May 5

Race for the White House

It has continued to be a depressing week for me, sports fan wise, so I really have not been that motivated to follow every in and out of the week in politics. Thus, I do not have much to say about Newt Gingrich formally dropping out and another failed former GOP candidate Gary Johnson, officially being nominated by the Libertarian Party, where, he appears likely to finish with the bronze medal of the 2012 General Election.

Of course, the race to win will be between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and if the daily tracking polls from Gallup and Rasmussen are to be believed, the race looks like a dead heat in the national popular vote. This is despite the fact that Obama, who dominated much of the news cycle this past week, gained a few points here in his job approval numbers, likely a byproduct of the one year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The Commander in Chief traveled to Afghanistan on the anniversary of the killing to address the nation.

The incumbent also had his first official large campaign rallies today in the key states of Ohio and Virginia and appears prepared to forcefully defend his office. Needless to say, his opponent and his supporters, of whom I am proud to be one (and will once again feel far more energetic about once I get past this Chicago sports funk) are also just as motivated to make the case why the President, whose poll numbers and confidence numbers remain lethargic, must be defeated.

There will of course be many battles to come over the next few months. For more than a week now, there has been talk about how the Obama Administration is reacting the anniversary of the bin Laden killing, which was a great event for America and the world, but one in which they are now being accused of "spiking the football" in regards to the incessant way they are seen as trying to capitalize on it politically.

Even some liberals, some as blogging maven Arianna Huffington have taken offense at the way the Obama campaign and the candidate himself have alleged that presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney would not have given the order to kill bin Laden. They have taken a lengthy 2008 quote from the then candidate out of context to make it appear that Romney had no interest in capturing or killing the terrorist leader. The Republican has made it clear that he supported the special operations action that took out bin Laden and said that "even Jimmy Carter" would have authorized it. In fact, it might be worth remembering that by his own admission, Obama's running-mate, Joe Biden, has admitted he opposed the mission and advised against authorizing it. If this is such a dividing line of judgment for Obama 2012, they should perhaps be asked why the campaign signs still have Biden's name on them.

As part of the political plot, the Obama campaign has also released an ad featuring former President Bill Clinton praising Obama for authorizing the risky mission, and in which he mused about how bad it would have been for Obama politically if the mission went bad and if the Navy Seals had been captured or killed.

That particular statement has left many Americans asking themselves, "bad for Obama? Wouldn't it have been more significantly bad for those Navy Seals and for all of America?"

So, the general election campaign will continue to inch along. For now, the incumbent is at just about 50% in job approval as a week ends and looks to be in an exact tie with his Republican opponent.

On the day of the 2010 midterm election, that prospect might have been comforting to many Democrats, but the bin Laden Anniversary buzz will pass, the employment situation once again looks to be worsening, and overconfident supporters of Obama will have to examine if he should in fact be running far stronger against Romney in the polls at this point of the game.