The New York Times' polling website, FiveThirtyEight.com, is showing the odds of Obama winning the Presidency at 85 per cent. This number has been going up dramatically for the last couple of days as the polling numbers are starting solidify around a must-have Electoral College win for Obama and a nice-to-have win in the popular vote.
This is not lost on conservative bloggers who see the inevitable on Tuesday: an Obama second term. And in the modern world of reporting news before it happens, conservative bloggers are already writing Mitt Romney's political obituary. Erick Erickson, ultra-conservative blogger for redstate.com in a scathing editorial referred to Romney as "unprincipled" and the "silly putty of politicians." He writes:
"I've been reading the 200 pages of single spaced opposition research from the John McCain campaign on Mitt Romney. There is no issue I can find on which Mitt Romney has not taken both sides. He is neither liberal nor conservative. He is simply unprincipled. The man has no core beliefs other than in himself.
Mitt Romney ... is a man devoid of any principles other than getting himself elected. As much as the American public does not like Barack Obama, they loath a man so fueled with ambition that he will say or do anything to get himself elected. Mitt Romney is that man."
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Romney's Etch-a-Sketch campaign strategy very nearly worked. While "liberal" heads exploded its strident inconsistency, what was more shocking was polls showed that, for nearly half of Americans, this was OK!
It is unlikely that this unprincipled strategy will work again. Obama's battle for the White House has been primarily a battle against an ostensibly slow recovery, hampered by a gridlocked congress. In reality, the recovery has been remarkably good considering how deep the hole was. BusinessInsider.com shows the historical fact that economies perform better under the Democrats. By 2016, the economy will be in full steam again and a new Democratic nominee (Hillary Clinton 2.0?) will be crowing about Obama's success and arguing why it should continue.
In the meantime, conservatism in the USA will face an unprecedented crisis. It is no longer a proud animal; it is a fearful one. Unrelenting demographics shifts will continue to make the USA a majority-minority nation -- a nation where there is no majority race. We can expect an inevitable xenophobic backlash from fearful conservatives: calls from the right for more restrictive immigrant policies and talk of making English the national language. (Americans should look north to Canada before going down this rocky road!) They will be shouting at the rain as this backlash will run counter to America's evolving demographics.
The conservatives will split -- the Fearful Conservatives on one side, the Embracing Conservatives on the other. Embracing Conservatives will embrace the demographic change, distance themselves from religious demagoguery, and return to the conservative credos of individual freedom, self-reliance, and fiscal prudence. If they let the politics of fear take over and the only principle remaining for the conservative movement is power-for-power's-sake, then today it's Romney's political obituary we are writing and tomorrow it will the obituary of the conservative movement itself.
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Barack Obama has made mistakes, and learned from his mistakes. He learned the hard way that he cannot be the catalyst for change in D.C. without the co-operation of the Republicans. His “Pollyanna” view that the 2 parties could come together to rescue the failing economy must have hit him hard like a striking baseball bat.
It appears Obama has adjusted his thinking and platform and should be commended for learning from the past. What he offers is honesty, something that is foreign to Romney. Romney has not yet learned that his lies come back to haunt him time and time again. His platform changes according to the way the survey winds blow. If Romney wins this election, I will most certainly “SMH”. Have the Americans not learned from stolen 2000 election? I guess not, because Bush was voted in for a second term. They say things happen in three’s, I am shaking my head...
OBAMA/BIDEN 2012
Why more serious Americans don't speak out about this is chilling. Maybe they should watch Idiotocracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy) and see their future unless they wake up and stop being such wimps.
I hope the conservative party reinvents itself into a more inclusive organization. I do not recognize the current party. It seems to be governed by irrational bias.
Instead of simply acting as a legitimate (and high necessary) watchdog against the inefficacy of an overexpanded government, to me, modern conservatives seem to be infected by a form a zealotry that allows them to both wildly condemn justifiable government activity while contradictorily demanding bloated military, law-enforcement and "correctional" spending.
I believe that the conservative movement has lost touch with its core values and has allowed itself to be hijacked and manipulated to serve big business's interests. In a very literal sense, it seems to have embraced a level of ignorance of which an increase of demagoguery, religious extremism, xenophobia and disregard for science are a consequence.
Both conservative and liberal forces must balance each other out within a functional democratic government or it will run astray into one form of extremism or another. Americans (and to an increasing degree, my fellow Canadians) need to realize that, at this point in time, the left-wing extreme of a communist takeover is a far-away fantasy, while the right-wing extreme of an authoritarian society in which a rich elite exploit an impoverished underclass is becoming a reality.