Could be – Jay Cost goes over Obama’s budget speech, notes that it has zero appeal to both center and right, and concludes that Obama is trying to nail down liberal support. Now, why would he need to do that when he’s still polling pretty strongly among the left? Because he may be worried that a bit more weakness in his polling will start to generate doubts about his 2012 electability – here is Cost on it:
…What Obama cannot suffer is a drop in support among Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. That’s how he could fall from the mid-40s into the high-30s. And that makes a huge psychological difference – like the price of oil going above $100. A president in the mid-40s is still in the game vis-à-vis the next election. A president in the 30s is flailing, in deep trouble, and appears headed for defeat. That’s a perception Team Obama just cannot tolerate. A big part of their electoral strategy is to make him seem invincible. Why else would an incumbent president need a billion dollars? What is that going to buy him? You could spend a billion dollars trying to convince me that the sun rises in the west, but I can assure you it wouldn’t work. Similarly, you could spend a billion trying to convince millions of former supporters that Obama’s done a good job, but if they think he stinks, your money will have been wasted. A campaign based on, “Who ya gonna believe…me or your lyin’ eyes?” will not be a very effective one. No, the billion is all about generating the perception of invincibility. It’s all about astroturfing a seemingly inexorable Obama bandwagon, which was a core component of his 2008 primary and general election strategies. And that perception would shatter if he sinks into the 30s. That’s George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter territory. That’s no good…
And, of course, both Bush and Carter ultimately faced primary challengers. A lot of people consider Obama unbeatable – on what grounds I really can’t imagine; perhaps its just what they thought of Carter. Carter, too, was considered a towering, unbeatable figure…mostly because those who make such public judgments had been wowed by him in 1976 and the last thing any “expert” will do is admit that he was a bone head about something. So it is with Obama – all the dunderheads who fell for him in 2008 simply don’t to admit that anyone would likely do a better job than Obama. Only a bit past two years in his term and Obama is already a strong contender for worst President, ever.
But while a lot of the fools of 2008 are still keeping up their faith, Obama and his team have to be disturbed. After all, the 2010 results weren’t just a loss – they were a crushing, unheard of defeat. For crying out loud, they went from a 60-seat super-majority in the Senate to 53 seats, and are almost certain to lose the Senate in 2012. At the State level, the loss was even worse – in fact, a lot worse. And then the left couldn’t even engineer a victory in a off-off-year State election in blue Wisconsin. The image of Obama might still shine brightly in the MSM and among the Beltway crowd…but he’s a faded quantity elsewhere. The final nail in the political coffin would be a primary challenger. Not that Obama wouldn’t win the nomination (it would be literal millions to one against anyone taking it away from him), but that such an event would probably doom him for sure in November, 2012. Obama is burnishing his image among the left and pledging to raise buckets of cash to scare off anyone who might start to think the Democrats would be better off without Obama.
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