Independents have been trending away from Obama for quite a while. Even the Reagan Democrats -- blue-collar whites -- jumped ship in 2010. I have seen a number of pieces arguing that Obama's campaign has written them off completely.
Here is a piece I missed when it first came out in early April detailing a survey of swing state independent voters by the organization known as Third Way, a coalition of New Democrats. Who knew that independents far prefer prosperity to equality of result? Who'd a thunk it?
The important thing about this poll, and Third Way's touting of it, is that it presaged the recent attacks on the Chicago gang's anti-Wall-Street message by moderate Democrats such as Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Bill Clinton himself. Remember that except for his inability to keep it in his pants, Bill Clinton is acknowledged as the smartest, most capable Dem politician since... well, ever.
I believe, that at this point, those New -- as of the Nineties, at least -- Democrats are so afraid of a disastrous Fall election result, losing the presidency and the Senate, that they are willing to run the risk of being seen as disloyal to Obama and the progressivist base in order to separate themselves from progressivism's goals of economic tyranny.
But the jumping ship by the Clinton gang over the last two weeks was just the beginning of bad news for Team Awesome One (TAO). Toward the end of last week, Greek bank runs and Spanish bank weakness sent the Euro into a tailspin. It lost about 4-5 cents of its value versus the dollar by Thursday of this week, a huge shift in the work of currency trading where changes are measured in 1/100ths of a cent.
At which point even the progressivist organ Mother Jones had thrown in the towel on the economy becoming the wind at TAO's back.
But Friday brought the worst of all possible economic news for the President's campaign. Job growth in May was extraordinarily weak, amounting to only half of economist predictions, and the two previous two months results were found to be only two-thirds of that previously announced.
After which CNBC's Larry Kudlow trumpeted -- as Romney's campaign is sure to do from now through election day -- that it is the Obama/Keynes economic model that is a failure.
It's critical that Republicans now state clearly that while they are not happy at these new economic numbers, they are certain that the country must agree that TAO's failure disqualifies the President from a second term.
