He took a “shellacking,” a 2012 poll shows him trail ing two Republicans, and losing candidates in his own party are griping about his “tone deaf” leadership.
And the Mad Hatter, Nancy Pelosi, refuses to exit quietly. Welcome to Barack Obama’s worst week in the Oval Office.
It started with Halloween and ended with Obama exposed as a diminished and damaged president. Merely listing his problems doesn’t do justice to his predicament.
The majesty of his brand and the aura of invincibility that marked his phenomenal rise have been shattered beyond repair. The midterm results were a furious, broad-based “no confidence” verdict on his stewardship.
In state after state, the elderly, independents and white women turned against him with a vengeance. His Midas touch became feet of clay, with his policies rejected and his team’s political competency discredited.
Things are so bad that the “Hillary” option is in the air again, though she swears no, no, no. Maybe her fingers are crossed?
If so, you can’t blame her. The wave of downbeat chatter about Obama includes supporters talking about a failed presidency and making references to Jimmy Carter, which is the kiss of death.
“The whole electoral map is back like it was in 2004,” said one fuming Democrat who cited the election of GOP governors in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida as Obama’s legacy. “I think his chances of being re-elected are no more than 30 percent.”
Obama, regarded as insular and arrogant by some who know him, has no one to blame but himself. Yet he no longer has control of the path to reinvention and re-election.
His long trip to Asia will give him distance, but the vacuum he leaves behind is being filled with criticism, including acid barbs from Dems. Key White House seats are empty as his return launches hand-to-hand combat with the reinforced GOP.
Obama’s problems are magnified by Pelosi’s daffy decision to try to become minority leader. Having led her House troops to a historic defeat, her announcement that “our work is not finished” reads like a parody.
Any more “work” of her kind and the country will be finished.
So Obama remains stuck to Pelosi and Harry Reid, who survived as Senate majority leader, albeit with a smaller majority.
Because the president already ruled out dumping Joe Biden, the Dem lineup for 2012 is set: Obama, Biden, Pelosi and Reid. How’s that for change?
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tells friends no Democrat can beat Obama in a primary because of his lock on the black vote. Yet she knows speculation about her won’t go away as long as he looks beatable, and it’s easy to imagine she enjoys the turn of fortunes.
The “beatable” sense comes from the CNN poll showing Republicans Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney topping Obama head to head. In a backhanded compliment, the poll shows Obama narrowly beating Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.
Obviously, it’s far too soon to count Obama out or any Republican in, but few presidential fortunes have fallen as fast. He was shunned by many members of his party, who saw him as a liability. Some he did try to help were sunk anyway.
Yet the change Obama needs is blocked by his stubborn view of what went wrong. In an interview with “60 Minutes” scheduled to air tonight, he again blames poor communication.
“Over the course of two years, we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to . . . persuading people and giving them confidence, and bringing them together, and setting a tone, and making an argument that people can understand,” he said.
That’s pure bunk. Voters understood exactly what he was doing, and repudiated it.
The question now is whether he decides to understand them. If he refuses, he’ll have another thing in common with Jimmy Carter.
Hey, nice going, ‘pal’
The results of the “Carl Paladino effect” amount to trickle-down disaster.
Republicans running for state comptroller and attorney general both got more votes than the buffoonish GOP gubernatorial candidate. That’s the reverse of how a ticket is supposed to work.
A strong candidate at the top can produce winners below, but Paladino doomed other Republicans by pulling a mere 1.4 million votes against Democrat Andrew Cuomo’s 2.6 million.
GOP comptroller candidate Harry Wilson got 1.9 million votes, about 465,000 more than Paladino, but still lost by 100,000.
AG wannabe Dan Donovan got 1.7 million, but also lost.
Heckuva job, Carl.
Free advice on Medicaid costs
Wisconsin’s newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, isn’t being fooled by handouts.
With Washington paying for Medicaid expansion only until 2017, when the states must start paying, Walker tells The Wall Street Journal:
“Free money is not free.”
Con’Dem’ned to play the fool
With state Senate control still uncertain, corrupt Dems who made it a laughingstock want an encore.
Said their spokesman: “We started in the majority, we remain the majority, and we will pull out all the stops to stay in the majority.”
Democracy be damned.
Long live King of Homeland
The GOP takeover in the House likely means Long Island Republican Pete King will head the committee on Homeland Security. That’s the good news.
Here’s the great news: His first order of business will be to slaughter some sacred cows.
“We’ve never had a hearing on the president’s plan to close Gitmo,” King told me last week. “We never had a hearing on the massacre at Fort Hood. Or on the plan to hold the 9/11 trial in New York courts.”
He sees those and other hot-button topics, off limits under a Democratic Congress, overripe for examination. They are part of his plan to take a harder look at terrorism, especially Islamic radicalization in America.
“I definitely intend to look at how mosques and prisons are being used to radicalize people and turn them toward violence,” King said.
The son of a former New York City police lieutenant, King, who opposes the Ground Zero mosque, is not afraid of the profiling debate on airline security.
“If an Irish guy is bombing planes, I have no problem paying more attention to Irish guys than Italian or Jewish ones,” he said. “If we suspect people from Yemen or Pakistan, it makes no sense to be searching everybody from Kentucky or Luxembourg.”
King thinks Obama’s team has come a long way from its dopey early days of calling Iraq and Afghanistan “overseas contingency operations” and terror attacks “man-caused disasters.” And he gives it high marks for thwarting the attempt from Yemen to explode bombs on cargo planes, a point he made personally to the president when Obama called after the election.
King and Obama have a friendly relationship, and Obama once offered to make him ambassador to Ireland. But King has no illusions he’ll be singing “Kumbaya” with the president.
“The way he frames it, no Republican idea can ever be a good idea,” King said. “He looks upon us as the Philistines, as people who are not as smart and sophisticated as he is.”