Posted by
Bill Crawford on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 8:41:35 PM
The political situation is quite crazy at the moment. It will get crazier.
The Democrats left town this Summer in an adrenaline hurry, fed in July by the Charlie Cook Report that predicted for the first time that the odds were better than even that the Republicans would take back the House this year. Cook at present is holding a bare GOP takover as a baseline, or a best case Democrat scenario.
The polling: This is more protracted than any time I've ever seen, including my forensic analysis of the '94 election (my intro to real world polling). It isn't bad enough that almost all of Obama's swing votes from the 2008 coalition he built are stripped away. The internals on these polls are horrific, and getting worse for the Democrats every week. The right track/ wrong track polling, the generic party polling is leaning more towards the Republicans now than it was in October of '94.
The conservative backlash: The Tea Party people have had their fill of being called provincial and racist. They all feel like they are living out the first ten chapters of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". They are scared witless at the debt we are running up. The conservative movement that was split in '06 between immigration reform and 'secure the border first' have moved almost entirely into the latter camp. These people are riled as hell, and will turn out like they did in 2004 with little or no prompting this year.
The economy: Is going nowhere. Businesses in this country are sitting on more than a $trillion in cash, and they will continue to. They have sat through health care, EPA and Congressional threats over cap & trade and are now awaiting to see what happens in November, then in the lame duck Congressional session following, and then what happens to the Bush tax cuts. Until they see some sort of predictability, they ain't hiring. They will continue to take the employees they already have and work them to death. Unemployment will only get better if more people 55-59 years old give up looking for work and sign up for partial Social Security.
Editor's note: the White House is proposing now that this dormant cash be used to "shore up pension funds". Just when you think the white noise insanity is peaking, somebody always speaks up and teaches you another lesson.
Obama the suddenly tone deaf politico: Health care was unpopular, but could have been sold better. What added to it's stigma was the impression that it was so important to the political class that they all ignored the unemployment rate all this time. Then he took a 70-30 issue like the Arizona immigration law and turned his Justice Department on them. He sued the State of Arizona. And while the dust on that was settling, Obama takes the NYC mosque issue and makes it national. Nobody asked him to step on that one.
This last part is pouring kerosene on the bonfire the Democrats are trying to put out. Many Democrats who won in swing districts in 2006 got a second term in the Obama windstorm two years later. Now they are twisting in hell, trying to explain all the votes the leadership busted them to make last year. This is a hole that only a huge money advantage can dig you out of.
The major point being, the phenomenona I see making the polling worse every week are not being corrected. Obama won't shut up. Joe Biden won't shut up. Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters want to have public House Ethics trials a month before Election Day. Chuck Schumer is complaining that the voters are "sour". It can't be that their ideas are unpopular, there must be something wrong with the voters- right?
I don't know, folks. That's not in my lexicon of winning friends and influencing people.
What it comes down to is that, if this crap continues unabated- if Obama does not get his head out of his butt and start talking less like a Law Professor and more like the man on message from two years ago, this could end up with a net gain of 60+ seats in the House and 12-14 in the Senate. Not since Barry Goldwater valiantly carried his base off the lemming cliff in '64 have we seen such a beating.
Well, they earned it.