OpEd Contributor
Brad O'Leary: Obama trades coattails for an albatross
By: Brad O'Leary
OpEd Contributor
November 4, 2009
There is bad news in Tuesday's voting for President Obama and his dwindling number of followers. Ten months ago, Obamamania got him the support of 53% of American voters.
Obama promised that his successes would only add to that majority. However, he didn’t count on Obamaphobia setting in, a nationwide phenomenon that has reduced his support to around 40%.
In Virginia’s gubernatorial race, Republican Bob McDonnell won in a landslide over his Democratic opponent, Creigh Deeds. Obama campaigned hard for Deeds. Deeds had the benefit of the entire Virginia Obama organization.
Deeds had Virginia governor and Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Tim Kaine’s help. Also recall that Obama picked Kaine to head the DNC in an attempt to solidify Virginia in the Obama Democrats’ column for years to come.
In the end, Deeds mustered only 41% of the vote. That is quite a bit less than the 53 % of the Virginia statewide vote Obama garnered last November. It appears that Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates gained at least five seats as well.
In New Jersey, a state that gave Obama 57% of its vote last year, gave Corzine only 45% this year. The state elected Republican Chris Christie. Last year, 2.2 million New Jersey voters turned out for Obama. This year, 1.2 million fewer voters turned out for his candidate.
Even a plurality of voters (46%) in the Democrat-stronghold city of Atlanta (in which 79% of voters chose Obama last year) chose Mary Norwood for mayor. Norwood attracted the support of Republicans and tea party activists. Meanwhile, the liberal-backed Obama Democrat candidate, Kasim Reed, only got 36% of the vote. The two will face each other in a run-off election next month.
The mainstream media, of course, went into full-spin mode weeks prior to these elections – doing its very best to hammer home the notion that none of this has anything to do with how people view Obama’s presidency.
But this is as laughable as many of the mainstream media’s edicts. Democrat Party bosses are in full alarm mode, as are liberal Republican Party bosses in New York and elsewhere. To think they’re sitting back, shrugging all of this off as just a few localized anomalies is to believe in the tooth fairy.
We saw the beginning of Obama’s decline in June, when Rasmussen released a poll showing President Obama and Mitt Romney tied at 45% a piece in a hypothetical matchup. This was a signal that Obama’s policies had already driven away 8% of those Americans who had supported him just eight months prior.
None of this is to say the winning Republicans didn’t succeed on their own merit on Tuesday – of course they did. But much of that merit was having the good sense to position themselves opposite the increasingly unpopular Obama policies.
As for those candidates that aligned themselves with Obama’s policies, well, they reached for last November’s coattails, but ended up with this November’s albatross.
Brad O’Leary is publisher of “The O’Leary Report.” His book, “Shut Up, America! The End of Free Speech,” is now in bookstores and available at www.EndOfFreeSpeech.com.
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