks" but also to "lift up people's spirits and make sure that they're not reacting just to fear."

It appears to me that Obama and the Democrats are reacting to fear of the voters right now.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Obama-Dems-are-in-trouble-because-Americans-arent-thinking-clearly-105130709.html#ixzz12eKzXENJ



 http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1289372