Fresh as Springtime..

A couple of posts ago, I wrote a short note on how Prez Phone-It-In was at it again. Er, actually, NOT at it again. Just like the Gulf crisis, when he should be at the head of his country, leading our efforts. he's taking it on the lam, playing with himself, and otherwise keeping a low profile by appearing to be above the fray. He's becoming the bookie-in-chief, fer crissakes!

By now, a breathless world has seen that Princess Phone has boldly stepped up and decisively made known his March Madness picks for the NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four. And, in what must have been an audacity of hype, POTUS Pants selected the number one seeds in all four brackets. Whattta guy! He has genitalia the size of -- er -- BBs.

Christ, he can't even get "Phoning It In" right.

And just in time, too. Because we are on the threshold of the precipice of the waning days before the beginning of the start of the commencement of the 2012 campaign season. We are, as Churchill once said, not at the end, nor are we at the beginning of the end, but it is safe to say we are at the end of the beginning. Anyway, coincidentally with all of this feeling of fresh, new, breezy Springtime revival, an article by Charles Babington of the AP kind of alludes to how, instead of Obama being a newly blooming daisy or daffodil or sunflower, he is more like a moldering piece of cow flop in a pasture.

Obama's team seeks new ways to fire up his base
By CHARLES BABINGTON
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Barack Obama rode a wave of voter passion in 2008 fed largely by intense dislike of President George W. Bush and the Iraq war, plus excitement among young and minority voters at the notion of electing the nation's first black president.

Now, as Obama cranks up his re-election campaign, all those factors are absent.

But does this worry our beloved pantload? Like a guy cranked up on LSD, he just keeps trucking through his own reality:

Obama acknowledged the challenge last week in Boston. "Somebody asked me, how do we reinvigorate the population, the voter, after two very tough years?" he told Democratic donors. "How do we recapture that magic that got so many young people involved for the very first time in 2008?"

One answer, the president said, is to persuade hardcore liberals to swallow their anger over political compromises the administration reached with Republicans, even when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.

Obama's concessions include dropping his proposed public option for health insurance, and extending Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest.

"There's no weakness in us trying to reach out and seeing if we can find common ground," the president said.

Despite his pleas, many Obama supporters clearly are disappointed. When he was inaugurated, 83 percent of Democrats said they expected his presidency to be above average, and nearly half predicted it would be "outstanding," an AP-GfK poll found. Two years later, 68 percent of Democrats rated it above average so far, and just 20 percent called it outstanding.

Last fall's elections were a disaster not only for the hundreds of Democrats voted out of Congress, governorships and state legislatures. They raised questions about Obama, too.

Thirty-seven percent of voters told exit pollsters they cast ballots explicitly to oppose the president, while 23 percent said their votes represented support for him.

But if Obama is wandering around in dreamland, he's got company; his staff is equally delusional.

Top Obama aides say things will look better by mid-2012, for several reasons.

They say GOP-led efforts to end state workers' collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and elsewhere are dramatically galvanizing the labor movement, a key Democratic constituency. Some union activists wish Obama would speak up more forcefully for them. But campaign aides say they think he is walking the right line by supporting unions without appearing unduly beholden to them.

Another key group, gays and lesbians, may shrug off several disappointments and work hard for Obama's re-election because he signed legislation beginning the repeal of the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which barred gays from serving openly in the military.

There you have it, the Democrat strategy in a nutshell: seek the pissed off   ultra-lib-victim, harness their anger or throw them a bone, and bridle and saddle them for the upcoming campaign.

If we can get a candidate who is not some warmed over retread (I'm talking about you Mitt and Newt) and a GOP who can mount a campaign that does more than promise $100 billions in budget cuts and shorts the public expectation on that promise. An organization and who will finally grow a pair and hammer this clown and nail his sorry his sorry administration to the cross for what it has (and hasn't) done, then maybe we'll be rid of him and his sorry coterie of sycophants forever.

Like the Japanese tragedy, I ain't gonna do any analysis here -- we will have 18 months of that coming up soon -- but I will say that this clown is going to have a lot more trouble getting re-elected than he thinks. The perfect storm that swept him into office in 2008 has blown out and all that's left on the is some flotsam, jetsam, used condominiums, empty beer cans..

..and some oil slicks.

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