Why a dead heat?

"Even Democratic pollster Peter Hart, one half of the bipartisan team that puts together the monthly Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, now puts Mr. Obama’s chances of re-election “at no better than 50-50.”

According to the average of eight national polls released in the two weeks until May 23, and compiled by Real Clear Politics, Mr. Obama has a marginal 1.8 percentage point lead over Mr. Romney.

The presidential race is effectively a dead heat.

The turnaround in Mr. Romney’s fortunes has stunned even his Republican allies, leading to a Wednesday headline in Politico, the U.S. capital’s political newspaper, reading: “GOP discovers that Mitt Romney could win.”

Of course, the national polls are of secondary importance, since the election will be decided in fewer than 10 swing states, as each candidate aims to accumulate the required 270 electoral college votes required to claim the Oval Office."  Globe and Mail

----------------------------------

Last week someone rebuked me for quoting Foxnews.  How about a newspaper in Canadia? "Terre de mes aieux..."  Well, some of them were from there.

Given the persona of Romney and the inherent advantage of incumbency, IMO BHO should be well ahead nationally.

He is not.  Why?

Factors against Obama:

-  A lot of people are secret racists and would never vote for him.

- A lot of people don't like his "European Socialist Policies." Most of those do not know what that means, but, no matter.

- Public confidence in the national economy is a "lagging indicator" in the public mind and the economy is only dimly understood by tens of millions of people who nevertheless are enfranchised.

- His left of center administration tends instinctively to take positions that irritate many in the US in the belief that non-"progressives" are not worth listening to.

       * Gay marriage is one of those.

       * An embroiled court room battle with the Catholic Church is another.

- There is deep suspicion that the tendency to embrace "progress" will be unfettered in a second term.

- Some Jews and other Zionists think him not friendly enough to Israel and they are doiong all they can to beat him.

Factors for Obama:

- Romney himself who seems to be completely incapable of identifying with non-rich people.

- Romney's polytheistic religion.

- Bain, the "vulture capital company."

- Romney's entourage of neocon foreign policy advisers.

- Women. Blacks and Hispanics are going to "stick with" Obama.

Think of a few more.  pl

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/worldview/new-polls-suggest-us-election-race-in-dead-heat/article2442441/

Comments

[different clue]

This will sound very hard to believe, but Obama will also lose votes from people who think he has never really been "leftist" or even "liberal" at all. His constant coddling of Wall Street Financialist criminality became and remains deeply embittering to many. Are we to assume that the whole financial crisis and collapse of 2008 contains not even one major crime somewhere under the wreckage? And yet the Obama-Holder Justice Department has conducted no major investigations into any aspect of any of it so far as I know.
Obama will lose votes from people who thought we had a golden moment to achieve some version of Canadian Style taxfunded Single Payer healthcare coverage. They (we/I) see Obama as having conspired with the Insurance Bussiness
and other healthcare-profiteering industries to prevent that from happening for decades into the future. They (we/I) bitterly resent the thought of being drafted into lives of Forced-Mandate premium servitude on the Insurance
Company Plantation. We still remember with deep personal bitterness Obama's offhand sneer about " little Single Payer advocates".

Obama may well lose votes from women and others who supported Senator Clinton during the primary process and still consider themselves and their majority of the voted-for delegates to have been betrayed and cast aside by
the Wall Street donor class and the Super Delegates and the
Democratic Party permaleaders like Reid and Pelosi.

I know that we have been warned in general about bulletin-boarding here for other blogs, but I hope I may be permitted to suggest two blogs in particular which offer evidence of deep distaste for Obama from "the liberals" and "the left". Those two blogs are called The Confluence by Riverdaughter and Naked Capitalism by Yves Smith. They list a whole range of factors arrayed against Obama that are not even hinted at by the Canadian paper referrenced above.

