It’s interesting: A majority of those Americans polled recently say that President Hopey-Changey doesn’t deserve a second term (he doesn’t), but when Barack Obama is pitted against the Repugnican Tea Party front runners — when the choice is made much more real — suddenly a second Obama term apparently doesn’t seem so bad after all.
An Associated Press-GfK nationwide poll taken December 8 through December 12, for instance, found that 52 percent believe that Obama should be voted out of office in November 2012, while only 43 percent believe that he should be re-elected.
The same poll, however, found that only 42 percent would vote for Newt Gingrich, while 51 percent would vote for Obama over Gingrich. The same poll found that Obama barely would beat Mitt Romney, 47 percent to 46 percent.
A Reuters/Ipsos nationwide poll also taken December 8 through December 12 similarly found that Obama would beat Gingrich, 51 percent to 38 percent, and that Obama would beat Romney, 48 percent to 40 percent.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal nationwide poll taken December 7 through December 11 found that 45 percent said they probably will vote for the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate in November 2012, while only 43 percent said they probably would vote for Obama.
Yet in the same poll, Gingrich garnered only 40 percent to Obama’s 51 percent, and Obama beat Romney by a hair, 47 percent to 45 percent. (Also in that poll, Obama soundly beat Ron Paul, 50 percent to 37 percent).
A USA Today/Gallup nationwide poll taken December 6 and 7 had similar findings: Obama barely beat Romney, 47 percent to 46 percent, and beat Gingrich definitively, 50 percent to 44 percent.
Yet a CBS News nationwide poll taken December 5 through December 7 found that 54 percent believe that Obama should not be re-elected, while only 41 percent believe that he should be.
What gives?
Well, for one thing, it’s incorrect to assume that only those who lean to the right believe that Obama shouldn’t be re-elected. I’m a foaming-at-the-mouth leftist, but if a pollster were to ask me whether President Hopey-Changey deserves a second term, my answer would be Oh, hell no. (The Wall-Street-coddling, war-mongering, Constitution-violating Barack Obama is a “socialist”? I wish!)
Obama & Co. have alienated the “professional,” “sanctimonious” left, very apparently craving the votes of the “swing voters” more than the votes of the actual left. Of course, give the “swing voters” the choice between an actual Repugnican and a Democrat who acts like a Repugnican (President Hopey-Changey, for instance, can’t sing the right wing’s icon Ronald Reagan’s praises enough), and they will vote for the actual Repugnican, but in November 2012 we will find out how smart Team Obama’s strategy of shitting and pissing all over its base has been.
It seems clear that Mitt Romney has the best chance of unseating Obama, but it remains to be seen whether the Repugnican Tea Party voters will focus on ideological purity or on general-election electability in their primaries and caucuses that are to begin shortly.
I remember the fight for the 2004 Democratic Party presidential nomination: Those who focused on ideological purity supported Howard Dean, while those who focused on electability (like I did) supported John Kerry (who, in my estimation, still did better against George W. Bush than Dean would have; I love ideological purity, but to me at the time, preventing a second disastrous term of the treasonous, unelected BushCheneyCorp was more important than was ideological purity).
We’ll see whether the Repugnican Tea Party set will choose their Howard Dean or their John Kerry, so to speak. If they choose Gingrich (or even Ron Paul), then Obama’s re-election is fairly assured.
If they wisely choose Romney, however (I say “wisely” because the point of elections is to win them, not because I have any love for Romney [I'd never vote for an active Mormon for any office, since they're all theocrats who answer to the cabal of evil old white men in Salt Lake City]), then, the polls indicate, it will be a close presidential race.
And Team Obama might just find out that its strategy of believing that those of us on the left have nowhere else to go was fucking suicidal, because, it seems to me, if we leftists withhold our support of Obama, as I am doing (I’m not giving him my vote or a fucking penny), Mitt Romney just might win in November 2012.
