Obama’s Second-Term Troubles
on March 15, 2013 at 6:44 am…have already begun:
According to the Washington Post-ABC News poll, half of independents express a negative opinion of the president’s performance; just 44 percent approve. A majority of Americans give Obama negative marks on handling the economy. And the president has only a four-percentage-point lead over Republicans when it comes to whom the public trusts more to deal with the economy.
This is clearly not where a president who is less than two months into his second term wants to be. But in some respects, it’s not all that surprising. Mr. Obama, while he won his contest with Governor Romney fairly handily, was not a particularly popular president for most of his first term–and the key elements of his agenda are decidedly unpopular.
He didn’t win in November because people voted for him — he managed to scare them into voting against Romney, or not bothering to vote.
If you look at the total vote tally, Obama had four million FEWER votes in 2012 than he did in 2008. Romney actually did better than John McCain did in 2008 by a million votes.
Obama’s total was only 51.08% of the vote, hardy a mandate.
Obama got most of the votes for president. Dems also got most of the votes cast in Senate races, and in House races. It wasn’t a landslide, but there’s no question that the electorate preferred Democrats to Republicans.
Fortunately, that isn’t how American elections are conducted. It doesn’t matter if a Democrat won his district by an 800,000 vote margin, that doesn’t carry over into the other independent House or Senate elections. Adding up the total votes is a waste of time. Likewise, we don’t elect presidents by the national popular vote total and that’s a good thing by design.
preferred
Proper use of tense.
Ya, Obama won the election but what does that have to do with what Dennis said? You can’t dismiss every criticism with, “Obama won.” Just like Obama can’t dictate his policies by saying, “I won” although he is certainly trying.
According to Wikipedia, voter turnout was 57.5%, so less people voted for Obama than stayed him. Hardly proof that Americans love Democrats.
Duh, that should be ‘stayed home’.
Only two Presidents have ever run as an incumbent and received fewer votes than they did when they were first elected President. One was Obama and the other was running unopposed. All others whose total votes dropped off from their first win lost their bid for re-election.
Many even lost while getting more votes the second time around.
That Romney couldn’t capitalize on this speaks volumes.
erp. That first sentence should end with “and still won re-election.”
The President who got fewer second-time votes and still won (because he ran unopposed) was Washington. Obama is in a league of his own when it comes to hanging on by his fingernails, especially in thinking he won some kind of mandate.
OK, time to roll out my “concern troll” personna.
Mr. Obama with the lackluster economy was supposed to be beatable. 2010 showed the deep dissatisfaction with the direction Mr. Obama is taking us.
Thing is that the Right/Republican/Libertarian/TEA Party people voted in with the 2010 Shellacking were voted in as “anybody but President Obama” — they were not riding a tide of the Gary Cooper movie version of The Fountainhead of what people “out there in the electorate” wanted.
We just plain scared people with the Scott Walker/Rick Scott/John Kasich/Ryan Budget/take-the-Federal-government-to-the-brink-of-default-to-dictate-to-the-President program. We didn’t need Mr. Axelrod to have to work very hard to make this the President’s reelection platform, and yes, reelection on this scare mongering was a narrow win. If we didn’t scare people, it could have been a Ronald Reagan level landslide.
The thing is, if we can get the economy turned around and growing again, all of this worry about government-share-of-the-GNP will become a distant memory. The President has been driving the economy into the ground by doing everything in his power to keep energy expensive with that Climate Change and Green Jobs conceit.
Mr. Romney should have been building bonds with working people, both the producers and consumers of energy, visiting oil rigs in the Gulf, visiting coal mines. Instead he went into a hypothetical about how he would have managed the auto bankruptcies differently and got Michigan and Ohio mad at him, two states he should have won on the prosperity-through-energy strategy I speak of.
So, we, and I mean we on the Right/Republican/Libertarian/TEA Party blogosphere worked hard to get Mr. Obama reelected, and did I say, there is no Grand Bargain (the 10:1 spending cuts to tax increases posed in the Primary debates, make me laugh), so we will just have to hold the line on taxes and suffer the deficits and muddle through the next 4 years.