New York Post says independents are deserting the president an his party.

The near-total loss of independents could prove catastrophic for Democrats if the trend holds through Election Day this year.

Democrats lost independents in off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and most recently in Massachusetts last month, when the party lost Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat.

“The independents have become a problem,” said Lee Miringoff, who conducted the poll. “They were his ticket to Washington, and now they’re a problem.”

Independents don’t just disapprove of the job Obama is doing, they’re tiring of him personally. His favorability rating among them is down to 39 percent, with a 59 percent unfavorable rating.

Last December, Obama’s favorability rating among independents was just under 50 percent. …

Independents aren’t buying into Obama’s brand of “change,” either: 45 percent say he is changing the country for the worse, while 26 percent believe it’s for the better.

In December, the numbers were equal at 36 percent.

Fifty-three percent of independents, who make up about a third of the electorate, now believe Obama has fallen below expectations. In December, the figure was 43 percent.

“The independents have jumped ship,” concluded Miringoff.

Obama won independents in 2008, making him the first Democrat to do so in a presidential election since 1972, when exit polling began.

Part of Obama’s problem: Independents, along with plenty of other voters, are hopping mad. According to the latest Rasmussen poll, a stunning 78 percent of voters not affiliated with either party report being angry at the government’s policies.

Overall, 75 percent of likely voters said they were at least somewhat angry at the feds, up 4 points from November.

Forty-five percent reported being very angry, up 9 points from September. Just 19 percent said they weren’t angry at all or weren’t very angry.

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And the Weekly Standard has a new article (not readable at the moment due to a web-site glitch) about Hilary Clinton democrats bailing as well. Perhaps the Standard didn’t want it released just yet.

Newsmax cheerfully interprets away Obama’s 1.9% winning edge, but, hey! Brown hasn’t even started campaigning yet.

A stunning new poll conducted by Newsmax/Zogby reveals that Massachusett’s new Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown could defeat President Barack Obama in a presidential election.

The Newsmax/Zogby poll released Tuesday found that the pair would be statistically deadlocked if the presidential election took place today.

The poll indicates surprisingly weak support for the president among independent voters, who favor the tyro Brown by 48.6 percent to 36 percent in a hypothetical matchup against Obama. …

“The real problem for Obama is that he has lost the middle, and losing the middle means losing independents,” McKinnon said. “And it is independents that are responsible for swinging elections one way or the other in this country. So if you lose independents, you’re going to lose the presidency.”

The poll asked likely voters: “If the election for president of the United States were held today and the only candidates were Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Scott Brown, for whom would you vote?”

Based on the 4,163 responses, Obama leads Brown by 46.5 percent to 44.6 percent. That amounts to a statistical tie because the Zogby survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percent.

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Even hard-core liberal snark queen Maureen Dowd evidently recognizes the rising star eclipsing the setting one.

He’s The One, all right.

The handsome, athletic pol with the comely wife and two lovely daughters who precipitously rose from the State Legislature to pull us all together.

The fresh face and disarming underdog America’s been waiting for, someone who suffered through his parents’ divorce, watched his mom go on welfare and survived some wayward youthful behavior to become disciplined and successful — a lawyer, a lawmaker and a devoted family guy who does dog duty.

Someone who’s always game for a game of pickup basketball, loves talking sports and even boasts beefcake photos. A pro-choice phenom propelled into higher office by conservatives, independents and Democrats, a surprise winner with a magical aura.

The New One is the shimmering vessel that we are pouring all our hopes and dreams into after the grave disappointment of the Last One, Barack Obama.

The only question left is: Why isn’t Scott Brown delivering the State of the Union?

Barack Obama told ABC News that he is determined to continue to try to pass the health care bill, even if it hurts him politically. “The one thing I’m clear about is that I’d rather be a really good one term president than a mediocre two term president.”

Charles Krauthammer responds that “Well, there is a third option he didn’t consider. He could be a mediocre one term president, and that’s what he been thus so far in his first year. And because mediocrity does not usually encourage the electorate to re-elect you that might account for being a one termer.”

