Barack Obama’s presidency is quickly descending into Jimmy Carter territory.
That means he is not only out of the mainstream and out of touch, he now is being seen as an incompetent president. And once that happens, the vultures begin to circle.
Recent evidence that this is happening:
- Democrat congressional candidates are begging the White House not to campaign for them this fall; these candidates do not want to be photographed with Obama! Who would have predicted that 18 months ago?
- The president’s performance on the New York City ground zero mosque has roiled his weakening political situation.
- Rahm Emanuel spent three days this week on the phone begging Democrats not to split — as Harry Reid did — from the president over this mosque issue.
- New polls show an increase in the number of Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim; and these polls were conducted before his ham-handed handling of the mosque controversy.
- A new story has been published revealing that the president still has not joined any D.C.-area Christian church. He says it “would be too disruptive for the church” if he joined. What hogwash!
- Add in the recent Michelle Obama Spain trip and the president being left alone on his 49th birthday and you have to wonder exactly what is going on inside the Obama White House and the Obama family, too.
- All of this makes political professionals scratch their heads. The smooth-running 2008 campaign operation has not translated to a well-run White House.
Consider the mosque issue: Friday night at a Ramadan dinner in the White House, the president reads from his ever-present teleprompter and clearly referred to the controversial downtown NYC mosque, despite his next-day denials.
For that speech to make it up to the teleprompter it had to go through a series of White House offices — ranging from speechwriting to the political office and probably the National Security Council as well — before getting to the senior staff for their review.
So what Obama said that night was indeed the policy of the White House. This was not some off-the-cuff gaffe.
Clearly by the next morning the White House was besieged with calls of protest from stupefied Democrats running for office this year begging the president to back off. And thus Mr. Obama did try to retract his Friday night statement — thus now showing a lack of command for the issue.
He is indeed incompetent. He fumbles each issue — and reacts to criticism with lightning speed by often reversing himself.
If we use the Jimmy Carter analogy, then let us follow it all the way. By 1980 Democrats were split over re-electing Carter. And the GOP had an establishment candidate in George H.W. Bush versus the outsider, Ronald Reagan. Reagan trounced Bush and then trounced Carter.
So, is something similar shaping up for 2012?
Or will the GOP this time — like they did in 1996 and 2008 — opt for a mediocre, boring, undaring, timid candidate who will be easy meat even for Obama?
That is the question.
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