More Americans would prefer to see Barack Obama re-elected than would prefer a Republican to win in 2012, according to a new poll released today by the Pew Research Center. In total, 48 percent of respondents said they would rather see Obama re-elected, while 35 percent said they would prefer a Republican and 16 percent didn't know. Among registered voters, 47 percent favored Obama and 37 percent preferred a Republican. By comparison, a Pew survey of registered voters in April 2003 found 48 percent wanted to see George W. Bush re-elected and 35 percent wanted to elect a Democrat. At the time, Bush's approval rating was higher than Obama's is now, and more people said they were satisfied than dissatisfied with the direction of the country. In March 1995, only 29 percent of adults in a Pew survey said they would prefer to re-elect Bill Clinton, while 33 percent said they favored a Republican and 20 percent wanted an independent candidate. Having "independent" as an option in that survey makes it difficult to compare directly to Obama's current position. The new survey also looked at Republican primary candidates: Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee led the field, with 21 percent and 20 percent respectively. Sarah Palin, with 13 percent; Newt Gingrich, with 11 percent; and Ron Paul, with eight percent, trailed Romney and Huckabee, and several other candidates received between two and three percent support. Conducted March 8-14, the poll targeted 1,525 adults and has a margin of error of three percentage points. Respondents to the Republican primary question included 538 Republicans and Republican-leaning registered voters; results for the smaller sample have a margin of error of 5.5 percentage points.
FORMING TO THE LEFT: A CHALLENGE TO OBAMA By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN "If President Barack Obama submits his intervention in Libya to Congress for its approval and he was still Senator Barack Obama, he would vote against his own use of force resolution. Obama has taken the first step into quicksand and will find it impossible to extricate himself. He has been lured by center-right governments in the UK and France to embrace the cause of saving Libyan civilians, a fight he probably cannot accomplish without ground troops and likely cannot win without regime change. Bush-43 spent six years trying to convince us that Iraq was not another Vietnam. Now Obama is trying to sell the idea that Libya is not another Iraq. But, of course, it is. In both cases, we face a hostile dictator who, with his political and military cronies, has made a good living by abusing his own people. Even if Gadaffi goes, his clique is as likely to trigger a guerilla war as Saddam's did in Iraq. And, in both countries, we intervene as a foreign power, distrusted by the population. And, in each case, we face a nation where the crowded cities and the vast open spaces around them make guerilla war highly possible. Add to this mix that Obama took the action consulting only with the U.N. Security Council, not the U.S. Congress. He, even now, refuses to send a war powers resolution to Congress. He begins the war with only 51% approval for the intervention among Democrats. A Democratic president cannot sustain popular support for a war by relying on Republicans. Obama is setting in motion the same forces that toppled Humphrey and Johnson in 1968 and Hillary in 2008. He is betraying his political base and will pay for it at the polls. In President Clinton's move to the center of 1995-1996, he took care to cave into the demands of Jesse Jackson to preserve affirmative action, despite the president's personal preference to make it gender and racially neutral. He did so precisely to avoid a primary fight so that he could accommodate the Republican Congress on domestic policy and budget issues without worrying about his left flank. Obama has cut no such deal with the likes of Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. If Obama stays in Libya, Kucinich probably gets into the race. If Obama continues to stay, Kucinich will move up in the polls. At the very least, Kucinich's challenge will hamper Obama's attempts to move to the center since complying with Republican demands for spending cuts will enrage his liberal constituents. At the most, Kucinich's candidacy will attract funding and credibility and become a serious political movement. Can't you see Michael Moore hopping on board? How did Obama get embroiled? It started with European pressure on Hillary. The Secretary of State did not like being the odd-woman-out as the European club berated the U.S. for failing to protect Libyan civilians. Never mind that they let the Kurds get gassed by the hundreds of thousands and the Rwandans get exterminated by the millions. Now, the European establishment was determined to act. Hillary, obsessed by the desire to fit in, came out - in private - for military action and, together with Samantha Powers and Susan Rice, convinced Obama to act. The subtext of this decision was that the president couldn't sit back and let slaughter proceed in Libya and have his 2008 presidential runner-up chaffing at the bit to stop it, always with the threat of leaks and, eventually, going public and resigning. So now the escalation begins. From no-fly zones enforced by bombing to no-drive zones for armor policed from the air. From protecting civilians to ousting Gadaffi. From toppling a regime to stopping a civil war. There is a strong isolationist wing in the Democratic Party. It is not like the isolationists of the right who see nobody as worthy of our support. It is based on those who say that we should tend to our own needs before we go abroad "in search of monsters to destroy" (words of John Quincy Adams). Obama used them to get nominated. Now Kucinich will use them to rob him of his base."
That's the real problem, mission creep. Though, it's not creep if it was part of the mission to begin with. ; ) I support the no fly zone initiative. We're all over presidents who do absolutely nothing to help the underdogs overseas. But it took... what? mere hours, to begin creeping.
The real problem is that the mission is not defined. No fly zone is not a mission, it's a political/military strategy to achieve an objective... hmm what exactly is the objective? When or under which conditions will we end the no fly zone? What's the end game? These are the questions that should have been clearly defined before the first fighter plane took off.
My problem is a bit deeper in: it's the lack of mission definition that scares me. These guys are expert confounders of words and situations... they never really defined the mission to start with so that nobody can credibly accuse them of mssion creep in the future. That's why they avoided going to Congress and build some sort of consensus up front, they were afraid of getting questioned!
I agree with you both. Maybe asking those questions is why Obama appeared to be "dithering". As I pointed out earlier, no matter what decision Obama made, or no decision, he could and would be damned for it.
Clinton said his biggest regret was not intervening in Rawanda while those people were having their limbs severed by machete daily. That sort of selective non-intervention has to make you think about what motivations beyond even oil are considered at the highest levels, and I don't mean this forum. I read that Gadafi was pumping billions into sub Saharan Africa and considering the sorts of natural resources at stake that is far off the radar of most media treatment and observations, it holds up that nationalizing, probably even compromising on, any of those resources would effect mining concerns of all the allied forces in the still in force Scramble for Africa. Just saying, you've got to consider beyond what we're being fed.
Why do you guys want to re-elect a mooslim? There is nothing wrong with carpet bombing Libya. They hate USA and Israel.