Ok, so a week in politics is a long time. Therefore, anyone who presumes to pontificate upon the US presidential election that is still about twelve months off must be a sandwich short of a picnic.
Yet, if present grass roots political realities in the US continue then it looks as if President Obama is not just going to lose the White House, but he is going to lose in such a way that the defeat will be labelled catastropic and historic. We will see. Ever since Obama took office we have ruminated on the likelihood that Obama would prove to be another Jimmy Carter--a president driven by naive ideological mishmash emotionalism, perceived as weak by the world, incompetent and ineffective at home. His subsequent trouncing was a thing to behold (entirely unexpected by the media pundits at the time, by the way).
It looks like we may have underestimated the negative fortunes of President Obama.
Whilst Carter may have had many faults, corruption was not one of them. To his shallow ineptitude, Obama has recently added the dirty smell of corruption, using tax payers money to reward companies which gave him financial support in his 2008 presidential campaign. He appears to have acted like a true-to-type Chicago politician covertly working behind the scenes to ensure that his "debtors" get federal contracts and tax payer money.
One current scandal involves a hapless solar panel ("green-energy") company, called Solyndra--now bankrupt. Here is a piece from Reuters on the matter:
Solyndra is the bankrupt solar company that received the first Department of Energy loan under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It also is notorious in that its largest financial backer, George Kaiser, was a substantial supporter of President Barack Obama in 2008 and regularly visited the White House following the election.The article goes on to trace how the company principals at Solyndra appears to have known that their company was going bankrupt, engineered a Federal bailout, but ensured that they themselves, rather than other creditors, got the money into their own pockets.
Many media outlets have been covering the contacts between George Kaiser, Solyndra officials, administration officials and members of Congress. A rich paper trail will no doubt yield the facts of SolyndraGate. But my interest has always been in following the money trail and trying to understand how the United States, contrary to law, became subordinate to George Kaiser’s Argonaut in bankruptcy court.
Obama is already in deep trouble at the grass roots. It would seem that not only are his prospects of re-election tenuous, but that the House and the Senate will result in a Democratic annihilation. This from the left-leaning Politico:
No one’s ready to write off the House yet. But in the wake of two recent special election defeats and President Barack Obama’s declining poll ratings, Democrats are increasingly pessimistic about their prospects of winning back control in 2012.Assuming that there is going to be a rout resulting not just in a Republican presidency, but also in Republican control of the House and Senate, to us the real focus now needs to be on Congress. Republican presidents, by-and-large, prove to be compromised, disappointing, and confused. They end up being very big spenders. Fiscal conservatives they are not. Each of the current runners for president in the Republican Party has weaknesses, gaps, inconsistencies, and foibles.
As recently as May, when the GOP plan to overhaul Medicare looked to be a silver bullet after a dramatic special election victory, Democrats held a glimmer of hope that the House might be in play. Now, resigned to the likelihood that the president will be a down-ballot drag in many races and absent signs of an electoral wave on the horizon, Democrats are scaling back their expectations.
Interviews with more than two dozen operatives and House members in both parties reveal that the cautious optimism of the spring has given way to a more grim view of the hurdles facing Democrats in 2012 — an unpopular president on the ballot; scores of vulnerable Republican incumbents bolstered by redistricting; free-spending, GOP-allied independent groups that will outpace their newer Democratic counterparts; and long-standing historical election trends.
While the idea of recapturing the House in 2012 has always been something of a long shot in the wake of the massive losses House Democrats suffered in 2010, the consensus is that the odds have never been longer. “I’m glad the election’s not today,” said Democratic pollster Keith Frederick, a veteran of House races. “Every poll shows independents losing their patience for the president. These House elections tend to get nationalized, and there’s no doubt right now that as a referendum on Barack Obama, House Democrats lose.”
A Republican president simply cannot be relied upon to act consistently with an ideology of small-government conservatism. To turn the tide back in the United States requires a small-government anti-Federal House and Senate. The Tea Party folk need to concentrate their attention upon the local and state elections for Congress. If genuine small-government, fiscally right conservatives take control of the two legislative houses and begin to act consistently with those principles then which of the current Republican crop wins the presidential election and occupies the White House is less important.
If both the House and the Senate go small-government conservative, then it may be appropriate to think that "hope and change" slogans should be trotted out again.
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