A Recipe for Disaster

Michael Gerson reports how the independent voters across the mid-northern states like Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania have turned against Obama and toward the Republicans:

The Quinnipiac poll produced the single-most startling figure of the midterm election so far: 65 percent of Ohio's likely independent voters now disapprove of Obama's job performance -- a 2 to 1 rejection. Obama has lost the center of the electorate in the center of America.

High deficits. Continued unemployment at 10 percent. A stimulus package that not only didn't work, it didn't work and spent too much."

At the same time that Democrats have massively disappointed Ohio independents, they have provoked Republican intensity. In one poll, 75 percent of Ohio Republicans described themselves as "certain" to vote, compared with 52 percent of Democrats.

Portman also argues that the issues are breaking against Democrats, especially health care. "I've done 70 plant tours," he told me. "It is the first issue people bring up to me. They know their premiums are going up. New mandates and new costs are creating uncertainty.

Ohio, recently the symbol of Democratic realignment, has become the graveyard of Democratic campaign themes. Portman -- who was President George W. Bush's trade representative and budget director -- was thought vulnerable to attacks on the Bush era. But this Democratic argument appealed mainly to the already converted. And it was complicated by a development some did not expect. A recent poll found that Ohio voters, by a 50-42 margin, would rather have Bush in the White House than Obama.

With the way things are going, who knows how big the rout is going to be in November?  All I can imagine next January is pretty much complete stalemate in economic and domestic issues...which then doesn't bode well for the next two years. 

Will someone in the Democratic Party step forward to challenge Obama for the nomination?  I think it could happen, which would then divide the party and make it even more enfeebled.

It looks more and more to me like Obama is going to be a one-term President.  He had a chance to do some big things, but he chose the pragmatic centrist road, which led pretty much nowhere.  (I would argue that the health care reform, while an incremental step in the right direction, doesn't do anything to get costs under control, as pointed out by Dr. Arnold Relman in the latest New York Review of Books.)  The Republicans refused to cooperate in anyway.  And then he changed from the inspirational orator that won him the election, into the professorial, unemotional, and out-of-touch President, who doesn't inspire hardly anyone.

And if Republicans are as 'unfit to govern' as Richard Cohen mentions in the previous post, we're in for a very long spell of totally ineffective government, unable to set forth reasonable short-term, let alone long-term policies.  This sounds like a recipe for national disaster, no matter who the President is.  I truly fear for our country.