Republicans will inevitably nominate a candidate. And no matter who it is, some portion of the electorate will be faced with the oldest of political choices, aka the "lesser of two evils."
Much glee has been emanating from the mainstream media and their Democrat allies regarding the general ineptitude of the Republican candidates for president. This has caused a great deal of consternation among those appalled by the current occupant of the White House. Yet if a CBS poll quietly dumped on the public Friday, the day any news that does not accrue to Mr. Obama's benefit is disseminated, all is not well in Progresso-ville. The poll asks, "Does the president deserve to be re-elected?" 41 percent say yes, 54 percent say no.
Now the important part of this poll has nothing to do with the poll itself. The important part of this poll has to do with the fact that Mr. Obama is getting a hearty thumbs down while the Republicans have not only not chosen their candidate, but are still beating the hell out of each other to win the nomination. It also comes at a time when the unemployment rate dropped four-tenths of one percent, troops are being withdrawn from the Middle East, and according to the same poll, Mr. Obama's like-ability factor is still north of 50 percent. So what gives?
Here's what gives: the "Anybody But Obama" mentality is gaining some serious momentum.
It ought to. The majority of Americans may not be in on the latest political maneuvering, and they may be even less acquainted with the mind-numbing nuances of economic data, but they are definitely up to emotional speed on the two dominant feelings they and their fellow Americans are experiencing. Quite simply, an overwhelming majority of us are either afraid or angry.
Or both.
Mr. Obama, much to his discredit, and in a complete abandonment of anything resembling the ostensibly uplifting hope and change campaign he ran in 2008, has sought to exploit those two emotions. Mr. Obama's enemies list — and make no mistake, "enemy" is precisely the right term — consists of "do-nothing Republicans," "fat-cat" bankers and Wall Street executives, and anyone who believes that turning a majority of Americans into wards of the state is a bad idea.
Each of the above enemies can be brow-beaten with impunity by a president secure in the knowledge that the overwhelming portion of our "unbiased" media will provide resistance to revealing some inconvenient truths. Thus, it doesn't mater that "do-nothing" Republicans, who can still be over-ridden by the two-to-one advantage of a Democrat Senate and presidency, have passed budget bill after budget bill, only to see them tossed in the trash by a Democrat Senate that epitomizes do-nothing-ism, as evidenced by a failure to produce a budget bill of their own in over 900 days.
It also doesn't matter that no other other president in the last 20 years has taken more campaign money from Wall Street or that those campaign contributions constituted one-out-every-five dollars of his total take in 2008. Nor does the seeming contradiction of getting funding from one's enemies ever get the proper airing, because it would reveal that crony capitalists and Democrats are joined at the hip. Thus, for example, the idea that it "takes a campaign bundler to get a government loan" for a green energy company whose technology is obsolete, never quite rises to the level mainstream media scrutiny such an arrangement should merit.
And of course, the fact that the president can denigrate the self-reliant and can-do attitude that made America the envy of the world as an "your on you own" society, even as that society has spent trillions upon trillions proving itself to be exactly the opposite — to the point of fiscal suicide — will never be properly challenged.
Perhaps the ABO crowd may be noticing something else as well. Perhaps they notice the rather remarkable facility of a media that can ferret out factoid after factoid of each and every Republican candidate's life going back decades, even as much of the president's past remains a cipher. Such incuriosity, in light of what we do know about the president's past — including close associations with a racist preacher, two unrepentant domestic terrorists, and a Marxist mentor, along with a stint teaching the principles of community rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky — is astounding.
It gets even more astounding when one considers the fact that a man named Dr. John Drew stepped forward a year ago, claiming he was a contemporary of Obama at Occidental College. Drew who says he himself was a Marxist at time, makes the same claim about the president. "Obama was already an ardent Marxist when I met in the fall of 1980," said Drew.
Can a man change? Certainly. But apparently, further interviews of Drew or even asking the president himself about the veracity of Drew's comment is off limits — courtesy of the same press that would perform anal cavity searches of every other candidate if given the opportunity to do so.
The bet here is Americans are beginning to notice. Again, not so much the details, but the sense that something is profoundly wrong, and that the epicenter of that wrongness is located in the Oval Office — or on the golf course.
Republicans will inevitably nominate a candidate. And no matter who it is, some portion of the electorate will be faced with the oldest of political choices, aka the "lesser of two evils." Yet if a CBS poll is any indication one "evil" has already been identified in pretty stark terms. Anybody But Obama may not be an uplifting choice. Neither is the choice between impotency or death when on has prostate cancer.
Sometimes the instinct to survive as a human being — or a nation — is all there is.