If a Romney victory means finally teaching the smug Democratic Party establishment sellouts once and for all that no, they cannot shit and piss upon their fucking base without repercussions, then perhaps it would be worth it.*
–
*Not that I’m holding my breath, of course. Instead of focusing on what an awful, uninspiring, milquetoast presidential campaign Al Gore ran in 2000 — he didn’t even win his home state, for fuck’s sake — the Democratic Party hacks instead blamed (still blame) Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.
History has demonstrated that the pseudo-progressive hacks who call themselves Democrats don’t learn, but only blame actual progressives for their own miserable electoral failures.
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markinjapan
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President Barack Obama
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Comments
Unfortunately, Obama has proven to be almost as evil. And he's taken the base- traditional liberal supporters for granted, doing everything possible to cater to the Repubs at our expense. He's been a friend of the 1% not the 99, but we're supposed to ignore that since the alternative is so much scarier. It is scarier- but he's proving to be just another slasher.
I'd rather have an outright evil person like Romney than someone like Obama, who talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.
With a Repugnican Lite like Obama at the helm, there isn't much to lose, so he and his Obamabots are gravely mistaken in believing that I'm going to support him because the alternative is slightly more evil than he is.
You’d actually choose “outright evil” over Obama? Really? “Nothing much to loose”?
I’ll not argue with your slam against gutless liberal Democrats; however, while Americans may have been kept ignorant of many facts (this mess took 30 years of pulling the wool over their eyes), we are not quite the stupid dumb sheep we are presumed to be. Almost, perhaps, but not quite. We mostly know Obama is not to blame for this perfect storm that, again, took 30 years of deregulation to create, and we also know that the obstructionists who did cause it are out to bring him down and they are the reason he has not been able to do more. Frankly, it’s amazing he's accomplished what he has- and I have been no gentle critic of Obama.
It seems to me you are taking to the right wing black propaganda bait hook, line, and sinker and have been astutely maneuvered by the clever propagandists of Seventh Avenue - the Republicans’ best hope where they can’t win votes is to enlist disgruntled ‘Progressives’ to do their job for them by taking votes from Obama by appealing to the lesser angels of our nature.
Understand what this entire cynical game has been for the past three years and a lot of money has been thrown at it. It’s a game called ‘Get the *iger’ even if that means tossing in a minstrel show Uncle Tom philanderer just to prove how tolerant they are.
GET IT: THIS IS THE POWER OF THE 1%! And you seem to play into their clever hands. For the past three years all efforts of the 1% with control of almost all we get to see and read has been focused on keeping unemployment high, of corporations keeping their tax free-profits and blocking all effort to make them pay a fair share, of turning the screws on the little guy only to blame Obama for the very harm these remorseless sociopaths have caused. We are not stupid. We mostly know all this. So why collaborate by default to throw the bums back in?
What? Can anyone actually think Obama could just come along wave a hand against all this three decade debacle and re-distribute the economy and, abracadabra, put us back to work AND do it in three years? Really? If so then one must believe in Mother Goose. The object of the 1% is to overtake our mind with their black propaganda and incite us to eat our own. I’ll not chomp at the bait.
Obama is just one man and not a dictator and this is a republic not a raw democracy. We the People have given him an impotent Congress. Great! Thanks for nothing much to work with other than a school of piranha owned by the 1%. Nice. Give him the office but not the power so when we fail we can blame him. Again, I remain utterly amazed he got anything done.
If Americans want change he must have more support. It is We the People who empower our president. Are we now again to be duped like sheep? Empowering him means sweeping Congress clean of the obstructionists and giving Obama a powerful nothing-to-loose, pull-out-the-stops, second term so he can effectuate his agenda and get one or two more SCOTUS appointments sufficient to over-rule Citizens United. And YES WE F*CKING CAN!
Show me any viable presidential candidate and Barack Obama is as good as it gets. It is as it is. I’ll not cut off my nosed to spite my face. With all due respect, the risk of an Obama second term are far less (and the possibilities far greater) than handing the helm to a pack of right wing nut jobs, megalomaniacs and demagogues who *are* the wrecking crew that got us precisely where we are.
