It took 3 years but that tingle has finally started to fade and some lefties are finally starting to realize what a failure this President is, and what an albatross he will be for their party:
He has been in and out of the high 30s for his approval, and in the low to mid-50s for his disapproval.
George W. Bush’s approval rating didn’t drop this low until Katrina hit.
Katrina hit in 2005, well into President Bush’s second term. It took Obama 33 months to get to that point.
Salon’s Matt Stoller suggests the Democrats should at least start to think about someone challenging Obama:
…on the economy, 71 percent of Americans disapprove of how Obama is doing his job. Even among reliably Democratic groups — union households, women and young people — he’s now unpopular.
No one, not even the president’s defenders, expect his coming jobs speech to mean anything. When the president spoke during a recent market swoon, the market dropped another 100 points. Democrats may soon have to confront an uncomfortable truth, and ask whether Obama is a suitable choice at the top of the ticket in 2012. They may then have to ask themselves if there’s any way they can push him off the top of the ticket.
That these questions have not yet been asked in any serious way shows how weak the Democratic Party is as a political organization. Yet this political weakness is not inevitable, it can be changed through courage and collective action by a few party insiders smart and principled enough to understand the value of a public debate, and by activists who are courageous enough to face the real legacy of the Obama years.
That would be a smart move….a very smart move, but it will never happen. Then those Democrat party “insiders” and “activists” will be labeled, as Republicans have for most of the Obama years, racists for daring to push out the first black President.
It won’t happen.
Obama has ruined the Democratic Party. The 2010 wipeout was an electoral catastrophe so bad you’d have to go back to 1894 to find comparable losses. From 2008 to 2010, according to Gallup, the fastest growing demographic party label was former Democrat. Obama took over the party in 2008 with 36 percent of Americans considering themselves Democrats. Within just two years, that number had dropped to 31 percent, which tied a 22-year low.
As a typical Democrat will do Mr. Stoller blames this all on the fact that Obama wasn’t liberal enough. He didn’t note that the majority of Americans consider themselves Conservatives of course, but eh…what else can a liberal do other than to wax philosophically about how great it would have been if only the liberal dream of rainbows and unicorns would have been faithfully executed.
Mr. Stoller then details how a primary challenge could actually happen:
If a few of the key constituency groups in the Democratic Party publicly wondered whether Obama should run for reelection, rumblings would start. Some organized constituency groups — say some components of the AFL-CIO — would need to announce that their support is up for grabs, based on a clear set of criteria. Given the Obama administration’s rampant anti-labor policies, this wouldn’t be an unreasonable posture. And then a senior politician, like, say, a Tom Harkin, would need to decide that he would want to encourage robust intra-party debate about the party’s future.
Harkin could run as a “favorite son” of Iowa, and encourage people in the caucuses to send a message to the party and to Obama by choosing him. Other candidates could then emerge in early primary and caucus states, as a way of repudiating Obama’s leadership. Candidates wouldn’t have to pretend to be running for president or be presidential quality; they could simply stand in as favorite sons or daughters of their own geographic area. This would immediately fire up a highly aggressive and needed debate about the direction of the Democratic Party and the country at large. It would build a new set of leaders, and elevate others who would like to distance themselves from the Obama policy agenda.
What a racist this Matt Stoller is to suggest such a thing….how dare he…..heh
Either way, it won’t happen. The Democrats pushed Obama as The One, the game changer, the greatest thing since sliced bread…they were blinded by the fact that this man was black, instead of looking at the fact that this man had done NOTHING to suggest he was capable of leading this country.
And now they have to deal with the failure he has become.
Unfortunately, so do we.
But not for much longer.
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