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Obama has dropped in the latest Newsweek poll. He's gone from 51-36 over McCain to 44-41. The most striking piece of data though is that 53% of registered voters think that he has changed his position on key policy issues to try to gain political advantage since becoming the nominee.
That is stunning. Over half of the public, though perhaps has not heard of the FISA fight specifically, believes he shifts positions for political advantage. And why shouldn't they? He did. The drop was substantially concentrated among younger voters between the ages of 18-39 and independents. Democrats and Hillary Clinton supporters maintained the same level of support for Obama.
Republicans gained a few points of strength overall, but Obama lost far more than the Democratic brand in the last month. It is only one poll, but honestly I did not expect to see evidence that the FISA shift hurt him among anyone except hard core activists. It turns out hard core activists still support Obama (though they perhaps aren't giving anymore), it's the independents that don't. I thought and still largely think this election is in the bag, though it doesn't really matter what I think, I'm not making decisions for the Obama campaign and his people don't like us hippie bloggers.
Still, I will say that Obama better win this election or else he'll be the most hated Democrat ever.
... Man the comments section is nasty. A couple of points.
One, Obama asked for the responsibility to win the election and defunded the outside groups. He wants to run this his way and he's going to run it his way. That means he gets the credit and the blame, and in this environment it is simply a Democratic year that he should take advantage of. If he doesn't he doesn't, but progressives should get none of the blame for it. We sure aren't going to get any credit. That's what responsibility means, when you have authority you take responsibility when you don't you don't pretend that you do.
Two, Obama switched his position on several high profile issues, including abortion (sort of), NAFTA, FISA, and guns. The netroots are angry with him, but the story of him changing his position would be out there regardless. These are his choices, not ours, and they point to a deep lack of principle in his choices. He gets the credit and the blame.
Three, the election environment is still very favorable to Obama. He can lose, which I didn't think was possible until the last few weeks, but people hate Republicans and McCain is a Republican. And this poll is probably an outlier, so there's no point in panicking. And frankly, unless you're sitting in Obama's campaign office near the campaign manager, there's very little reason to worry, since nothing you do matters.
Four, stop blaming critics for Obama's fuck-ups. Lots of people got excited about a new kind of politics, and then stopped giving when it became obvious Obama offers more of the same tired Democratic bullshit. Is that their fault? Maybe. But Obama should have known that this would happen. Plenty of people told the campaign to improve their outreach to liberals so he would understand the problems and be able to make better political decisions. He chose not to do that. Fine. But then the millions of liberals out there who believe in liberal stuff aren't going to support him. Obama gets that; he even said that if the FISA issue is a dealbreaker, "that's ok".
It's not a deal-breaker for voters, but it ratchets down donors to simple supporters and it clearly annoys a good number of independents.
Five, Obama can clearly recover and recover quite easily. He can come back from his trip to Iraq with Chuck Hagel and announce some progressive blah blah on gas prices and Iraq, and he'll easily be the belle of the ball again. Progressives, as the primary showed, are cheap dates, though we're getting more expensive as we keep getting lied to.
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