Critical parts of the coalition that delivered President Obama to the White House in 2008 and gave Democrats control of Congress in 2006 are switching their allegiance to the Republicans in the final phase of the midterm Congressional elections, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Republicans have wiped out the advantage held by Democrats in recent election cycles among women, Roman Catholics, less affluent Americans and independents. All of those groups broke for Mr. Obama in 2008 and for Congressional Democrats when they grabbed both chambers from the Republicans four years ago, according to exit polls.

If women choose Republicans over Democrats in House races on Tuesday, it will be the first time they have done so since exit polls began tracking the breakdown in 1982.

The poll provides a pre-Election Day glimpse of a nation so politically disquieted and disappointed in its current trajectory that 57 percent of the registered voters surveyed said they were more willing to take a chance this year on a candidate with little previous political experience. More than a quarter of them said they were even willing to back a candidate who holds some views that “seem extreme.”

On the issue most driving the campaign, the economy, Republicans have erased the traditional advantage held by Democrats as the party seen as better able to create jobs; the parties are now even on that measure. By a wide margin, Republicans continue to be seen as the party better able to reduce the federal budget deficit.

The public wants compromise from both sides, though it thinks Mr. Obama will try to do so more than Republicans will. Yet for all of its general unhappiness, the electorate does not seem to be offering any clear guidance for Mr. Obama and the incoming Congress — whoever controls it — on the big issues.

While almost 9 in 10 respondents said they considered government spending to be an important issue, and more than half said they favored smaller government offering fewer services, there was no consensus on what programs should be cut. There was clear opposition to addressing one of the government’s biggest long-term challenges — the growing costs of paying Social Security benefits — by raising the retirement age or reducing benefits for future retirees. Support for one of Mr. Obama’s main economic proposals — raising taxes on income above $250,000 a year — has declined substantially over the course of this year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/us/politics/28poll.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

see toon above...

Obama leaned in like a schoolmaster, still not understanding that here was an unappeasable foe. He had a "profound disagreement" with that and, while he "didn't want to lump [Stewart] in with a lot of other commentators …" Stewart was visibly riled, not at being corrected but at being seen as just one of many talking heads, and it was like that moment in The Social Network when Zuckerberg realises he must destroy those Winklevosses. He is NOT just another nerd who can be bought off by high rhetoric.

"I don't want to lump you in with other presidents, but …" Stewart retaliated, accusing Obama of merely "papering over" corrupt systems instead of transforming them. Obama continued to try to defend himself.

As any Republican could have told him, attacking the enemy is the best form of defence. Yet he refused to take this obvious tactic, standing instead on the back foot, which not only adds at least 10 pounds on camera but probably takes away at least 15 voter points.

He may feel that he is above making jokes about non-masturbating witches standing for office, but the higher the road he takes, the greater the suicidal plunge.

Instead, viewers were left with the feeling of yes. But...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/28/barack-obama-jon-stewart-daily-show

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Gus: as in Australia, the US mass discontent is fuelled by a biased media and a gnarly mongrel opposition who both have basically destroyed any record of what good the present government did, to show what it did not do — while fostering the venting of anger at anything Obama-ish, blaming his government for the boils on their bums. This is done overtly with the ultra-right wing intent to gain power at any cost, including that of losing earthly sanity with the promotion of anti-evolution lipsticked dorkettes, to do even less social and green "reforms" in favor of promoting bigoted big bucks pocket-lining, while cutting the poor's legs as a "necessary" saving measure... Meanwhile, the angry middle class will rediscover its purpose of being in the "righteous" middle, proud of having protested while achieving zippo but greater boils on its bum...

Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?

Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?

No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.

Start with the politics.

In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.

After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.

Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.

Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that, in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr. Obama.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/opinion/29krugman.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB&pagewanted=print

In politics as in finance, markets overshoot. Traders and voters swoon over stocks or politicians one week, and then rage at them the next.

That’s why I’m feeling a bit sorry for President Obama as we approach a midterm election in which he is poised to be cast off like an old sock. The infatuation with Mr. Obama was overdone in 2008, and so is the rejection of him today.