On the good-for-Obama side I would offer the Forced Restructuring (with Federal taxpayer-funded loans) of the American-based car companies GM and Chrysler. He will get a very large gratitude-vote in southeast Michigan and perhaps in those bordering parts of the Midwest which were saved from Moldavian levels of poverty by the prevention of GM's and Chrysler's impending extinction. And those "car country" voters will remember that Romney supported exterminating GM and Chrysler in order to exterminate the United Auto Workers union, as well as to incidentally facilitate the vulturistic profiteering by lucky rich people from the wreckage of the collapsed car companies.

( In all fairness, credit for saving the American car companies should be extended to President Bush as well because he extended the first multi-billion-dollar Bridge Loan to keep GM and Chrysler alive long enough to let them become Obama's problem).

[Walrus]

Murdoch supports Romney.

Wall Street supports Romney.

The 1% support Romney.

What else matters?

Then of course there is the question of Obamas supposed "Socialism". By my standards Obama hasn't done anything that could remotely be called Socialist

For example, a single payer national universal healthcare system has co existed side by side with a private system in Australia for at least Forty years to the fury of American big pharma who would dearly like to seee it dismantled so that they can visit their tender ministrations on us the way they do on you.

My girlfriend was diagnosed with colon cancer in September last year. What followed was immediate keyhole hemicolonectomy followed by Twelve chemotherapy (folfox6) sessions over the last Six months. MRI now shows she is clear as a bell, bloodtests likewise. Total cost to her - zero. Well not quite - all of us pay a 1.5% levy on taxeable income to fund this system. Socialism? Common &*^%$#ing sense!

Others would agree that there is little difference between Romney and Obama - they both work for the 1%.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/24/barack-obama-mitt-romney-apologist

The owner of "The Agonist" website quoted a friend:

"the difference is that the Dems at least offer to buy you dinner before they date-rape you. But you still don't get that dinner."

My gues is that the turnout of Democrats in November will be abysmal.

Have a pleasant and safe Memorial Day weekend.

[JohnH]

One of BHO's big problems is that he has stiffed his base, and not just slightly.

Some of his past supporters are simply not interested in voting for someone who has wholeheartedly embraced W's policies after shamelessly positioning himself as someone who would do the people's business. Instead, he has been the best buddy of Wall Street, Big Oil, and Big Pharma at the people's expense.

On the civil liberties side, BHO has been an unmitigated disaster. He has shown himself to be more than happy to destroy the Constitution by arrogating himself authority to designate Americans terrorists, lock them up, and throw away the key. Trial by a jury of one's peers be damned.

Bottom line: the election in November will truly be a choice between two evils. Given BHO's track record it is really hard to consider him the lesser evil. Given that BHO firmly embraced Simpson-Bowles, it's not even clear that he will gut Social Security and Medicare more gently than Romney, particularly when BHO no longer has to face re-election.

Obama's base will not vote for Romney, but they may well sit at home or even vote for anybody but Obama-Romney.

[CTuttle]

Exactly, dc... Democrats are the real conservatives...

I'm a PO'd, long suffering, Liberal...!

[Anonymous]

With few honourable exceptions, those voting for Obama are the same ones asking for a harsh punishment for Zimmerman.

No great complexities behind the electoral tendencies, unfortunately.

[Al Spafford]

The Republicans have been able to state over and over mythology re Obama without hardly a glance of critic by the major news media. "Obama is a spendthrift, mortgaging our children's future" --a lie, He has kept Federal spending FLAT.
http://sn144w.snt144.mail.live.com/default.aspx?n=1479726162&fid=1&fav=1#n=2012543046&fid=1&fav=1&mid=25e82cb7-9fa1-11e1-9b7f-002264c17c86&fv=1
"Obama has socialized medical care" --a lie, he adopted the Republican proposal of several yrs ago, keeping the USA away from a "European" single Federal payee system.
But, ya tell a lie over and over again, it becomes a "truth"! Didn't someone in Germany yrs back say that?

[Nancy K]

As a Liberal I feel that Obama has not sufficiently supported his base, however as a Liberal there is no one I can vote for except Obama. For me to sit home is to vote for Romney and that will never happen. Obama is not really the lesser of two evils, I am hoping he will remember who he is in his 2nd term.