Krauthammer describes the democrat response to their defeat in Massachusetts as “a marvel of obliviousness, of obtuseness, and of unbelievably condescending arrogance.”

3:04 video

Willem-Adolphe Bouguereau, Liberal Democrat Pursued By the Furies, 1862, Chrysler Museum of Art

Jay Ambrose takes on the role of Greek chorus, chanting about the lessons “Progressives” should have learned when they were turned out of office last time and didn’t.

Go back some decades, and it looked as if liberals were going to be the death of America. They wanted to take it really easy on criminals. They favored welfare programs that destroyed families. They backed foreign aid that buttressed tyrannies. Their way of dealing with enemies was unilateral disarmament. Still other proposals could have spent, taxed and regulated us into oblivion.

The voters didn’t like all of this, the L-word became a curse, and so liberals went into something akin to a witness protection program. They changed their name to “progressives” and if they did not quite hide out, they became less obtrusive with some of their views. Yes, they griped, fumed, engaged in numerous sneak attacks and thumbed their noses at the opposition, but they did turn the lights dimmer than before on their grand vision of free-enterprise destruction and runaway statism.

Ah, but then after their surprising 1990s ascension came the self-destruction of earmark-happy, spendthrift congressional Republicans who seemed to assume power was theirs forever, even if many of their principles were proving strangely evaporative.

So first off, the Democrats took back Congress. Then Barack Obama used unexcelled rhetorical skills, a recession, an unpopular war in Iraq and George W. Bush’s deep decline in public estimation to capture the White House. Conservative values had supposedly been rejected, and behold, it was the liberal hour, a time for the enlightened few to strike back, to fix things – glory, glory hallelujah!

The arrogance was suffocating. Resurrected liberals were practically smirking as they instructed us to sweet-talk our way out of terrorist threats, advised we should quickly duplicate Europe’s semi-socialist mistakes and condescendingly dished up all manner of other liberty-smothering ideological inanities that would transform America into a poor imitation of what it once was. …

Ordinary Americans have caught onto all of this, and so, I am sorry, liberals, but the word of the day for you is “lose.” Your side has lost elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and now your side has lost the Senate seat previously held by the very liberal Ted Kennedy in very liberal Massachusetts to Scott Brown, a Republican.

The message to the Democrats is simple. Either give up your liberal ways and veer toward the center or face political catastrophe in November’s general election. The message to liberals generally is also simple: Get back into your witness protection program.

No, Senators and Congressmen, the message of 2008 was not, “Go ahead and repeat the New Deal.” What 2008 really proved is that Americans are, for the most part, pragmatic and apolitical. When politics gets too noisy or too scary, when things start going to pot economically, they throw out the incumbents and send in the other team.

The Clintons alarmed America with Hillarycare, and the voters took away their Congressional majority. So Bill Clinton pulled in his horns and tried to govern competently, making noises like a Centrist. The economy caught fire as the Republican Congress favorably impacted economic policies, and Bill Clinton ironically even escaped removal from office, despite the Monica Lewinsky scandal and his perjury, because the public was decidedly content with a divided government featuring a competent democrat administration (however corrupt) as long as the economy was good.

Barack Obama has a very undeserved reputation for high intelligence. He is so stupid that he never even understood that there has come to exist, post the unhappy 1970s, a fundamental and unspoken contract between voters and leaders in American national politics: Don’t screw up the economy and you can be in office.

Mort Zuckerman, who supported Obama, has a lot of negative things to say about Obama’s performance after one year.

He’s misjudged the character of the country in his whole approach. There’s the saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” He didn’t get it. He was determined somehow or other to adopt a whole new agenda. He didn’t address the main issue.

This health-care plan is going to be a fiscal disaster for the country. Most of the country wanted to deal with costs, not expansion of coverage. This is going to raise costs dramatically.

In the campaign, he said he would change politics as usual. He did change them. It’s now worse than it was. I’ve now seen the kind of buying off of politicians that I’ve never seen before. It’s politically corrupt and it’s starting at the top. It’s revolting. …

The Democrats are going to get killed in this election. Jesus, looks what’s happening in Massachusetts.