I am neither Democrat nor a Republican and would take umbrage at being called either, but neither am I stupid so I’ll vote for Obama even if I must hold my nose against the acrid stench of American politics poisoned by propagandists who are owned by almost all our sources of information. Sorry, I am not about to throw the proverbial baby out with infamous wash. May cooler heads prevail.
Yes, indeed, I'd rather deal with straight-up evil people than liars like Obama, who promise "hope" and "change" only to renege on the promises that got him into the White House. Obama's betrayal is, in my book, a worse evil than the Repugnicans' outright evil. At least we know that the Repugnicans are the enemy, but Obama pretended to be our friend.
I've heard many times the bullshit "argument" that to oppose Obama only helps the 1 percent. Fact is, to support Obama only helps the 1 percent. Perhaps both are true and we're fucked no matter how you slice it.
I tend to believe the polls when polls taken by different polling agencies at the same time show the same results. If you are alleging that the polling agencies are in cahoots to present false results to the public, then you need to back that up with some evidence, don't you think?
I acknowledge that Obama inherited a huge fucking mess. No doubt. However, when he had both houses of Congress in his party's control for two years, he didn't do enough with his power. He squandered the rare opportunity to push through a progressive agenda. Instead, he wasted his time and energy trying to make the Repugnican Tea Party set wuv him -- which never was going to happen, in no small part because, as you correctly point out, he's black and they're a bunch of racists and white supremacists.
I don't blame Obama for what he inherited, but I do blame him for not doing nearly enough when he could have. He had one shot and he blew it big time.
I cannot in good conscience support Obama because to do so is to support the Democratic Party's continued drift to the right. To support him also would enable future politicians to get away scot-free with reneging on their campaign promises. If there is no price to pay for violating campaign promises, then there is no reason not to keep on violating them. I won't be a part of such enabling.
I'm not a registered Democrat either -- I'm registered with the Green Party, because the Democratic Party largely nauseates me.
Speaking of the Green Party, Ralph Nader has been said to believe that things have to get worse before they can get better. I tend to agree with that, and a President Romney might, just might, be the long-term solution to the fact that the Democratic Party has not been on our side for many, many years now.
I don't care what the Democrats' populist rhetoric is. I look at what populist results they do or do not achieve, and in the past three years, Obama has achieved very little. He does not deserve another term.
To cavalierly dismiss Obama as a member of the 1% is not mere prejudice but bigotry. He is only recently in that category by virtue of EARNING is as an author.
I live close to the poverty line and yet I live better than 70% of the poor suckers in this planet. I would hope they did not despise me for the good fortune of living in America. "Evil" is an ugly slander. Specifically, as an adult, define his EVIL and show me how and serious viable contenders are better. Otherwise it all just flying hyperbole no one can take seriously and, add the vulgar language, if sounds like and infantile a hissy fit tantrum.
The last thing that Obama wants to do is to anger the 1 percent. Because he is one of them. I didn't mean that he's one of them because he's a millionaire, but because he does their bidding; however, thank you for pointing out that his income also makes him one of them.
That's a GREAT "defense" of Obama that I hear a lot from the Obamabots like you: "ALL politicians lie!" At least you admit that he's a liar, though...
My definition of an evil person is a person whose actions consistently harm others but who is not bothered by this fact. Obama's drones that repeatedly kill innocent civilians in the Middle East, for instance -- if I were responsible for the death of just one innocent person I would feel awful, but from what I can tell, Obama sleeps just fine at night.
Obama also just OK'd a law that gives him the right to kill any American citizen without due process -- just like the BushCheneyCorp would have done. Don't worry; soon he might have all dissisents like me slaughtered, knowing that people like you will defend him no matter what he does.
Obama is an evil man, a wolf in sheep's clothing. That's not hysterics. That's discernible fact. And perhaps the most scary thing about him is the number of good(?) people -- sheeple -- he's able to drag into his evil.