Daar ontmoet ik je in het midden.
Expres niet, dat kun je haast niet voorstellen. Ik denk dat de snelheid waarmee het midden-oosten gedoe voorbij is van groot belang zal zijn. De 2012 run is in het 2e deel van het jaar als ik me niet vergis. Als de oorlog dan nóg bezig is dan denk ik dat zijn populariteit is blijven dalen en dat het dan heel moeilijk wordt. Als het snel afgelopen is, en hij zich weer meer naar binnenlandse zaken gaat richten, dan geef ik hem meer kans.
Zijn voordeel is wel dat er nog niet zo heel veel opgestaan is wat qua uitstraling etc het kunstje zou kunnen herhalen wat hij toen gedaan heeft.
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Las net in de Wallstreet Journal Online nog een stukkie over Obama 2012. Ik ken het vrouwtje die het geschreven heeft niet, dus weet niet in hoeverre het 'partijdig' geschreven is. Het stuk neigt zeker een beetje naar een bepaalde politieke voorkeur (ik hou mezelf nooit bezig met politieke zijden), maar er worden wat dingen aangevuld op eerdere info in dit topic. Heb wat dingen dikgedrukt gemaakt, over uitslagen andere polls, wat faire kritieken en wat dingen over zijn budget-speech.
Suppose everything we think we know about the president’s political position is wrong? That’s what I think became clear this week.
…
Let’s start with the immediate and go to the overarching. The president is immersed in another stressed and unsuccessful spring after a series of losing seasons. Internationally, he’s involved in a confused effort that involves bombing Libyan government troops and sometimes their rebel opponents, leaving the latter scattered and scurrying. Responsibility to protect is looking like tendency to deflect. Domestically, the president’s opponents seized the high ground on the great issue of the day, spending and debt, and held it after the president’s speech this week. In last week’s budget duel, the president was outgunned by Republicans in the House and outclassed by Paul Ryan, who offered seriousness and substance as a unique approach to solving our fiscal problems.
In this week’s polls:
An Ipsos survey says 69% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, up five points since March. Zogby has only 38% of national respondents saying Mr. Obama deserves re-election, with 55% wanting someone new. Mr. Obama carried Pennsylvania in 2008 by double digits; a poll there this week shows only 42% approving his leadership, with 52% disapproving. Gallup had the president’s support slipping among blacks and Hispanics, with the latter’s numbers dramatic: 73% supported him when he was inaugurated, 54% do now. Support among whites on Inauguration Day was 60%. Now it is 39%.
At this point everyone mentions Mr. Obama’s personal approval numbers, which are consistently higher than his leadership numbers. The RealClearPolitics average puts his personal approval at 47.6%, which doesn’t sound bad. But let me offer a hunch based on conversations with people from many walks of life and all regions the past 18 months.
The president’s personal numbers are probably lower than the polls report. Not that the polls are dishonest, but the American people don’t want to not like Mr. Obama. They don’t want to tell a young pollster that hey don’t like a man they elected two years ago, with excitement and hope, by a margin of 9.5 million votes.[b] There are two things I have never heard, not once, in the past year: “I love this guy—I love Obama,” and “If only John McCain were president, everything would be better.”
We all get stuck in the day-to-day and lose sight of the overarching, but the overarching fact of Mr. Obama’s presidency is that he made a bad impression his first years in office and has never turned that impression around. [b]He spent his first 14 months moving on what he was thinking about—health care—and not what the public was thinking about—the economic crash, jobs, spending. He seemed not to be thinking like everyone else, which underscored the idea that he was unresponsive to the crises they were seeing. It’s hard to get past that.
His speech this week brought together all the strands of his flawed leadership. It was at moments clever, but merely clever, not up to the needs of the moment—and cleverness in a time of crisis comes as an affront. The speech seemed oblivious to recent history, as if the president had just discovered something no one knows about, a problem with spending, and has decided to alert us to the danger. He said other politicians attempt to cut by focusing on “waste and abuse,” but he knows the real secret: The problem is entitlement spending. But addressing entitlements is all anyone serious has been talking about for years; it’s what the Ryan plan is all about!
The speech was intellectually incoherent. An administration that spent two years saying, essentially, that high spending is good is suddenly insisting high spending is catastrophic. The president appealed for bipartisan efforts but his manner and approach leave his appeals sounding like diktats. His attempts to seem above the fray leave him seeming distanced and unwilling to risk anything.
Most important, the speech signaled that the White House, after all this time, sees the question of spending as a partisan tool, a weapon to be deployed in an election, and not an actual crisis. This is disrespectful toward citizens who feel honest alarm. *
Because of these flaws, the speech will have no afterlife, and a major speech with no afterlife might as well not have been given.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704116404576263411383190464.html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read
* En dan zou ik er deze uit willen lichten:
Most important, the speech signaled that the White House, after all this time, sees the question of spending as a partisan tool, a weapon to be deployed in an election, and not an actual crisis. This is disrespectful toward citizens who feel honest alarm.
Dit is wat ik me in dit opzicht het meeste 'zorgen' om maak; het belang van externe veldslagen winnen en miljarden uitgeven wat hoger lijkt te liggen dan het oplossen van het grootste interne probleem; het begrotingstekort. Dan komen de Amerikaanse soldaten, misschien met een victorie op zak en misschien niet, terug van een buitenlandse hel in hun eigen hel waarin ze hun huizen en banen kwijt raken of veldslagen in eigen land kan gaan voeren bij wijze van. Vietnam all over again, zeg maar..
