Pop-star president’s power already dissipating

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Conn Carroll @ The Washington Examiner:

“The organization doesn’t exist without belief in the candidate,” White House senior adviser David Plouffe told Politico after November’s election. “They turned out for Barack Obama. It was all because of him.”

“All because of him.” That comment may sting the hundreds of Democratic candidates who spent countless hours working on their own campaigns, but it is also probably true. Obama is a fantastically popular political figure whose personal connection with voters led to record turnout among many demographics.

But Obama’s appeal probably will not last much beyond 2016, if it even lasts that long. But you need not take my word for it — nor even Plouffe’s. Ask Obama’s own 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina. When pressed by Politico to explain why Obama’s re-election campaign was reluctant to share its now-mythical voter database with other Democrats, Messina said: “You know, this organization was built for people who supported this president … those people were involved because of the issues and positions the president took, and … you can’t just hand it to the next candidate. They have to have their own relationship with voters. … Look, we learned from our shellacking we took in 2010: Too many Democrats thought they could put Barack Obama’s picture on a piece of literature and his supporters would turn out magically for them. It doesn’t work like that.”

Indeed, it doesn’t. Just look at Virginia’s Prince William County, which went for Obama by identical 16-point margins (58 percent to 42 percent) in both 2008 and 2012. In 2009, with no Obama on the ballot, the county broke for Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell by 18 points (59 percent to 41 percent). And then in 2010, federal Republican candidates again beat their Democratic counterparts 52 percent to 46 percent.

Obama may have turned Virginia’s Washington suburbs blue, but only when his name was on the ballot. Without him, far fewer Democrats bother showing up to the polls. Other Democratic candidates do not connect with voters the way Obama does.

And the voters who do turn out to vote for Obama don’t seem all that interested in staying politically active after Election Day either. After Obama was elected in 2008, there were tons of stories speculating about how he would use his then-unprecedented 13 million-name campaign email list.

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Since I voted in my first Presidential election (1968), I’ve experienced more losses than wins (where a “win” is defined as my candidate getting elected). What this experience has taught me is that there are two ways of dealing with defeat. The first way is to pretend that it didn’t really happen and that the winning candidate didn’t really win on his own merits — that it was all just a combination of unfortunate events, leading to an undeserved victory. This can be called the “4 years of denial” mode of coping. The second way is to acknowledge defeat (“hats off to the President,” is the way Lindsay Graham graciously put it) and then proceed to make the best of it, which starts with realizing that family, job, faith, health, and friends are what really count, happiness-wise. All of the preceding are virtually never impacted in a meaningful way by the actions and power of the Presidency (particularly since the end of the military draft, when a President did have the unilateral power to decimate families).

This particular blog post shows an unfortunate eagerness to proclaim Obama’s Presidency a failure, before he’s even been sworn in for his 2nd term. What it tells me is that it is going to be a very long 4 years for the author and for those who share this particular mode of post-election coping.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA

@openid.aol.com/runnswim:

Yes, Larry, family, job, faith, health and friends are the most important things in life, but when we have a president who has set out to destroy the happiness we gain from those things, because he believes that he can acheive the socialist utopia that no one else in history has ever been able to acheive, we have a right to grumble about him.

What Obama is doing to this nation will not be fully felt until he is long gone from office. The Obama/Reid cabal will take this nation down a road that no one is going to want to travel in the future. We are becoming Greece as the CIC lies to the American people with not one twinge of conscience.

The only good part of all this pending disaster is that you are going to see your taxes go up. You, and all the Beast/Left Coasters who voted for Obama thinking he was going to restore the economy with Saul Alinsky/Marx policies.

Larry, your sanctimony might have an iota of credibility if we didn’t have the memories of all the leftist wastebucket propagandists like Medea Benjamin and her code pinko cabal being treated like rock stars whenever a republican was in office. If we didn’t have Hillary Clinton herself saying “Dissent is patriotic” when a republican is in office…if we didn’t have all the quotes from Obama demanding the closure of Gitmo but then keeping it open…or the quotes from that duplicitous SOB that “raising taxes during a recession is wrong” when he was running in 2008, but now that he doesn’t fear losing an election he insists on cramming even more taxes down our throats to buy the votes of the uneducated, the lazy, and the idiot leftist zealots too dim to see the inherent self-enslavement of socialist philosophy.

What the left and the evil Obama are doing is against the US Constitution. Progressive taxation was Marx’s method for bringing down a capitalist society, which is exactly what Obama is trying to do, exemplified by his admission that he knows raising taxes on the top 2% won’t fix the debt and deficit problems, but he is doing it under the concept of ‘fairness’.

Banning firearms is what tyrants do to make it easier to control/abuse/murder the people.
National Socialist health care is not about improving quality medical care, but about – once again – CONTROLLING THE MASSES. If you doubt that, then please explain why Obama and the democrats voted to exempt themselves and their family members from the effects of Obamacare? If it is such a great freakin idea, then why aren’t Pelosi, Reid, et al just chomping at the bit to get into the government health care exchange they want the rest of us forced into? Please explain how creating 15,000 new IRS agents but doing nothing to produce more doctors does anything to increase access to medical care…

Please, Larry, take your misguided self-guilt that drives you to believe the deceptions of leftist ideology and flush it away. Read the Federalist Papers to understand what the Founding Fathers really intended when they built our government, and stop believing the “feel-gooderism” palaver spouted by Hollywood airheads and lying politicians. Stop forging the chains of your own enslavement on their political plantation, because that is exactly what you are doing.

@Babydoc #3 – Oh, Bravo my friend!!…Excellent! Now, what is scary is that, if you look back in history…what you say – it is all there…it just didn’t happen in this country…Yet…

Quite frankly, I pray it doesn’t and that we who feel the same way, are dead wrong. But these ‘things’ that [may] come to pass aren’t always aparent, especially to those not paying attention, are in denial or to the ignorant [is bliss] among us…

Why is there seemingly, so relatively few of us who see the writing on the proverbial wall????