You'd have to be deluded to deny that Pres. Barack Obama was vulnerable this year based on the nation's economic indicators. And really, no one denied it.
Obama was lucky that the GOP's heaviest hitters decided to wait for the open race in 2016. And he's been lucky about the utter ineffectiveness of Super PAC money thus far this cycle.
But his biggest stroke of luck? The GOP's obvious inability to make this election about the economy.
SEX
Republicans face a wide
gender gap, which is particularly damaging given that women vote in larger numbers than men. But no matter how much it hurts them electorally, they just can't seem to get away from railing against contraception, or opining about magical in-uterus
rape sperm deflector shields.
And at the same time they're pretending to be outraged by Akin's comments, they are enshrining their exact sentiment in the GOP's party platform.
Why would Republicans want to take the focus off the economy by engaging in crazy-ass social issues, like re-litigating 1965's Grizzwold v. Connecticut?
MEDICARE
It's not as if the GOP wanted this race to be about Medicare, but adding Paul Ryan to the ticket (in order to win the support of Mitt Romney-hating wingnuts) did just that.
While House Republicans panic, the top of the ticket is putting a brave face on the matter, pretending to be excited to engage in this "debate." And they've certainly gone on the offensive, repeating the claim that Obama set out to destroy Medicare by cutting $700 billion from the program. (The $700 billion was from the inefficient Medicare Advantage program—cuts that Ryan's budget included as well. Not a single recipient has lost an iota of benefits.)
The GOP hopes that repeating that lie will turn the tables on the Democratic advantages on Medicare, or at least muddy the waters to the point that voters think, "they ALL want to destroy Medicare!" The problem is, voters don't trust anything Republicans say about Medicare.
It's like the GOP advantages on the deficit, on Wall Street performance, on national defense. We can repeatedly point out that Wall Street does best under Democratic administrations, that the only president in freakin' forever to balance the budget was Bill Clinton, and that both Clinton and Obama won the wars they started (Serbia, Libya) cheaply and without losing a single American life (not to mention the matter of a certain Osama Bin Laden).
But none of that matters. The conventional wisdom that Democrats suck on national defense, the deficit, and business is so engrained, that it will likely take decades more to turn that perception around. Sucks for us.
But of course, Republicans have bizarrely decided to avoid focusing on the things people like about them, and instead have made Medicare their battleground. An NBC/WSJ poll in June found that 40 percent of respondents trusted Democrats more than Republicans on Medicare, compared to 24 percent who believed the opposite. (Republicans led on the deficit 37-25 and terrorism 33-24.)
In a March Pew poll, the numbers were 48-35 in favor of Democrats. In other words, only the GOP fringe—the same one that thinks Obama was born in Kenya—thinks the GOP is better than the Democrats on Medicare.
Can Republicans muddy the water enough to make a difference in the next two months and change? They can probably make some inroads, but once again, this isn't favorable turf for them. In fact, they're operating in enemy territory. And to compound their problems, the people who most care about this issue—seniors—are the people most likely to vote! Indeed, nearly one-fifth of the most right-wing seniors weren't crazy about the Paul Ryan pick. If Republicans can't get unanimity with that crowd, just imagine the damage being done outside of the mouthbreathing community.
It's genuinely inexplicable—Republicans have a critical issue all teed-up and ready to use against an incumbent president suffering middling approval numbers. And THIS is how they decide to approach the elections?
As long as we're talking about sex and Medicare (with a dash of immigrant bashing thrown in for good measure), things will continue looking mighty fine for us.
