Waterloo, With A Jericho Chaser

Catching the walls in mid-tumble-down:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 29% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty percent (40%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11. That’s the first time his ratings have reached double digits in negative territory (see trends)....The number who Strongly Approve of the President has remained unchanged since the press conference but the number who Strongly Disapprove has gone up by five percentage points (from 35% on Wednesday morning to 40% today)....Overall, 49% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. Fifty percent (50%) disapprove....The President is now seen as politically liberal by 76%. That’s up six points from a month ago, 11 points since he was elected, and the highest total to date. Forty-eight percent (48%) now see him as Very Liberal, up 20 points since he was elected.

The two and a half year hype bubble has burst, brothers and sisters.  Barack Obama spent all that time making ridiculous promises, even more ridiculous gaffes, scandalously accepting the literal worship of the Obamedia that bilked most of a generation of American young people and sixty-eight million voters overall into buying into this man as a genuine messianic, "transformative" figure.  He convinced the public that, unlike all the charlatans that came before him, HE really COULD make water run up hill; HE really COULD give you your cake, let you eat it too, and it wouldn't go straight to your hips; HE really DID have the "ancient Chinese secret" (which they stole from the Muslims in any case); HE really COULD get the hot housewife to throw away her shiny new Swiffer and take back her old mop and he'd throw in a perpetual motion machine FREE OF CHARGE!

About $787 billion worth of old mops, to be precise.  The L'il President is reaping the Hogzilla whirlwind, both in the "jolt to the economy" that never was and letting his legislative blitzkrieg PR template cat out of the bag before getting to the true heart of his domestic communization ambitions.  Whether or not he bilked himself into believing his own phony baloney, plastic banana "stimulus" rhetoric, it's sucked the credibility - and the famed Jemimah glory - right out of his presidency, which is why his emergency BarryCare presser on Wednesday was such a flop.

The non-Kool Aid-drinking voter is left with one of two choices: Either....

1) B.O. is just the telegenic but ignorant, empty-suit frontman for the crazy, radical, corrupt, neoBolshevik rabble on Capitol Hill who are (a) actually writing this health care putsch and (b) far, far less popular than he is; or

2) The Chosen One is the mastermind, and therefore just another charlatan whose "You can keep your own health care plan/spending a trillion dollars will 'bend the cost curve'/only the 'rich' will take the tax increases rectally" snake oil has been exposed as bovine scatalogy and has no contingency rhetoric on which to fall back.

Yes, Virginia, Baracka Clause has run out of things to say.  I guess the "tingle" has finally fizzled out.

Either way, it strips away the Chicago Cherubim's "heavenly" aura and leaves in its place a callow, scheming, thuggish, incompetent liar who's really, really, REALLY in over his head.  Or, in more concise terms, the Peter Principle from hell.  And the options are meager:

1) The Carter Path: He can continue flacking for a health care takeover whose unpopularity is reaching toxic levels and either ride it down in flames along with his congressional underlings if it fails to pass, or flee into hiding at Dick Cheney's undisclosed location to escape the angry public rebellion if they jam it down the throats of the American people, congressional Republicans, AND their own "blue dogs". (And good luck with that caper at this juncture, BTW).

2) The Clinton Path: He can let this debacle blow over, come back next year, make a big show (not unlike Arnold Schwartzenegger's post-2005 initiative wipeout mea culpa) of having been "humbled" and "gotten the message" and being willing to work with Republicans and moderate Dems to enact "bipartisan" health care reform.  IOW, triangulation wedded to incrementalism.

No secret what the smarter option of the two is.  Plus #2 has the added bonus of mitigating the growing-by-leaps-and-bounds possibility of another 1994-esque midterm election debacle. 

After all, the capacity of the American people for foolish grace is practically limitless. Particularly for a prodigal messiah.

UPDATE: Just as yet another example of Donk 2010 vulnerability, the infamous pant-suited night rider Babs Boxer is under fifty percent and clinging by her fake past-on nails to a four-point lead over former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.  Add that to Chris Dodd, Joe Biden's old seat, newly minted and freshly vulnerable Snarlin' Arlen Specter, Barry O's old seat, Ken Salazar's old seat....well, an eleven-seat GOP gain is still far-fetched, but not quite the pipedream it once was.

UPDATE II: Uh, Your Unholiness?  If the Skip Gates/"stupid cop" crack was supposed to be a "distraction" from the midden hold you've crapped yourself into on botching your health care takeover, take my advice - try something else.