E-Minus 14 Days

More baby steps....

POPULAR VOTE PROJECTION: Obama 50.3%, McCain 47.7% (McCain +0.2%)

ELECTORAL COLLEGE PROJECTION: Obama 353, McCain 185

“McCAIN MAXIMUM” (Total Electoral Votes including states in which he is within five points - Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio): 261

The Rasmussen daily tracking poll is unchanged (50-46 Obama).  Missouri goes back in the McCain column (for the time being).

After a night to sleep on the great Biden confession/concession/warning of foreign policy disasters in the making if his young charge makes it to the Oval Office, I find myself questioning Barry's regent on his presumption that the expected "blink, duck, cover, & run" strategy will cause the Rogaine Messiah administration to crater in the polls a year from now.

First, it would depend on the what and where of the crises.  If Ralph Peters doesn't mind me borrowing his for a sec...:

***Say Russia invades Ukraine next summer as they did Georgia back in August.  If memory serves, wasn't the Bush Administration's response to the latter pretty much indistinguishable from Obama's?  McCain showed a much more informed and sophisticated understanding of the crisis and its stakes, but in the end he wouldn't have been able to take any action to halt the first step of Russia's reconquest of its "near abroad" any more than B.O., and for the same reasons: (1) nobody wants a shooting war with Russia and (2) they have us over a barrel with Iran and can play that card before we could ever get forces to Eastern Europe to stop the New Red Army, assuming we could even scrape them together.  Would conceding Czar Vladimir's reconquest of the constituent "republics" of the old USSR damage False Messiah politically?  Hard to see it.

***Would President Hussein "get tough" with Pakistan on its extreme reluctance to oust al Qaeda and the Taliban from its northwest provinces?  No.  Would President Hussein really apply the "Surge" strategy to Afghanistan that he spent the past two years eviscerating when applied to Iraq?  Doubtful.  Would his crazoid America-hating base demand the abandonment of Afghanistan instead?  Absolutely.  Would he heed them?  More than likely.  Would losing Afghanistan hurt him politically?  Not enough to generate the Biden scenario.

***How about tossing Iraq to the Iranian/al Qaeda wolves?  This could leave more of a mark, as Americans still do not like to lose wars, though that assertion would be questionable in the wake of Obama's very election itself.  Combine it with a loss of Afghanistan - the two countries liberated to date in the War On Terror - and a disturbing trend would be created that could cause Barack the Lord some serious PR heartburn.

***Iran announces its entrance into the nuclear weapons club with a bang sometime in the next twelve months.  Perhaps in an underground test, perhaps in an above-ground test, and perhaps in Tel Aviv or Haifa.  Blameable to some degree on George W. Bush's Obamaesque failure to pre-emptively disarm the mullahgarchy while he had the chance?  Definitely, but it's hardly an argument that President Hussein will be able to make.  He could try to claim that if Bush hadn't invaded Iraq, Iran could have been talked out of building nukes, but that'll hardly fly when he's already surrendered Iraq to Tehran.  The Middle East equation will have changed forever, that will feed right into B.O.'s retreat fetish, and given what the effect on oil prices will be with Iraq gone and Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates under threat of nuclear blackmail, and the impact THAT will have on an already recessed American economy pre-emptively reeling from False Messiah's promised tax increases, this one really could make Barry's name "mud".

***Another 9/11, in the context of any or all of the above.  Fughedaboudit.  The buyer's remorse will be bitter, clinging, and palpable.

Or will it?  I think back to the two recent historical precedents of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.  The latter ran as a centrist and then governed as a Marxist in his first two years, and his party got destroyed in the congressional mid-terms just two years later.  It was only after that that he pragmatically piggy-backed himself to the Republican majorities' successes and stole the credit for them that he became PR bullet-proof.  The former, though, was simply "the other guy" in 1976.  Or, rather, the candidate who didn't have the "R" after his name.  Voters weren't voting FOR Carter, but AGAINST Ford, much like they're not really voting FOR Obama as AGAINST McCain.

The difference, of course, is that neither Mr. Peanut nor Sick Willie were [*AHEM*] black.  And not even Clinton bore the magnitude of Enemy Media investment that Barry O does.  Their having pretty much single-handedly gotten the callow, naive, ideologically malodorous Illinois junior senator elected, the Chicago Cherubim could whip out an Uzi at his first State of the Union show next February and mow down everybody in the House chamber who didn't duck in time, and Olby and Chris "Tingle" Matthews would be complimenting the new president on how much better his aim is than Sarah Palin's - and how if Bush had still been around, HE'd have whipped out a bazooka (that Dick Cheney slipped him from behind when nobody was looking).

Does anybody seriously believe that the same Enemy Media that protected Barack Hoover Obama from any and all vetting and public scrutiny for the past two years will start muckraking him at the first opportunity after he assumes office?  Bull-doodles; they'll give him a four-year honeymoon like he'd married every model in the Victoria's Secret catalogue, no matter how bad the economy gets and how many overseas disasters he causes and how many mass-casualty Islamist attacks hit the homeland.

Will that be enough to prevent the polling freefall of which Slow Joe warned?  With conservative talk radio banned by the reimposition of the "Fairness" Doctrine, combined with who knows what other Donk deck-stacking they use their supermajorities to enact, it has to be considered a legitimate possibility.

Why?  Because Team Messiah won't leave anything to chance like the Goober Plenepotentiary did.  Carter's time, and his Democrat Party, were so different from today's version as to be unrecognizeable.  The days of normal politics, where you campaign during election season and govern the rest of the time, are dead on the Donk side of the aisle.  Clinton killed them, and the GOP still hasn't figured out how the game has changed.  Obama won't simply impliment his rancid, discredited, obsolete, despicable policies and then sit back and reap the whirlwind like Carter did; you're going to hear Dubya invoked as the Devil Incarnate and root of all of America's problems even more after he's gone than when he was in office.  And, of course, President Hussein's administration will aggressively define any critics who dare to speak against him in any way, shape, or form as flaming racists.  It will be essentially a re-enactment of the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb process on an even larger scale, as Barry and the Dems systematically destroy American capitalism, demolish any and all American private retirement wealth, outlaw private health care and medicine, nationalize the entire energy sector, disband the military altogether, and hopelessly outnumbered Republicans won't utter a peep or lift a finger in protest for fear of being denounced as hood-wearing, lynch-happy night riders.

Oh, and let's not forget who will be B.O.'s most loyal soldier on the depopulated GOP side of the aisle: John Sith McCain, who will give President Hussein all the "bipartisan" cover he needs as he brings down a storm of strategic disasters to stagger the United States to its knees - as, in his mind, we deserve to be.

I'm trying not to let my cynicism morph into paranoia.  I'm trying to remember that yes, even Bill Clinton made himself unpopular at one time.  And I'm trying to convince myself that America is still a center-right country, and that these last two disastrous political cycles aren't, can't, keep repeating themselves until there are no Republicans left and we're all living in a real-life Red Dawn - and that maybe, someday, the GOP may actually start to regain some of the vast swaths of seats it has had ripped from its grasp.

I'm trying not to be a bigger fatalist than Senator Rogaine.  And I'm having immense difficulty succeeding.

UPDATE: Hey, how about a Venezuelan missile crisis!  That'll give the Lord Barry and Uncle Hugo something to chat about!