Northwest Indiana Discussion

Great choice Willard

, incumbent Vice President Joe Biden is seen as a far better choice than Ryan to serve as president if needed,

The liberals hyperventilating at the thought of Paul Ryan “a heartbeat away from the presidency” seem completely unaware of who’s filling that slot at the present moment. Why is it that Joe Biden is the only national campaign surrogate who’s never expected to put together an appropriate sentence? Every time he spouts off some wildly offensive stereotype, or makes a glaringly false assertion, journalists treat him like a chatty, precocious four-year-old who has no control over what comes out of his mouth.

But in a warning sign for the campaign, incumbent Vice President Joe Biden is seen as a far better choice than Ryan to serve as president if needed, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

President Barack Obama could lose his home state of Illinois in November, a new poll shows.

A poll conducted by Illinois-based pollster and political strategist Michael McKeon found Obama leading Republican Mitt Romney by 49 percent to 37 percent in Cook County, the home of Chicago. That puts him ahead by a far thinner margin than expected in a county he should be winning handsomely.

Cook is the most Democratic leaning county in the state. It is also the most populous.

Those numbers do not bode well for the president.

“He has to come out of Cook County with a big lead or he’s gonna have problems downstate,” explained McKeon, who said that based on the numbers he had seen, Obama polled only in the forties in downstate Illinois.

“It’s not like his policies are very popular downstate,” McKeon said. “He’s viewed as more part of Chicago than he is part of Illinois.”

According to the poll, which surveyed 629 registered voters last week, Obama’s problems are not in Chicago proper, but in suburban Cook County.

President Obama wondered to supporters if this election could be “the end” of his political career.

“It’s August 23rd,” Obama wrote in a fundraising email with “the end?” as its subject line. “And 75 days from now, I’ll either be looking at another four years in the White House — or the end of this opportunity.”

He asked for contributions of $5 or more, saying “we’re getting outspent by wide margins in critical battleground states — and what we do about that today could be the difference between winning and losing on November 6th.”

As Election Day approaches, President Obama is sharing a few important things about himself. He has mentioned more than once in recent weeks that he cooks “a really mean chili.” He has impressive musical pitch, he told an Iowa audience. He is “a surprisingly good pool player,” he informed an interviewer — not to mention (though he does) a doodler of unusual skill.

All in all, he joked at a recent New York fund-raiser with several famous basketball players in attendance, “it is very rare that I come to an event where I’m like the fifth or sixth most interesting person.”

But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. “There’s a reinforcing quality,” he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I’m the best at this.

And though Mr. Obama craves high grades from the electorate and from history, he is in a virtual dead heat with Mr. Romney in national polls, the political equivalent of school progress reports.

Gallup polling suggests RNC did nothing for Romney

September 3, 2012

Philip Klein

Senior Editorial Writer
The Washington Examiner
It’s still too early to say for sure whether the Republican National Convention rejuvenated Mitt Romney’s campaign, but at least according to Gallup numbers so far, it hasn’t moved the polls much.

Romney currently trails President Obama by an insignificant one-point margin, 47 percent to 46 percent. That’s a 7-day tracking poll running from last Monday through yesterday and therefore includes a full three days of polling after Romney’s Thursday night acceptance speech. If he were to have received a substantial bump, the tracking poll would have likely picked it up by now. In the last poll before the start of the RNC, running through last Monday, it was Romney who was edging out Obama by one point.

The evidence from the tracking poll that Romney received no bounce is also backed up by a three-day Gallup survey following the RNC, which found that while 40 percent of Americans said they were more likely to vote for Romney after his speech, 38 percent said they were less likely and it made no difference to 22 percent.

Frank Newport, the editor in chief of Gallup blogs that, “We’ll know a little more when we report our seven-day average on Tuesday,September 4, which will contain include four days after Romney’s speech on Thursday. After that point, any impact of the GOP convention will begin to be co-mingled with the impact of the Democratic convention. That’s why the ultimate reckoning will be what the election landscape looks like after both conventions.”

Barack Obama approaches his nomination for a second term with the lowest pre-convention personal popularity of an incumbent president in ABC News/Washington Post polls since the 1980s. He’s also at his lowest of the year among registered voters, with trouble among women.

Just 47 percent of registered voters in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll see Obama favorably overall, down 7 percentage points from his recent peak in April, while 49 percent rate him unfavorably. He’s numerically underwater in this group for the first time since February.

See PDF with full results, charts and tables here.

The decline has occurred entirely among women registered voters – from 57-39 percent favorable-unfavorable in April to a numerically negative 46-50 percent now. That’s Obama’s lowest score among women voters – a focus of recent political positioning – in ABC/Post polls since he took office. Unusually, his rating among men, 50-47 percent favorable-unfavorable, is numerically better than it is among women, albeit not by a significant margin.

In 2008 the senile warmonger and the moron from Alaska got a 6 point bump after the GOP convention and we all know what happened in November. Mittens The Compulsive Liar got do-do after his convention.

That's a shame.

Only 43 percent of political independents offered a one-word positive opinion of President Barack Obama, according to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center.

Forty-three percent of respondents offered negative terms, while 14 percent offered neutral terms, according to the study, released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Washington Post.

Twenty-four percent of self-identified Democrats offered negative or neutral terms for Obama.

The most common negative terms for Obama were “failed” or “failure,” “incompetent,” “disappointing,” and “liar.”

Bill Clinton’s favorables are up after his impassioned promotion of President Obama at this week’s Democratic National Convention, but there is a huge partisan divide over whether the two men actually agree on what’s best for the economy. Most also believe Clinton was a better president than the man he was championing.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 59% of Likely U.S. Voters consider Clinton who served from 1993 to 2001 to be a better president than President Obama. Just 19% think Obama is a better chief executive. Twenty-two percent (22%) are undecided.

Here's The Most Important Post-Convention Bump For Obama That Puts Him In A Great Spot For Re-Election

Brett LoGiurato|Sep. 9, 2012,
AP
President Obama's post-convention spike continues, and that's especially evident — and important — in the steady increase in his approval rating, which is at a 15-month high in the Gallup daily tracking poll.

Obama's approval rating in Gallup now stands at 52 percent — above the 50 percent mark that usually nearly ensures re-election. Moreover, his disapproval rating has dropped to just 42 percent.

Pre-convention, Obama's approval-to-disapproval rating stood at 45 percent to 48 percent. That means it has swung 13 points during and in the aftermath of the convention.

The last time Obama was at 52 percent was during the three-day period of May 23-25, 2011.

Obama's approval rating also jumped to the same 52 percent mark in Rasmussen's daily tracking poll, while 47 percent disapprove. That compares to a 48-52 approval-to-disapproval split the day the convention started.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-ap ... z261ghntGa