FORMER WH ADVISER PLOUFFE: PEOPLE 'TRUST THIS PRESIDENT'

Appearing on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, former senior White House adviser David Plouffe made the awkward comment that Americans “trust this president.” He admitted that it had been a “tough patch” for President Obama in the wake of the exposing of his lies about Obamacare and his disastrous Iran deal.

“It’s not just healthcare, you know, the shutdown affected everybody, confidence in government.” But, Plouffe said, Obama would soon see an upswing: “let’s fast forward to the State of the Union and the months after that: Health care working better, a lot of people signing up, economy continuing to strengthen, hopefully no Washington shutdowns.”

This is wishful thinking on Plouffe’s part, given the fact that the Obamacare fines have not yet kicked in, and neither has the full employer mandate. Polls show that for the first time, President Obama is seeing a steady decline not only in his job approval numbers, but in his personal favorability ratings – and that decline is prolonged. By late October, Obama was in negative territory, with only 41 percent of Americans favoring him personally, against 45 percent who viewed him negatively.

Via: Breitbart

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HOW DEMOCRATS TRIED TO MAKE OBAMACARE REPEAL-PROOF

When former Obama adviser and campaign manager David Plouffe said on Sunday that running against Obamacare would be an "impossibility" for Republicans, his reasoning seemed dubious. By the fall of 2014, Plouffe insisted, "millions of people will be signed up," and Republicans would struggle to convince them to give up their new insurance. While those figures seem optimistic, Plouffe's argument should not be dismissed.

Democrats designed Obamacare to be repeal-proof. They followed the advice of veteran Chicago strategist (and convicted felon) Robert Creamer, who wrote Democrats' political blueprint for passing "universal health care" in 2006-7, partly while he was serving time in federal prison for bank fraud and tax evasion. The idea was to use health care reform as the first in a series of sweeping, "progressive" changes in America.

Throughout the Obamacare fight in 2009 and 2010, Creamer admonished Democrats that their electoral fortunes depended on their ability to pass the bill and motivate Obama's core supporters: "[H]istory tells us that if Obama doesn't deliver on things like health care reform, his numbers and the Democratic brand will sink and leave many Democratic candidates for Congress looking for other lines of work," he wrote.

What Creamer overlooked, of course, was that many of the Democrats who voted for Obamacare were from relatively conservative districts, including some that had only recently been poached from Republicans in the 2006 midterms. By following his advice, Democrats lost the House--and also lost several state legislatures,  allowing the GOP to redraw districts and dash Obama's dreams of a permanent progressive majority.

Via: Breitbart

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No Drama Obama’s Dramatic 2012 Reelection Campaign

The press liked to call their style No Drama Obama. 

It was a nice turn of phrase that matched the mood of the candidate in 2008. 

But that all changed with the reelection. The personal tensions started earlier and rapidly worsened. They fought in private and in the open. There was plenty of simmering, and often a high boil. The team of rivals rarely achieved a spirit of cooperation and seemed more inclined to bitter, dogged rivalries. 

There was a new actor in the campaign drama: Jim Messina. Obama convinced Messina to leave his political father, Sen. Max Baucus, by calling him the day after Hillary Clinton dropped out of the Democratic primary contest. The sales pitch was neither about hope nor change. “You’re really going to get to run a business,” Obama told Messina. 

Seven days later, Messina was in Chicago with control of the campaign staff and its budget. On his first day at work, David Plouffe handed him a list of half a dozen people.

“Fire them,” Plouffe said.

So he did. Messina would introduce himself to bemused staffers and ask them to visit his office for a second or two. That was the last conversation they would have with him at campaign headquarters. Other staffers might be unhappy at taking the ax to new coworkers; Messina was not one of them. He was in Chicago to bring some order to an operation that had outlived the structure of the primaries. If that meant he was unpopular, so be it.

Just five months after President Obama signed his historic health-​care reform into law, he shared his armored limo with Messina in Seattle, where they had traveled for an event to help reelect Sen. Patty Murray.

Via: The Daily Beast,

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Obama Campaign Says Polls Showing Romney Surging Is A “Bluff”…

DENVER - Obama campaign senior adviser David Plouffe sought to knock down claims by the Romney camp that they are gaining momentum and steaming toward victory on Wednesday. Plouffe called those claims "more bluff than reality" and contended that the Romney camp is "overstating their Electoral College situation."

"We think we maintain a lot more plausible pathways to 270 than Governor Romney, who we think essentially has to pull an inside straight in terms of the Electoral College," Plouffe said during a bus ride through Iowa, noting that the President is leading or essentially tied in polls of most battleground states. "Governor Romney's campaign likes to talk about how well they're doing in North Carolina, but we think we're doing a lot better in Ohio and Iowa and Nevada than they're doing in North Carolina."

Plouffe argued that the Obama campaign is "already sitting at a win number" in some of the battleground states, though he declined to say which ones. "I'm not going to call states, but we'd win the election if it were held today,"  he said. Obama campaign officials have sought to downplay the significance of Romney's rise in the polls following his strong performance in the first of three presidential debates.

Today, Plouffe argued that the bump Romney received was a natural and inevitable tightening in a race that widened artificially in September. "Governor Romney was not going to get 44 or 45 percent in battleground states," he said. "He's a major party nominee in a divided country in a tough economy. He's going to get 47, 48, 49 in a bunch of these states. So that's all that's happened is Governor Romney picked up some of what he lost. We don't consider that momentum."

