What Do We Do With Barack Obama?

[JamesL]

Who likes the president?

Rich Democrats aren’t coughing up anymore, the Times reports. The Goldman Sachs crowd has dropped him cold.

His inside circle can’t seem to get out of the White House fast enough.

Approval ratings suck.

Other Democratic politicians don’t want him on the campaign trail.

Black people have, apparently, soured on him, too.

The people in the backyards he’s visiting don’t seem very happy about having them in their backyards.

Obviously anybody the least right-of-center finds him anathema.

Who’s left? There is a block, but they seem stoic, dug in, anti-Fox. And you certainly don’t hear much of a passionate defense from them anymore.

The answer is that nobody likes him as much as they did, or as much as they thought they would, or even as much as they thought they should.

At this moment, we have a largely unrecognizable figure in the White House. The weirdly continuing questions about his birth place and religion may be not so much a slur as a demented metaphor for his real lack of identity—and friends.

There’s a guilty sense, too. People are edging away from him because they now feel they got it so wrong. It’s buyer’s remorse with recrimination—self-recrimination.

How did everybody get it so wrong is a question many people seem to be asking themselves—not least of all these people slinking out of the White House.

It is not just that he has turned out to be something different. In fact, reasonably, he isn’t that different. The more powerful sense of remorse or at least sheepishness may come from people now asking themselves how and why they came to think of him as different than he was. More confounding, they may not really now be able to remember just who exactly they thought he was.

So to refocus the story: Some mass misperception put Barack Obama in the White House and now nobody knows what to do with him.

Can there be a more awkward situation?

More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: @MichaelWolffNYC.

 

[Trader666]

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Quote from JamesL:

Who likes the president?

 

[Range Rover]

Quote from JamesL:

Who likes the president?

Rich Democrats aren’t coughing up anymore, the Times reports. The Goldman Sachs crowd has dropped him cold.

His inside circle can’t seem to get out of the White House fast enough.

Approval ratings suck.

Other Democratic politicians don’t want him on the campaign trail.

Black people have, apparently, soured on him, too.
[/i]

His approval ratings are at 47 on Rasmussen Reports and 46 on gallop.Thats higher then bush when he left office and even higher then Reagan at this time during his presidency

He is campaigning for candidates,most recently in Pennsylvania

It is absolutey false that blacks are souring on him

This guy should check his facts before writing articles

 

[Range Rover]

Quote from JamesL:



The people in the backyards he’s visiting don’t seem very happy about having them in their backyards.
[/i]

Obama overshadows Pa. candidates
By: Emily Schultheis
October 10, 2010 11:07 PM EDT

PHILADELPHIA — At a rally in Philadelphia’s Germantown section Sunday afternoon, President Obama’s 27-minute speech began and ended with deafening cheers and applause from the crowd.

Two other politicians there went almost unnoticed: Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato.

Obama’s Pennsylvania rally was intended to bolster Sestak and Onorato, who are both trailing their Republican opponents in the polls. But rather than put the spotlight on the two pols leading the statewide ticket, the President’s visit only served as a reminder of the uphill battle both candidates face in the leadup to Election Day.

In his speech, Obama recalled the energy and excitement of the 2008 campaign, using the rally to get the Philadelphia community “fired up” for an election in which his name isn’t on the ballot. First-time voters — largely African-Americans and young people, who made up a majority of his audience Sunday afternoon — are two sections of Obama’s 2008 constituency that Democrats nationwide are most worried about getting to the polls in November.

Sunday’s “Moving America Forward” rally, one of several similar rallies Obama is holding across the country, was designed to excite those voters. It featured a whole host of top Pennsylvania Democrats, including Gov. Ed Rendell and Sen. Bob Casey, and even a concert performance by The Roots.

Yet Sestak and Onorato seemed merely an afterthought at the event — Onorato spoke for just over two minutes, and Sestak barely spoke for one. Where the crowd went wild for Obama, their enthusiasm for Sestak and Onorato was only lukewarm. And while Obama made brief references to each in his speech, he focused on national trends rather than talking extensively about either of them.

The rally’s location underscored the importance of strong Philadelphia turnout for both Democrats.

The two candidates have a distinct advantage over their opponents in overwhelmingly Democratic Philadelphia. Even though a late September Franklin & Marshall poll showed Onorato just 4 points behind Republican state Attorney General Tom Corbett and Sestak 9 points behind Republican Pat Toomey statewide, those figures were flipped in Philadelphia. There, the poll found, Sestak tops Toomey 42 percent to 25 percent and Onorato leads Corbett 40 percent to 17 percent.

