The Wednesday night White House fence jumper is just about the only person who wants to get closer to President Barack Obama.
Adesanya Adeola Dominic jumped the iron fence late Wednesday, but he was stopped by Obama’s security force before he got halfway across the White House lawn.
That jump makes him a better friend to Obama than many Democratic Party candidates, who do not want to be seen with him on the campaign trail, or to even admit they voted for him in 2012.
African-Americans, swing-voters, women voters and even Lady Luck are ignoring him in the weeks ahead of the 2014 midterm.
Even Democratic apparatchiks are throwing rocks at the Oval Office windows.
“Folks are beginning to scapegoat and second guess, but there are plenty of reasons to do that,” said Democratic blue blood Jim Manley, who formerly worked for the Democrats’ Senate leader, Harry Reid, and for Sen. Ted Kennedy.
“President Obama doesn’t like to get his hands dirty. He seemingly floats above it all,” Manley complained to a Bloomberg publication.
There’s a reason for that public betrayal — Obama’s polls are mostly in the low 40s, and so his support on the economy, on immigration and on health are confined to the Democratic faithful.
His polls are so low that swing voters by a margin of roughly three to one are backing the GOP.
That swing is expected to give the GOP a Senate majority, expanded control of the House and control of a record number of state legislatures.
The swing voters are not backing GOP candidates because of enthusiasm about their political promises — they’re backing the GOP because they’ve lost faith in Obama’s policies and competence.
Even African-Americans are walking away from him, after voting for him en bloc in 2008 and 2012.
Many blacks walked out during his Oct. 19 rally that was held in a school where 90 percent of the students are black, in Maryland’s Prince George’s county where the D.C.-area black middle class has taken root. The people who left offered excuses —- avoiding traffic, for example — but they didn’t walk out on him in 2012, when perhaps 90 percent of blacks still hoped that Obama’s policies would reverse their post-2007 economic slide.
Even Lady Luck has deserted him, after she had escorted him from Harvard to Chicago to the Illinois State Assembly, then to the U.S. Senate and then to the White House in 2008.
But he pushed her too far.
In June and July 2014, Obama was politically damaged when 130,000 Central Americans arrived at the Texas border.
They didn’t arrive by accident, but because Obama has effectively invited them up to the border by allowing illegal immigrants in the United States to bring their children into the country after 2010. He and his deputies had quietly changed enforcement and asylum rules, and allowed the migrants to ask the courts for permission to live in the United States.
A green card is a jackpot prize in life for anyone born outside the United States, so more and more rational Central American migrants walked through Obama’s Golden Door in 2011, 2012 and 2013.
In 2014, the stream of migrants became a flood when 130,000 adults, youths and children rushed through the courtroom door that Obama opened.
Unsurprisingly, America’s voters looked at each other, talked about immigration, wages and jobs, shook their heads, and turned their thumbs down to Obama’s top second-term priority, a new bill that would grant a degree of amnesty to illegals and increase immigration.
Polls show that Americans now strongly oppose his immigration policies by a factor of three to one, or roughly 50 percent to 15 percent. Back in late 2012, the support was almost level.
Having defeated himself on immigration, Obama has no legislative win in his second term.
With Lady Luck exiled, Obama’s fortune accelerated downwards.
The Islamic State’s hard-core jihadis rushed into the military vacuum in northern Iraq, and bloodily proved that Obama’s decision to run out of Iraq in 2010 was a mistake. The subsequent prime-time beheading of two American by the jihadis underlined the lesson in blood red.
But Obama also made his situation worse.
The Ebola crisis blew up and forced him to choose between his progressive commitment to ending national borders and the public’s growing demand for better border controls.
Obama chose progressivism, and rejected pro-American border controls — and a Liberian flew into Texas, infected two American nurses, created an Ebola scare and further damaged the president’s support among security-conscious women, just four weeks before the election.
A late October poll by AP and Gfk showed that the GOP now has more support among all women — not just married women.
“In last month’s AP-GfK poll, 47 percent of female likely voters said they favored a Democratic-controlled Congress while 40 percent wanted the Republicans to capture control. In the new poll, the two parties are about even among women, 44 percent prefer the Republicans, 42 percent the Democrats,” AP reported Aug. 21.
Obama, so far, has been hesitant to admit that he’s toxic for his party’s candidates. “These are all folks who vote with me. They have supported my agenda in Congress,” he said Oct. 20, rhetorically wrapping himself around fleeing Democratic candidates. “These are folks who are strong allies and supporters of me,” he added.
Obama’s sympathizers and supporters are now looking past the election, in the hope that he can somehow recover his public support and political clout.
“For his sake and ours, Obama must fire himself. He needs to recognize that, for all of his strengths as a person and a politician, he’s shown an astonishing lack of growth on the job,” said Ron Fournier, a columnist at National Journal.
“Obama won’t evolve unless he replaces enablers with truth-tellers—advisers unafraid of telling the president he’s wrong,” Fournier lamented.
But who expects Obama to fire his top staff when he hasn’t learned anything on the job?