COMMENTARY | In 2008, a mystery candidate named Barack Obama made history by becoming the first African American president of the United States.
Today, Obama has a record, a very public record, with very real consequences. Among his most notable achievements: the most deficit spending of any president from George Washington to Ronald Reagan, stagnant unemployment, a record number of Americans living below poverty level and dependent on some form of government assistance and the first downgrade of the U.S. credit rating in United States history -- all while setting the national record for most rounds of golf played by a sitting president.
Republicans and the tea party tried to warn you. But most didn't listen. They were too busy chanting Hope and Change and calling anyone who didn't buy into it a racist. Now, as all those admonitions of economic and social chaos continue to come to ugly fruition, even Congressional Democrats, liberal pundits, pollsters and once rabidly loyal members of the mainstream media are starting to squirm with discomfort.
It's all about saving face, mind you. They knew the chaos would come too. They just know it's just getting harder for them to keep spinning three years of failure into a believable success story without looking like a fool. So now, just as Bush loyalists turned on George near the end of his struggling presidency, the most devoted of Obama's public relations support unit are bailing.
In August, Politico reported Democrat strategist James Carville offering a single word of advice for the struggling president: "Panic." On Monday, Patrick Caddell, President Carter's pollster, and Douglas Schoen, who advised President Bill Clinton's re-election, suggested through an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that it's time for Obama to "step aside" and give the nomination to Hillary Clinton.
According to a recent CNN/ORC International Poll 26 percent of Democrats would prefer that their party nominate another candidate for president. While that is hardly a majority, that number was only 18 percent a month ago.
In September, after listening to Obama's absurd class warfare rhetoric that the "millionaires and billionaires" need to pay their "fair share" of taxes, even the Associated Press had to call him out and bear the facts that prove "they already are."
Because of their highly unpopular fiscal policies, like Obamacare and the waste of his 2009 trillion-dollar stimulus, Democrats were pummeled in the 2010 midterms. Losses in the Sept. 13 House special elections in New York and Nevada were again attributed directly to Obama.
In anticipation of another drubbing in 2012, seventeen House Democrats - including the 16-term Democrat from Massachusetts, Rep. Barney Frank -- have decided not to seek reelection.
As Obama tours the country on his own reelection tour, incumbent Democrats who want to keep their seats are avoiding him like the plague.
After contacting over a dozen Democrats in the moderate Blue Dog Caucus Politico found only a few were even "willing to comment on whether they supported Obama's reelection bid."
Unable or simply unwilling to come through with those promises of Hope and Change the New York Times reported that Democratic operatives for the 2012 election have decided that "the party will explicitly abandon the white working class."
Once believing she and her husband were "well beyond the hot dogs and beans era" of their lives and finding herself "exhausted" at defending Obama - the man "who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class," Velma Hart asked the president to his face at a Washington D.C. town hall a year ago. "Is this my new reality?"
Having observed the stark difference between Obama "talk" and Obama "reality" for three years even Chris 'I Use to Have a Thrill Up My Leg' Matthews wants to know; "Is this it? Is this as good as it gets?"
According to Gallup, 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama's effort to create jobs, 67 percent disapprove of his handling of the economy and the deficit and 73 percent believe it's all getting worse.
Republicans and the tea party tried to warn you. Now, after three years of the economic chaos Obama has inflicted upon the nation, their new message is simply; "We told you so."
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