It’s really interesting because he had brilliant, brilliant political instincts during the campaign. I don’t know what has happened to them. His appointments present somebody who has a lot to learn about how government works. He better get some very talented businesspeople who know how to implement things. It’s unbelievable. Everybody says so. You can’t believe how dismayed people are. That’s why he’s plunging in the polls.

I can’t predict things two years from now, but if he continues on the downward spiral he is on, he won’t be reelected. In the meantime, the Democrats have recreated the Republican Party. And when I say Democrats, I mean the Obama administration. In the generic vote, the Democrats were ahead something like 52 to 30. They are now behind the Republicans 48 to 44 in the last poll. Nobody has ever seen anything that dramatic.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Bill Siegel contends that Americans by 2012 are likely to have had it right up to here with Barack Obama’s smooth, cool, and artfully glib insincerity. He could very well be right, and it seems to me that when he talks about the stylistic and substantive opposite of Obama, he’s really talking about Dick Cheney.

Obama, the proficient law student and law lecturer, is well trained in “issue spotting” – being able to articulate both sides of an issue. Perhaps his most effective public manipulation lies in his ability to briefly state something worth recognizing on the other side of an issue, thus convincing the audience that because he can see the complexity of our problems he must know the best solution.

Obama will frequently answer a tough question by saying “on the one hand we want X, while on the other we certainly must be concerned with Y.” He will avoid a clear answer, inviting the audience to trust to him on the presumption that, because he could mention something of value to both sides, he must be best suited to work out the optimal compromise. The liberal media fell completely for this simple and cheap trick. Meanwhile, Obama, the hustler, never intended to solve any problem with any solution other than one from the far left. …

He has been the consummate salesman, or “flim-flam man,” coming into town ready to sell whatever the audience will accept, only to later figure a way to weasel his way out of living up to his word. After awhile, those who look at him with open eyes bounce between fear to panic and back as they realize the country has elected a leader who, along with his close staff, is willing to sacrifice the most fundamental priorities of the nation with the most shocking cold-heartedness. His complete lack of “real” emotion, covered up by a false, almost Las Vegas “Rat Pack” veneer, has recently become apparent to more and more of the nation.

Finally, “change” has been Obama’s calling card. And, as with any hypnotic induction, vagueness can powerfully bind many a subject when left to the mind of the listener to clarify. Nevertheless, many Obama supporters are beginning to realize that the “change” he or she imagined the president to have suggested is different from the almost complete overhaul of our national fabric that Obama and his minions have been pounding out. As more of the country discovers this, they are becoming less interested in a radical and massive transformation of the country and more interested in simple “baby step” improvements while maintaining the integrity of our system.

All of this leads one to consider whether what is truly needed to beat Obama is to have someone who doesn’t resemble him. Perhaps what will emerge for Republicans is not a charismatic, dream-laden salesman who knows how to wow audiences, handle Oprah, and romance NBC “news” personalities, but rather someone who is simple and, perhaps, not very good looking or stylish at all.

Perhaps they should choose someone not looking to be on Mt. Rushmore before he can ease the economy and address the true faults in our health care system while not destroying it. Perhaps someone who doesn’t claim to be open and transparent while keeping under wraps critical aspects of his past; one whose past is easily understandable and relatable. One who, to his core, is American, from America, and, most importantly, loves America. One who is strong enough to fight for America, show he is prepared to fight, believe in its exceptionalism, and no longer apologize for any so-called “harms” upon which the world’s numerous “victim” groups have cast their identities. One who sees clearly the dangers of “radical” Islam and has tired of pretending it is anything other than what it says and does. And one who tells the truth and loves the truth.

Read the whole thing.

Matthew Dowd has some very bad news for liberals. Sarah Palin, he argues, has a real shot at winning the presidency in 2012.