[SAC Brat]

I always like your political analysis. Coincidentally, I was listening to a podcast of one of the Forrest Pogue interview tapes with George Marshall on my commute yesterday and was enjoying Marshall's observations of the nature of politicians of all parties and different political systems of government.(This was after Marshall talking about Monday Morning Quarterbacks and defending Robert E. Lee's campaigns.)

The major parties are lucky "None Of The Above" isn't on the ballot or the polls.

[SAC Brat]

I forgot to mention that the graphic for the post is thought provoking, considering the topic and the holiday.

Better tomorrows.

[Al Spafford]

Sorry, wrong link to my comments above. This should be it:
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/obama-tax-revenue-drought-not-spending-binge

[turcopolier]

All

Someone wrote to tell me that my weakened mind has fallen under the influence of the media who are attempting to "sell" the idea that the presidential contest is a "horse race" rather than a contest between Democratic virtue and Republican evil. Well folks, it IS a horse race between the men who would be president. As Lewis Black says, "The Democrats suck and the Republicans blow." pl

[CTuttle]

Another major factor in play... AIPAC...!

[robt willmann]

Assuming that the opinion polls are valid, president Obama's main problem is that he has betrayed his many voters who "hoped" for actual "change" from George W. Bush. Instead, they have gotten a third Bush jr. term, and in some respects a worse one, especially domestically. Obama has prosecuted more whistle-blowers, has urged the judge-created state secrets legal privilege more, helped the telephone companies get "retroactive immunity" for illegally turning over the local and long-distance calling subscriber records of millions of Americans to the federal government--to the NSA? FBI? CIA? others?--in direct violation of a federal law (except for Qwest, whose head was then prosecuted for "insider trading" while the outlaw phone companies were permitted to merge with others), expanded the Afghanistan war and pilotless drone attacks in other countries (more than Bush jr.), no prosecution of massive financial fraud by banks and Wall Street firms even though there were many prosecutions of fraud regarding the 1980's Savings and Loan scandals, approval of the expansion of the Anti-Patriot Act and the FISA Act, approval of the recent National Defense Authorization Act with its provisions for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial, engaging in the assassination of U.S. citizens via a secret policy and not a law, and so forth.

This is like the opinion of different clue, Walrus, and JohnH above.

Betrayal creates strong reactions in people, especially when expectations are high. You could see it in the faces of voters at the election polling places in 2008, as they despised Bush jr. so much that they were determined to vote for Obama and purge the Republicans. They did so but now are pulling the knives out of their backs from the stabbing so deliberately and cynically executed by Obama and his administration.

Romney is extremely vulnerable concerning his corporate raiding, plundering, and leveraged buyouts while with Bain Capital, but Obama is not getting any real traction with that issue because he is dirty, too, having supported the massive TARP bank and Wall Street bailout law in 2008, refused to prosecute financial crime, appointed former employees of those organizations to financial policy posts in his administration, and so on. Even David Stockman--former Republican Congressman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981-85 for the Ronald Reagan administration, and an operator in the private equity game himself (not always successfully)--derisively attacks Romney's claim that he was a job creator at Bain Capital--

http://lewrockwell.com/goyette/goyette36.1.html

Certainly the Obama campaign team is figuring that the "liberals" and civil liberties-oriented and antiwar people are going to vote for him anyway, but, as has also been said, many of those people and Democrats might not vote at all, or might vote for the Libertarian candidate. A lot of Republicans will be energized, as they were in the 2010 elections, against Obama, his health care plan, and so forth, which resulted in a larger turnout by Republicans and wins for many Republicans against Democrats in local races that they normally would not have won.

Had Obama come out swinging and using the Democratic majority repealed the Patriot Act and other draconian legislation, broke up the extra-large banks and brought back the Glass-Steagall financial law, subpoenaed bank executives to testify at federal grand jury investigations of financial crime instead of inviting them to the White House, and demanded significant change to or withdrew from the so-called "free trade agreements", he would be absolutely unbeatable for re-election.