So here’s my message: Give him a chance.

The sourness toward Mr. Obama reminds me of the crankiness toward Al Gore in 2000. We in the news media were tough on Mr. Gore, magnifying his weaknesses, and that fed into a general disdain. So some liberals voted for Ralph Nader, and George W. Bush moved into the White House.

Like others, I have my disappointments with Mr. Obama, including his tripling of forces in Afghanistan. Yet the central problem isn’t that Mr. Obama has been a weak communicator as president or squandered his political capital — although both are true — but that we’re mired in the aftermath of the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s.

After all, Gallup polls still show Mr. Obama with public approval a hair ahead of Ronald Reagan’s at a similar point in his presidency (when America was also in recession). And maybe the best comparison is with President George H. W. Bush, a solid president and admirable man who had stratospheric approval ratings in 1991 at the end of the Persian Gulf war and then was fired by the public a year later when he sought re-election — because of a much milder recession than today’s.

Bill Clinton, who was as good a president as we’ve had in modern times, captured Mr. Obama’s challenge: “I’d like to see any of you get behind a locomotive going straight downhill at 200 miles an hour and stop it in 10 seconds,” Mr. Clinton told a crowd in Washington State, according to a Washington Post account.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31kristof.html?src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB&pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON — Republicans made their closing argument on Sunday for capturing control of Congress, assailing President Obama as a champion of wasteful and excessive government, as Democrats countered that returning power to Republicans would embolden corporations and the wealthy with disastrous results for middle-class Americans.

Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. converged on Ohio in hopes of rekindling the passion Democrats displayed two years ago in sending the pair to the White House.

“In two days, you have a chance to once again say, ‘Yes, we can,’ ” Mr. Obama said at a rally in Cleveland, reprising the theme of his 2008 campaign. “There is no doubt that this is a difficult election.”

But Representative John A. Boehner, who is poised to become speaker if Republicans win the House, offered a rebuttal as he crisscrossed the state, warning voters not to be taken in by familiar promises of changing Washington.

“Washington hasn’t been listening to the American people; I think it’s been disrespecting the American people,” Mr. Boehner said, firing up Republicans in Columbus. He flashed a sign of confidence, saying: “We’re going to have a big night on Tuesday night — a really big night.”

Republicans are positioned to reach or surpass the number of House seats that they picked up in 1994, according to strategists and independent analysts, when the party gained 54 and ended four decades of Democratic dominance in the House.

The ranks of vulnerable Democrats deepened, with House seats in Connecticut, Maine and Rhode Island becoming susceptible to a potential Republican wave that could exceed the 39 seats needed to win control. Democrats clung to hope that they could hold on to the Senate by at least a seat or two.

Officials in the Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay) have taken extraordinary measures to protect US President Barack Obama ahead of his visit.

In their effort to provide maximum security in the run-up to his visit on Friday, they have removed coconuts which may fall on his head from trees.

All coconuts around the city's Gandhi museum have now been cut down, an official told the BBC.

Every year in India people are injured or even killed by falling coconuts.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11684382

On Wednesday David Axelrod, President Obama’s top political adviser, appeared to signal that the White House was ready to cave on tax cuts — to give in to Republican demands that tax cuts be extended for the wealthy as well as the middle class. “We have to deal with the world as we find it,” he declared.

The White House then tried to walk back what Mr. Axelrod had said. But it was a telling remark, in more ways than one.

The obvious point is the contrast between the administration’s current whipped-dog demeanor and Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric as a candidate. How did we get from “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” to here?

But the bitter irony goes deeper than that: the main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn’t.

In retrospect, the roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance — we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions.

This promise of transcendence may have been good general election politics, although even that is questionable: people forget how close the presidential race was at the beginning of September 2008, how worried Democrats were until Sarah Palin and Lehman Brothers pushed them over the hump. But the real question was whether Mr. Obama could change his tune when he ran into the partisan firestorm everyone who remembered the 1990s knew was coming. He could do uplift — but could he fight?

So far the answer has been no.

read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/opinion/15krugman.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

see toon at top...