It is all about the ground game now. Speech after speech has been made. Rally after rally has been planned and executed. Meet ups and coffees have been attended. Fundraising mail has spilled from mailboxes. Now everything depends on actual voter turnout on November 2.
President Obama is worried. Though he claims differently, his tone and speech is more shrill and demeaning towards his opposition the closer we get to voting day. Whether it is lying about the record of the GOP in support of a global AIDS initiative or telling his audience that the GOP will have to "sit in the back", none of it is worthy of his office as he hits the campaigning trail.
President Obama says we are getting "cocky", those of us hoping for change on November 2. Speaking at a Cleveland rally, he told the crowd:
“If everyone who fought for change in 2008 shows up to vote in 2010, we will win this election,” the president said. But poll after poll has noted a clear lack of intensity among Democratic voters, while Republicans and independents are highly motivated to cast a vote against the direction Obama has taken the country over the last two years.
Democrats have denied such a gap exists.
“This enthusiasm gap has not materialized,” Mitch Stewart, the director of Organizing for America, an offshoot of Obama’s presidential campaign structure, said on Saturday.
But even at the president’s rally inside Cleveland State University’s Wolstein Center, there were 5,000 empty seats inside the auditorium with a capacity of 13,000.
The President and former President Clinton, along with VP Biden have been crisscrossing the country in a last ditch effort to spark enough enthusiasm within the Democratic party to make a difference in the election results. What he didn't say in his plea for the same amount of voters to turn out for the mid-term election that did in the 2008 election was that the voters are having a change of heart. They have left Barack Obama. Whether it is the votes of women, Independents, or blue collar workers, all have firmly said they will be voting for the GOP this time around.
It is not, however, that the American electorate has a new crush on the Republican party. It is that the change that is wanted is not what Obama has provided. Americans don't want a far left agenda of government takeover of industries and banks, of business stifling tax increases, of rewarding his own special interest supporters in legislation while he bashes the opposition's supporters, and calls his opposition "the enemy" on Latino radio.
November 2 will be a referendum on the Obama presidency. Though they deny that fact, Team Obama knows what is coming. Obama deliberately rushed through legislation not wanted by the American people but crucial to his agenda, as he knew this mid-term election would be a correction in course. Let's hope it proves that.
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