Gallup polls over the past 60 years show that no president with an approval rating under 47 percent has won reelection, and no president with an approval rating above 51 percent has lost reelection. (George W. Bush’s approval rating in the weeks before the 2004 election hovered around 50 percent.) The 2012 election will be primarily about our current president and whether voters are satisfied with the country’s direction.

Who the Republican candidate is, and his or her qualifications and abilities, will matter only if Obama’s approval rating is between 47 and 51 percent going into the fall of 2012. Interestingly, in the latest Gallup poll Obama’s approval rating was at a precarious 49 percent.

Second, America is still (unfortunately) politically divided and polarized, and Palin benefits from this dynamic. While Democrats love Obama, Republicans look on him with real disfavor. The gap between Obama’s approval rating among Democrats and among Republicans is nearly 70 percentage points — a higher partisan divide than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush experienced. Obama’s agenda and actions this year, and some mistakes, have solidified this divide.

Polls show that Palin’s favorability numbers are a mirror image of those of Obama. She is respected and loved by the Republican base, while Democrats despise her. Granted, independent voters have significant reservations about her capability to be president, and this would be a hurdle in the general election. But to win the Republican nomination, Palin needs only to get enough support from the base to win early key states. Already, in nearly every poll today, she has a level of support that makes her a viable primary candidate. Just look at the crowds and the buzz her book tour is drawing. …

Like it or not, if Sarah Palin decides to seek our nation’s highest office, she has a shot.

Jay Valentine offers a likely sounding explanation and a prophecy which matches my own thinking very well.

There is a point in tournament poker where one player doesn’t have the chips to play out the next raise, but they have great cards, so they call “all in.” At that point, nobody can raise them and the hand gets played out — either to a game changing win or a total loss for the person who made the call.

It appears Sarah Palin decided she and her family could no longer deal with the thousand cuts, so she is “all in.”

Palin may well decide to stay home and make macaroni and cheese for the kids, but history may not let her. She has already established herself as a major player — candidate or not. More importantly, the wildly critical left has put her in a financial position where she has no choice but to speak out, perhaps do a book, and make the money she needs to pay legal bills for 15 unwarranted “ethics” investigations, all of which she handily won. The legal bills remain.

One doubts that when she speaks out, it will be about how to field dress a moose. Rather, she will take positions in speaking and writing about her core beliefs. That is a problem for the radical left of their own creation.

Palin enters the arena where the fight is not between liberal and conservative; nor is it between Republican and Democrat. The fight is between elite and the common person who works every day and continually asks how Washington D.C., under both parties, is so out of control.

It is very amusing today reading leftwing blogs spinning the news of Sarah Palin’s resignation like an old Victrola revolving a hot jazz 78rpm disk.

Brad Friedman has a big scoop, he claims. He just knows that it was an impending financial scandal driving her from office. It’s ugly opposing the left. Manufactured scandals come the way of someone like Sarah Palin like the moths attracted by your headlights when you drive through swampy woods at night. A lot of leftie blogs are hugging this theory to their chests and swaying side to side as they coo over it.

Josh Marshall can’t make up his mind if she’s leaving because she’s sulking or if it’s because of recent revelations (apparently different from Brad’s), not about anything she’s allegedly actually done, but somehow nonetheless proving her bad character. Whew!

The democrat national committee is adopting the ever popular “one more example of a pattern of bizarre behavior” throwing-up-their-hands-and-giving-up non-explanation. “We knew all along she was barking mad. She’s conservative”

On the whole, I think Mark Halperin‘s last suggestion seems the most likely.

If she wants to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, she needs to spend more time raising money, establishing her international and national expertise, and traveling the Lower 48. And she needs to start now.

The governorship was tying her down, and using up her limited time and resources battling a basically trivial shit storm of frivolous, petty, and partisan smears that no one nationally cares very much about, but which the establishment media may be relied upon to report loudly.

Leaving office allows her to cash in on a book deal and make speeches repairing her family’s finances, and to fund raise in earnest for the 2012 race while operating outside of elected office as a conservative leader addressing national rather than provincial state issues.

