CNN was up 6 points. Gallup was up 5 points. ABC News/Washington Post was up 1, and so it went until I came across something called SurveyUSA/Civitas. That poll had Mitt Romney up by 10 points, but I do not know who they were polling or why. Possibly they were pulling our leg.
Remember, these polls came after the Democrats in the convention assembled voted against mentioning God in their sacred document. Oh, sure, on the third voice vote, the mayor of Los Angeles, standing rather unwillingly at the podium, gave the vote to God, but we all heard the vote. God lost. And there was the bloody business about Jerusalem. The Democrats want Israel's capital elsewhere. Where? I wonder. Finally, there was the Democrats' contrived controversy about a procedure that has been uncontroversial among Americans since the 1960s, birth control! Do the Democrats really believe that Romney is going to deny them their birth control devices, even colored condoms? Those devices are the Republicans' one foolproof way to ensure suppression of the Democratic vote. It is even more effective than returning illegal aliens to their home country.
Frankly, the Democrats who came to Charlotte were about the most unsightly mob observable in these United States in years. Any breadline in the 1930s would have appeared more well dressed, and certainly its members would be more representative of mainstream America. Only an occasional group of Occupiers could have outdone the Charlotte Democrats in sartorial splendor, and most of them are certifiably deranged.
Yet in the end, the president got his bump, and it came a day or so after the Friday economic news came, all of it highly unfavorable to him: job creation, down from July; Americans seeking jobs, down from July, the percentage of Americans working or seeking work, down to a 30-year low. As for foreign policy, while Obama was wowing the gullible last week with his listless poetry, the Chinese and the Russians were snubbing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her Syrian initiative.
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So here is yet more evidence of the Taranto Principle. Just as the media give Democrats the impression they are in the majority, so do the great polling organizations. So keep it up, Mr. President: no to God, no to Jerusalem, and whatever message you want to send out about birth control. Your foreign policy is a masterpiece, especially in the Arab world. Your economy, well, it is still Bush's economy.