No Reason for Dem Complacency

Byron York reports that the president's campaign is spending huge amounts of money to focus-group Mitt Romney's treatment of his dogdecades ago -- a sign the President's campaign is no more careful in spending donor money than his administration is in spending the taxpayer's.

But Niall Ferguson's piece in The Daily Beast is a perfect antidote to liberal complacency over the president's chances for re-election. What's more, note also that Obama's voter base hasn't been directly affected in any positive way by the recently rising stock market. Very recent economic news, coupled with the potential of spillover from the European mess, could likewise complicate life for the President . . . along with the probability that gasoline prices -- which have risen more under President Obama than under Jimmy Carter! -- won't improve before election day.

Given all this, it could well be that complacent Democrats have their heads in the sand . . . or, to mix metaphors, are simply whistling past the graveyard.

Finally, a certain petty smallness in the kinds of attacks the President and (his cohorts) seem eager to launch at Romney don't seem likely to boost the American people's affection for the President -- or their assessment of his likability.