But for a Democratic candidate to win statewide in Pennsylvania, they can’t just win Philadelphia — they need to win big.

Barack Obama carried Philadelphia by a 67-percentage-point margin in 2008: a full 83 percent of the city’s residents voted for him, compared to just 16 percent for Sen. John McCain. That jaw-dropping margin resulted from a huge influx of first-time voters —many of them young people and African-Americans.

Onorato, who hails from Pittsburgh, does not have the built-in name recognition in Philadelphia that Rendell, a former Philadelphia mayor, enjoyed in 2002 when he won the first of his two terms. A full 43 percent of Philadelphia voters said they were still undecided in the governor’s race, according to the F&M poll.

At a West Philadelphia rally last month, Onorato acknowledged that fact.

“I come to Philadelphia every week, weekdays and weekends, to get my message out,” he told the crowd. “They know me in the West, and I want to make sure they know me in the East.”

Sestak, despite representing a House seat in the Philadelphia suburbs, has a similar challenge in the city: a third of Philadelphia voters in the F&M poll said they were undecided in the Senate race. And he also must navigate a still-awkward relationship with a state and national Democratic establishment that wholeheartedly supported his Philadelphia-based primary opponent, Sen. Arlen Specter.

In recent weeks, Democratic heavyweights have been eager to make peace with Sestak and campaign with the struggling Onorato — proof of the importance national Democrats place on wins in Pennsylvania. Both Obama and Biden headlined fundraisers for Sestak last month, and former President Bill Clinton campaigned with both Sestak and Onorato several weeks ago. And Specter, who has kept his distance from Sestak since the primary, will headline a fundraiser for the Democratic candidate on Monday.


© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC

 

[nutmeg]

Maybe after the elections he might step up to the plate and be a leader. He is probably beholden to "the old gaurd". IE the Reids & Pelosis - the power structure and the Rangels and the Waters the ethical culture.

 

[Free Thinker]

Quote from JamesL:

Who likes the president?

.[/i]

the stock market.

 

[Range Rover]

Quote from nutmeg:

Maybe after the elections he might step up to the plate and be a leader. He is probably beholden to "the old gaurd". IE the Reids & Pelosis - the power structure and the Rangels and the Waters the ethical culture.

He's more beholden to Republicans imo.Massive deficit spending,bailouts,bringing Romney care national,continuing the patriot act,continuing Bushes wars,trying to pass Bush and Mccains amnesty plan,etc.

 

[Free Thinker]

Quote from Range Rover:

He's more beholden to Republicans imo.Massive deficit spending,bailouts,bringing Romney care national,continuing the patriot act,continuing Bushes wars,trying to pass Bush and Mccains amnesty plan,etc.

exactly. the reason supporters have lost the passion for him is because he has been a better republican than george bush. every thing he has signed into law could have been proposed by a republican president.

 

[Trader666]

LOL. So blame Obamacare that was shoved down Americans' throats by Obama and democraps who didn't even read the bill on Romney.

Quote from Range Rover:

He's more beholden to Republicans imo...bringing Romney care national

 

[bugscoe]

Quote from Free Thinker:

the stock market.

New Survey Confirms that Regime Uncertainty Is Spooking Investors
by Robert Higgs

Writing for CNBC’s “Behind the Money,” John Melloy describes the findings of a recent survey of investors:

Institutional investors fear a government policy mistake far more than inflation, terrorism, a housing double dip, a weak dollar, poor earnings or any other potential risk to the economy, according to a survey of 100 mutual fund, hedge fund and pension fund managers by Citigroup Global Markets.
“Government Policy Missteps” garnered more than a third of the participants’ votes as their biggest fears in the quarterly survey, ahead of the more than 15 percent who cited “Protectionism,” which is also strongly-tied to the actions of the Administration and Congress.

Last week, I had occasion to speak to several wealthy investors, each of whom attested to the apprehensions associated with regime uncertainty. Most of them seem convinced that the Fed is in the process of destroying the dollar, but none of them has a firm expectation about what will replace it as an international reserve currency. Many see no good prospects for domestic investment at present, except in certain commodities. Needless to say, perhaps, such an outlook by investors does not portend a robust recovery from the current recession, if indeed it is compatible with any recovery at all.

We live, as the saying goes, in interesting times—indeed, much too interesting.