Yesterday, news of Sarah Palin’s action swept discussion of other events right off the aggregating pages. The left should tremble. They don’t like Sarah Palin, but they too recognize that she has the most important element in political success in the bubble-headed media-driven culture of today’s America. Sarah Palin has star power. Combine the power of celebrity charisma with conservative ideas, and you have an irresistible combination. Sarah Palin could potentially bury Barack Obama and today’s ascendant left.

He’ll need to change the tie

The Obama Administration’s constant and ever-increasing attacks on Rush Limbaugh demonstrate perfectly clearly that, at this point in time, there is no more effective and articulate representative of Conservative political thought in America than the genial and talented radio talk show celebrity and that Rush is the single most effective source of opposition to the radical democrat agenda. Rush Limbaugh is the Republican leader that democrats most fear, and decidedly not Michael Steele.

Barack Obama has himself demonstrated in the most effective possible way the ability of the combination of eloquence and personal charm to substitute for a meaningful resume featuring either significant occupancy of, or achievement in, high office.

The conclusion is unmistakable. We should, at once, start grooming Rush Limbaugh as the next GOP presidential candidate. Limbaugh should run for a governorship or senate seat in 2010, and proceed, in precisely the way Barack Obama did, to let his newly acquired seat grow cobwebs, while he pursues higher office.

Running an inexperienced outsider candidate is bound to be something of a long shot, and Rush has a few vulnerabilities, but just compare Limbaugh’s essentially trivial prescription drug scandal with Barack Obama’s raft load of unsavory associations. The press will not treat Rush as clemently as they did the Kenyan Caliban, but Rush Limbaugh has a real genius for counter-framing an issue. Rush can defend himself.

Rush’s sometimes slightly transgressive sense of humor and his entertainer’s style represent admittedly a greater handicap. Americans want their politicians to provide a primary note of dignity and gravitas. But there is time still for Rush to strike a different tone, to present a modified version of himself. Besides, the continuing economic crisis and the practically assured foreign humiliations and debacles that the current administration will inevitably produce are bound to provoke a passionate desire for change on the part of the electorate so strong that any credible and effective GOP candidate will be starting out with a strong hand.

The White House is trying to link the GOP to Rush. Let’s really link them.

Never Yet Melted endorses Rush Limbaugh for President in 2012.

Barack Obama’s movement in the direction of centrism via a series of prominent appointments has not gone unnoticed by the left, and Christopher Hayes, in the Nation, fires a warning shot across Obama’s bows.

There will be moments in the next four years when a principled fight will be required, and if there is an uneasiness rippling through the minds of some progressives, it arises from their doubts about just how willing Obama will be to fight those fights. When a friend of mine decided to run for office this year, someone suggested that he write down a list of positions he wouldn’t take, votes he wouldn’t cast, then put it in a safe and give someone the key. The idea was that by committing himself in writing to some basic skeletal list of principles, he’d be at least partially anchored against the slippery slope of compromise that so often leads elected officials to lose their way.

Does Obama have such a list? And if so, what’s on it?

Read the whole thing.

The Obama presidency cannot avoid all the ingredients for the perfect political storm. His nomination could only be achieved via the support of the democrat party’s activist extremist base, but once elected Obama’s freedom of action will inevitably be severely curtailed by the nation’s current circumstances, featuring economic crisis at home and war overseas, two situations in which the implementation of leftwing policy choices can only lead to full-scale disaster.

The leftwing base will not only have to endure seeing Hillary Clinton made Secretary of States and Robert Gates’s appointment as Defense Secretary renewed. Obama will have to agree to tax cuts to save the economy, and Obama will have to agree to increased military efforts to save the US from humiliation at the hands of Islamic extremism.

Sooner or later, one pragmatic policy decision flying in the face of leftwing ideology will prove to be one too many and will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back of the nutroots base’s tolerance and support. After that watershed event, the left will turn on Obama with just as much savagery as it did on Lyndon Johnson, and it will destroy his presidency.

Obama is in a no win situation. We just need to buckle our seatbelts, prepare for a wild ride, and have a candidate ready for 2012.