Dick Morris Video: Obama’s Poll Blip Fades

Today’s Lunch Alert, which was actually put out yesterday.

Morris is of the opinion that the election is over; he’s been of that opinion for a while. Nothing much has changed even though the president got something of a bump out of the Obamacare ruling – the public still hates Obamacare even if it did survive the Supreme Court.

Morris isn’t the only guy out there who’s saying Obama is finished. Michael Barone is saying something similar…

The aging electorate of the Rust Belt remains Democratic, and these counties voted 56 to 42 percent for Barack Obama. But that means that they were only 3 percent more Democratic than the national average. The polling data suggest that Obama is not running as strong in the Rust Belt counties this year. The bus tour was undoubtedly aimed at pushing his numbers up.

But he seems to have been left with little to say. No wonder he resorted to making jokes about his family and adding, “People’ve been commenting: I need to gain some weight.” As if to compensate, he ate some grits — a staple once you get an hour or so south of Washington, but not so much up north.

But what else could he talk about? Certainly not the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules shutting down coal-fired electric plants. Nor his decision blocking the Keystone oil pipeline. He could hail the development of fracking in the region’s Marcellus Shale natural-gas formation, except for the fact that regulators in his administration seem intent on shutting it down.

He could repeat his calls for “investment” in education, but even if you don’t regard that as a political payoff to the teachers’ unions, the dividends are going to be a long time coming in. And calls for investment in infrastructure may lead people to recall his chuckling admission that there are no shovel-ready projects, thanks to regulatory and legal roadblocks.

The uncomfortable fact is that Obama doesn’t have a convincing economic story to tell. The recovery summer promised for 2010 and for 2011 and again for 2012 has yet to arrive.

And then there was this e-mail the Obama campaign sent out to their supporters…

Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

Good news first: June was our best fundraising month yet. We exceeded expectations — more than 706,000 people like you stepped up and pitched in for a grand total of $71 million raised for this campaign and the Democratic Party.

Bravo. That’s seriously impressive.

Bad news? We still got beat. Handily. Romney and the RNC pulled in a whopping $106 million.

Getting outraised by $35 million a month is a terrific way to get clobbered on Election Day.

And there’s the poll of likely voters The Hill just released…

Two-thirds of likely voters say President Obama has kept his 2008 campaign promise to change America — but it’s changed for the worse, according to a sizable majority.

A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.

There has been a lot of grousing at the Romney campaign for its supposed lack of punch lately. But I’d say anything Romney would do between now and the Republican Convention would be a waste of time if it doesn’t involve putting a campaign machine together and raising money. Big policy initiatives or rhetorical flourishes will only get lost between now and the convention, so it’s smarter not to let any of them loose.

Keep talking about the economy, promise to sign a repeal of Obamacare – which 80 percent of the country expects you to do regardless of whether you did Romneycare; all you really need is to say “forget Romneycare; I wouldn’t have done that as President and I won’t do Obamacare as president” – and let Obama flail around in search of a campaign message that makes sense. Then pick your VP for the week of the convention, give a fire-and-brimstone speech about how Obama is ruining the country and turning it into a larger version of those crappy Euroweenie countries which are collapsing right now and how even a centrist president who isn’t trying to remake the world in the image of Milton Friedman would constitute a colossal change from what we have now, and bury Obama under an avalanche of ads.

This will be the nastiest presidential campaign since 1828. That you can count on. It’s all Obama has left, because the voting public doesn’t have a lot of use for him or his policies.

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