This nugget is devastating:
By a 53 to 28 percent margin, independents say they plan to vote against the president in November 2012.
And even Palin is now not a universe behind the president in the polls (I note that Carville now thinks she is going to run as well).
I think the explanation is simple enough: Obama gave the impression that the recovery was happening – and then it stalled. He's being held responsible for the stalling (even though Fukushima and the Euro implosion were hardly his fault). This is fair enough. What I hope is that voters focus on the future and what we can practically do. Yesterday, the IMF all but endorsed Obama's sensible embrace of stimulus-now and more debt-reduction later. But the GOP's total intransigence seems to be paying off politically.
I think it's now fair to say that they are even attempting to intensify the slowdown by intimidating the Fed from doing its job. Their logic, as David Frum notes, is from another planet, another time and another set of facts. And their motivation? Purely their own power, regardless of the effect on the American and global economy:
As is, we’re looking at a continued economic slump, more unemployment, and more deleveraging via continuing catastrophic consumer default on mortgages, car loans, credit cards, and student aid. And now the GOP leadership is urging that the Federal Reserve make the catastrophe worse? To what end?
I know what the detractors will say: to the end of defeating President Obama and replacing him with a Republican president. And if you’ve convinced yourself that Obama is the Second Coming of Malcolm X, Trotsky, and the all-conquering Caliph Omar all in one, then perhaps capsizing the US economy and plunging your fellow-citizens deeper into misery will seem a price worth paying to rid the country of him.
Every time you think the ultras in the current GOP won't go there, they do. They'll sabotage economic growth for short term political advantage. They'll sabotage their own president in negotiating with allies. They're happy for the US to default if it means they can damage Obama. Their own plan for immediate, drastic austerity would be catastrophic for the global economy. Their pre-Arab Spring belligerence would shut America out of a critical opportunity to ease tensions with the growing and burgeoning Muslim world. And they have no problem treating the world economy as a partisan plaything.
If they claw their way back to power this way, our system really will be broken for a long time. And the great possibility of an adult conversation on pragmatic grounds to help the economy will be lost. And this is emphatically not Obama's fault. He tried. They threw it back in his face again and again. Which means, I believe, that we should double down in backing him, instead of the ear-splitting whine coming from the left.
The Dish 