And the bad news just keeps coming for the Democrats and Obama.
After taking weeks of beat downs on jobs, class warfare and campaign cash from opponents and friends alike, Obama is starting argue publicly with himself even as new data shows that his campaign may be spiraling out of control in at least one battleground state.
A day after reports that Romney and the Republicans raised more money than Obama and the Jets, a new poll of likely voters from a local Michigan polling firm shows Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama by one point in Michigan.
“[A]n EPIC-MRA poll of 600 likely Michigan voters,” writes the Detroit News, “showed Romney ahead of Obama 46 percent to 45 percent — within the 4 point margin of error. An April poll by the same firm showed Obama up by 4 percentage points, 47 percent to 43 percent. Romney has vowed to aggressively compete for Michigan, while Obama has visited the state 11 times and touted his rescue of General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC as part of the $85 billion auto bailout.”
So the state that got more of the Obama federal funny money than any other agrees that it’s just not working.
“I saved GM”?
That’s not even working in Michigan, which is supposed to be the state most sympathetic to Obama’s economic policies.
But that’s not even the worst of it.
Things are so bad for Obama that Bill Clinton’s out working as a “surrogate” for Obama.
Memo to Obama: When you team up Bill Clinton with the word “surrogate,” someone in the end is getting screwed.
Afraid this time it’s you, buddy.
“Last week, Clinton said GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney,” reported FoxNews, “had a ‘sterling’ record at private equity firm Bain Capital, departing from efforts by Obama's campaign to criticize the Republican's experience there as having little to do with job creation.”
Clinton also broke with Obama on the Bush tax cuts, saying that extending the cuts would help avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” that govercrats keep talking about in an effort to get the public to goose government spending.
Two weeks ago I wrote about how 14 Democrats had rebuffed Obama’s blame-game economic message, including noted liberals Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), former DNC Chair Ed Rendell and most astonishingly Obama campaign surrogate Corey Booker, the Democrat mayor of Newark, New Jersey.
So it doesn’t come as surprise that Clinton makes it number 15.
However, number 16 will come as a surprise.
The Obama campaign seems to not understand that supporters should actually, um, support the policies of their candidate. Obama’s supporters seem to spend more time explaining why they don’t agree with the president on economic matters- which is understandable if they don’t want to hurt their own credibility.
But even that’s not the worst of it.
Obama has turned against himself, arguing against his own ideas in a span of just hours. That now makes 16 Obama supporters who- including the man himself- don’t support Obama’s policies.
I guess Obama’s just as confused about his policies as Feinstein, Clinton, Rendell and Booker are.
In a press conference on Friday Obama argued that he added so many jobs as president, especially during the last year that “the private sector is doing fine.” Hours later however he apparently reversed course and said the “the economy is not doing fine.”
I’m not sure that Obama understands that the private sector accounts for about 60 percent of our GDP and could make up 75 percent of our GDP if we just stopped the government spending spree.
But, joking aside, for sure the bigger point is that his comment on the private sector betrays what he thinks but won’t say.
Obama thinks things are swell for all of us bloodsuckers out here in the private sector who just won’t pay our fair share so that public payrolls can be expanded with everything from sugar plum police, to food stamp recruiters.
Now we know that Obama’s anti-success rhetoric doesn’t stem from clever messaging that he thinks can tap into the populist mood.
No, he actually believes that things are “fine” on Main Street and that if we’d just fund more government jobs, all would be okay.
And this anti-Main Street ideology that Obama is espousing but not enunciating explains everything else: why Obama surrogates are abandoning him; why Walker won Wisconsin- again; why Romney is leading in Michigan- a state if ever there was one that was bribed to vote Obama; and finally why, in fact, Obama’s economic record is so dismal.
Obama’s break with himself, if not Freudian, is certainly, at the very least, frightening.
"The Private Sector is Doing Fine"
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