As my more faithful readers know, I would never be confused with Pollyanna, even if I donned a pinafore and carried a parasol. But, just as confident as I was that John McCain, thanks to his own pathetic campaign and the economy’s coming down with a severe case of the vapors a month before the election, would lose to Barack Obama, I am confident that Obama is moving back to Chicago in January 2013.
There are several reasons why I’m convinced Obama is bound to lose the 2012 election. To begin with, the curtain has been pulled back on the Wizard of Malarkey, and millions of suckers have seen with their own eyes that “Hope and Change” was just more of the same old political hokum. And in 2012, Obama’s campaign won’t have the historical significance that it did in 2008, when he was campaigning to be the first black president in U.S. history.
There is also the matter of an unemployment rate that’s higher than when he took office and immediately pushed through a trillion-dollar stimulus he guaranteed would keep that rate lower than it is now. As if that weren’t bad enough, he’s run up $4 trillion in additional debt, much of it owed to China. Then, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, he sent us into Libya, at a current cost of $1 billion, in the vague hope of removing a Middle Eastern tyrant who’s no better or worse than the rest of his colleagues in that part of the world. Furthermore, even if we managed to eliminate Gaddafi, jihadists in the guise of freedom fighters would, in all likelihood, replace him.
But the actual reason I’m betting Obama won’t be re-elected is that he simply won’t have the electoral votes.
In 2008, Obama carried 28 states and the District of Columbia. That gave him 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173. But that was then and this is now. At the time, Obama’s offshore drilling ban hadn’t destroyed the oil-driven economy of the Gulf states. While it’s true that all of those states except Florida went for McCain, I’d say that Obama’s energy policy and his support for the cap-and-trade bill ensures that none of them will be moving into his column.
The soaring costs of fueling their cars, heating their homes and feeding their families will remind voters all over the country that not even Clinton was as fanatical in his opposition to the American coal and oil industries. It will not be overlooked that, at the same time Obama was attacking America’s oil industry, he was giving Brazil $2 billion to help finance their offshore oil industry — in which, coincidentally, George (“I’m Not Dracula!”) Soros has a huge financial stake, though, unfortunately, not a wooden one through his heart.
In breaking down the electoral votes, I am also taking into account the number of people who side with Arizona in its ongoing battle with Obama over illegal aliens, as well as those who live in the 28 states whose attorney generals have joined in opposition to the president’s proudest achievement, Obamacare.
Along with all of those considerations, one should keep in mind that Obama only won Ohio by 4%, Florida by 3% and Indiana and North Carolina by 1%. That’s the same Indiana from which Obama is now threatening to withhold $4 billion in Medicare allotments for daring to de-fund Planned Parenthood.
One should also keep in mind that during the first two years of his administration, Virginia, Ohio and New Jersey all elected Republican governors, in spite of Obama’s earnest efforts on behalf of their opponents. In Massachusetts, the voters even elected a Republican senator for the first time in decades. Proving these weren’t aberrations, in the midterms, the GOP added 63 seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate.
While it’s true that a Republican House will prevent Obama from going quite as crazy in his last two years as he did in his first two, I think there’s very little chance that they’ll be able to rein him in as much as Newt Gingrich and the Republican House reined in Bill Clinton in the mid-90s, which, ironically, helped him get re-elected. For one thing, Clinton, unlike Obama, was more a practical political hack and less a left-wing ideologue.
Besides, even as a survival tactic, if Obama attempted to veer towards the center, the combination of Reid, Pelosi, Schumer, Kucinich, Waxman, Sherman, Leahy, Frank, Boxer and Wasserman-Schultz would keep pulling him back.
It’s bad enough, so far as Obama’s base is concerned, that they’ve had to eat their words when it came to the War Powers Act, Gitmo, military tribunals, enhanced interrogation, ACORN and the Patriot Act. If you expect them to come to their belated senses when it comes to such things as drilling offshore, in ANWR and Wyoming; doing away with affirmative action; opposing federally-funded abortions; adopting a pro-Israel policy in the Middle East; returning power to the states; and doing away with Obamacare, you might as well expect them to register as Republicans.
So, while overcoming Obama’s 365-173 advantage in 2008 might seem an impossible task, bear in mind that 12 of the 28 states that are trying to get rid of Obamacare helped get him elected last time. But thanks to his overbearing arrogance, his obvious contempt for anyone who disagrees with his policies, his narcissism, his ineptitude when it comes to managing the economy, his endless appearances on TV and his bias in favor of the Arabs over the Israelis, I don’t believe he has won over anyone who wasn’t already convinced he was godlike in 2008.
Added to all of that are the endless rounds of golf, parties, vacations and campaign fundraising events that he somehow manages to find time for, while leaving such minor details as forging a federal budget and dealing with spending cuts to underlings like Pelosi and Reid.
Plus, redistricting has shifted electoral votes in Republicans’ favor, so even if he repeated his 2008 performance, he’d only win 359 electoral votes.
If Obama loses Florida (29 electoral votes), Virginia (13), Colorado (9), Ohio (18), Indiana (11), and North Carolina (15), where he only squeaked by last time, we’re talking about 95 electoral votes. Which means that even in the unlikely event that Obama somehow manages to hang on to those other 22 states, he would end up in 2012 with 264 electoral votes, losing to someone with an (R) after his or her name who’d have 274.
Burt Prelutsky is a humor columnist, a movie critic and a writer for TV. He’s written episodes of MASH, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Family Ties, Dr. Quinn and Diagnosis Murder. He blogs at BurtPrelutsky.com.