Instead, the lack of motivation in people who otherwise would vote for Obama, along with the motivation of Republicans and others to vote against him, rather than motivation to vote for Romney, will probably be the main reasons for his defeat, if he ends up losing.

[anna missed]

I'll go along with those citing Obama stiffing the base as a central reason for his pathetic numbers. I know lots of people who worked really hard for the guy 08, and now all I see is the rolling of eyes, and a great big collective yawn.

The general sense developing is that sure, Obama could loose against the weakest republican candidate in a long long time, but considering what Obama promised and what was delivered - corporatist domestic policy and Bush foreign policy, what real and substantive difference is left between the two?

[steve]

Agreed.

There is nothing "left" about Obama's domestic or foreign policies. He has coddled the banking and insurance industries, and snubbed labor, beyond what any republican of twenty years ago could have dreamed of.

Thus far, the only interesting thing about the politics of the Obama administration is the fact that republicans have been able to paint this moderate republican/democrat as some sort of socialist.

Good grief!

I won't vote for him.

[steve]

Well, Colonel, I think that nails it.

[Walrus]

Col. Lang,

How is your Bells?

[Morocco Bama]

BHO's a shoe-in for a second term. Want to bet? Romney will be destroyed from a public relations stand-point when the time comes....late summer, early fall. Romney will be made out to be the Republicans version of Dukakis in '88. The real question will be in this fine Kabuki Theater where we can all pretend this election will somehow change the course of events and make the world right again (as if it was ever "right"), is who/what will be Romney's Willie Horton? One would think that Gingrich and Santorum threw everything about Romney against the kitchen wall in the primaries, but I'm betting there's a whopper, or two, being held back for just the right time....not that BHO and Company need it. They've made their masters happy. No need for the Plutos to turn their backs on BHO after he's done exactly what he's been told to do.

Oh, and to me, Polls are meaningless anymore, if they were ever valid. Their only validity is pure comical genius.

[Yellow Dog]

Hmm. I agree with the author regarding BHO's chances.

Lately it has occurred to me to ask myself, "Which will accelerate the ultimate destruction of the GOP more, the wholesale re-introduction of Bush policies that would surely follow a Romney victory (Hello, John Bolton!), or the rush even further to the right that would follow a Romney defeat?"

[Cold War Zoomie]

A dead heat actually shows how weak Romney is.

Obama should be toast considering the unemployment and under-employment numbers along with the fizzled policies supposedly cobbled together for "Main Street." As others have said, the last four years has not been kind to the Obama supporters, especially young college grads with over 50% unemployment and growing mountains of student debt.

He's the luckiest man alive in politics right now.

[SAC Brat]

Is it possible that the media is just trying to gin up some excitement? Granted both fishheads stink. I'm disappointed that former Reagan Administration bank regulator Bill Black isn't running as a third party candidate. I think he could do well with a "We used to put these people in jail" campaign.

[JohnH]

Said more succinctly, what Obama offering his base to vote FOR? Beyond meaningless, well articulated sentences, there is nothing.

My local Congressman opposed the war in Iraq and the war and Afghanistan. Yet in 2007 he voted to renew funding for both. When asked why, he said that the supplemental appropriation bill contained some aid for New Orleans!

Every politician knows that a fundamental law of politics is that they need to give voters a reason to vote for them. Obama thinks he can secure the loyalty of his base in return for nothing.

[Alba Etie]

Lewis Black is one of my favorite commentators/comedians .

[Paul Deavereaux]

Obama is the best President imaginable for Wall Street/Bankers/Financial Criminals of all shades, the perfect front man. Using the word 'socialist' with 'Obama' is laughable. He's no more than a highly polished lawn jockey for the rich.

[Byron Raum]

The very tangible result of this is that Australians live 3-6 years longer, on average, than Americans. The same is also true of Canadians, the British, and other European countries with socialized medicine.

We also pay twice as much for our healthcare. People have tried to explain this away as that we subsidize all the research for the world, but then if this was the sole cause of the price difference, I'd think it should show better life expectancy results.