Via: CBS News

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Race tightens for swing states

Mitt Romney’s overwhelming debate victory has tightened the presidential race in the dozen or so battleground states that will determine the winner of the election.

To reach the Oval Office, Romney must win back a number of the states won by President Bush in 2004 but President Obama in 2008 —or win back states like Pennsylvania that have been won by Democratic presidential candidates the past several cycles.

Here’s a look at where the swing-state battles stand ahead of Obama and Romney’s second debate showdown on Tuesday night.

Florida (29)

Romney enjoys a two-percentage-point advantage in the Real Clear Politics (RCP) average of polls after crushing Obama in their initial debate. He had previously trailed the president by 1.6 percentage points.

But it’s possible Romney’s numbers are being boosted by one poll. The Tampa Bay Times released a survey Thursday that showed him up by 7 percentage points, a finding the looks like an outlier compared to other polls.

The Tampa poll showed Obama’s 11-point lead among independents swing to a 13 point advantage for Romney. In addition, Hispanic voters in the poll favored Romney 46 to 44 percent over Obama, despite the president’s more than 50-percentage point lead among the group nationally.

Obama campaign adviser David Plouffe dismissed the poll, telling the Tampa Bay Times that “it’s impossible for us to be at 44 in Florida,” and arguing that the campaign believes it will outperform its 2008 support among Hispanics. Plouffe said Obama’s campaign expects to take win at least 60 percent of the Hispanic vote.

Florida is must win territory for Romney given the uphill climb he faces in other swing states.

Via: The Hill

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TEAM OBAMA BLAMES JOHN KERRY FOR DEBATE LOSS

The Obama campaign has been reeling since losing the first Presidential debate of this election cycle in front of 67 million viewers.  They've tried--and thus far failed--to craft a narrative to explain away the debacle in Denver.  Previously, we reported to you that Obama Senior Advisor David Plouffe, who ran the President's successful 2008 campaign, (falsely) accused Mitt Romney of lying.  In a rare comedic moment from the typically robotic former Vice President Al Gore, he suggested on Current TV that the Mile High City's altitude was the reason Obama was low on energy and enthusiasm.  And, of course, Obama's chronically dishonest deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter and several others passed the buck to the moderator, Jim Lehrer. None of the above caught on, even with the mainstream pro-Obama media. 

Now the Obama Administration is floating their latest excuse: that the campaign, particularly John Kerry (who played the role of Romney in simulated debates), did not channel Mitt's aggression enough.

From CBS's "This Morning":

Norah O'Donnell: "Some Democrats say [Obama's] campaign needs a wake-up call.  Bill Plante is here with that part of the story.  Bill, you've been talking to your sources; what are they saying?

Correspondent Bill Plante: "Well Norah, they're simply upset and really outraged.  They blame the President's team, first of all, for not preparing him to meet the challenge of an aggressive Mitt Romney.  They say that nobody in the room challenged him, including the guy that he was debating with, John Kerry, because, as they say, he wants to be Secretary of State so he's not going to get in the President's face. And Presidents are used to deference; they're not used to people challenging them like that.  So they think that the debate prep was terrible, but they also fault the President himself for not understanding that Romney was going to be more aggressive."

The 2012 Obama campaign continues to be a stark contrast from their 2008 effort.  In 2008, then Senator Obama used youthful ebullience, soaring rhetoric, and a precise campaign infrastructure to capture the hearts and minds of the American people.  In 2012, the President seems increasingly lethargic and quick to make excuses for missteps on the campaign trail.

What once was "Hope and Change" is now "Mope and Blame," and this time it's John Kerry under the President's bus.

Via: Breitbart

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THE AUDACITY OF CRONYISM: JARRETT, PLOUFFE, AND DONILON

It’s hard to know which is worse: the arrogance of the Obama administration in assuming that its White House staffers can get away with anything, or the apathy of the media in not holding those staffers accountable.

Actually, let’s scratch the word “apathy” and call it what it really is: abjectness. The media have been abject in their willingness, even eagerness, to serve the political interests of this administration and its re-election effort.

Let’s consider the cases of three staffers, all at the top rung of the White House ladder: Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett, Senior Adviser David Plouffe, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon.   

Valerie Jarrett has been a mentor and ally of Barack Obama for two decades; by all accounts, she has an unshakable bond not only with him, but also with Michelle Obama. And now her clout is apparent to all: aprofile of Jarrett, written by Jo Becker and appearing in Sunday’s New York Times, was headlined, “The Other Power in the West Wing.” As in, there’s the President, and there’s Valerie Jarrett.   

The Times story, all 3300 words of it, was one of those stories that everyone in DC thought they had to read; as another Times reporter, Jodi Kantor, tweeted on Sunday, “The political world pauses as one to dissect Jo Becker’s profile of Valerie Jarrett."

Indeed, Becker’s story was full of grist for Beltway mills. One anonymous presidential adviser (who sounds a lot like re-election campaign guru David Axelrod) pronounced that “Valerie is effectively the chief of staff... She’s almost like Nancy Reagan was with President Reagan, but more powerful.” And a “former senior White House official” (who sounds a lot like ex-White House chief of staff Bill Daley) added, “She is the single most influential person in the Obama White House.” Whoa. Wait a second. Did the former official really mean to say that Jarrett was “the single most influential person in the Obama White House”? If so, where does that leave the President? Is it possible that Jarrett, working with Michelle Obama, is more powerful than Mr. Obama? No, that doesn’t seem possible--unless, of course, it is possible.

Via: Breitbart

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