The midterm elections of 2010 will be recalled as a time when the majority of voters said, not just No, but Hell No!
Zogby Interactive released the results of a survey taken between October 29 and November 1. “One-half of likely voters say they do not plan to vote for President Barack Obama in 2012, compared to 40% who say they expect to support them. The same poll also found that 57% see today’s election as a referendum on the President.”
The elections have many candidates on the ballots across the nation and just one in the minds of Americans. The view that it is a referendum on Obama was “widely held across major demographic groups. Exceptions to that opinion are Democrats (30%), liberals (30%, and moderates, who are evenly split on the question.
On Friday, the President will flee the country for a trip to India. Reportedly it will cost $200 million-a-day to maintain the security and other aspects of his visit to Mumbai, India. An estimated 3,000 people including Secret Service agents, U.S. government officials, and journalists will travel with the President.
The timing is no accident. The trip to the other side of the globe will leave a political debacle behind while providing another opportunity for Obama to strut upon a world stage. By the time he returns and the votes have been counted, it will be clear that voters rejected him in what well may be record numbers. The “wave” election will be more like a tsunami for the Democratic Party.
To those who hope Obama will draw some lessons from the outcome of the midterm elections, Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing in the November 2nd Wall Street Journal, offers some sobering thoughts. “Plenty of suggestions, none of them feasible, are in the air now about how he can reposition himself for 2012, and move to the center.”
“Mr. Obama is who he is: a man of deep-dyed ideological inclinations, with a persona to match. And that isn’t going away.”
The spotlight will shift slightly now from a politically wounded president, a lame duck with only two weapons, executive orders and vetoes. The light will fall on the emerging Republican leaders and, in not that long a time, emerging Republican political candidates.
Much depends on how they conduct themselves in the two years between now and the 2012 national elections because they must find ways to resist the executive branch’s further destruction of the economy. A 2% growth rate is anemic and insufficient.
Rarely mentioned in the press is the devaluation of the dollar. In that, the Federal Reserve has been complicit and its constituency has been the banks that have regained their footing while the rest of the nation’s business community is still looking for a sign of recovery.
The expected electoral losses will be blamed on the economy and that is surely a component, but generally unspoken is the meltdown of all the expectations his supporters had for Obama less than two years ago.
It is the belated discovery of his long held belief in socialism.
His personal traits have proven off-putting. What president refers to his political opponents as “enemies” and suggests they will have “to ride in the back” as if they were to be segregated in the way black Americans rebelled against in the 1960s?
Instead of expressing confidence in Americans, he felt they were “hardwired” to abandon their common sense to fear, along with the implication that they simply did not understand complex issues.
Voters discovered that Obama suffers from petulance and the refusal to take the blame for any bad decision. In 2006, after the midterm elections, George W. Bush said his party “took a thumping.” They had and they had earned it. Don’t expect to hear any such candor from Obama.
By the time of the midterm elections, Obama’s lack of any real preparation for the office was evident. He had spent barely 143 days in the U.S. Senate before embarking on his campaign. As an Illinois state senator, his record consisted mainly of voting “present.”
John Zogby, the pollster displayed a hall-of-mirrors interpretation of the survey. “Clearly,” he said, “many voters are holding President Obama accountable for a still struggling economy and
not giving him credit for the stimulus bill, healthcare reform or financial regulation.” (Emphasis added)
The reality is, of course, that the voters have given him full credit for the failed stimulus bill, the hated “Obamacare” reform bill, and so-called financial reform that does not even mention the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants—government entities—that had to be bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars.
When fifty percent of the voters go on record two years in advance of the next elections saying they will not vote for Barack Obama, he needs to begin thinking about life after the presidency.
© Alan Caruba, 2010
