Politico’s battleground poll carries some bad news for President Obama: Mitt Romney has established his first lead in that poll since May.
A new POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Tracking Pollof 1,000 likely voters — taken from Sunday through Thursday of last week — shows Romney ahead of Obama by two points, 49 to 47 percent. That represents a three-point swing in the GOP nominee’s direction from a week ago but is still within the margin of error. Obama led 49 percent to 48 percent the week before.
Republicans and Democrats are also now tied on the generic congressional ballot; Democrats had held a slight lead.
Romney has pulled even with Obama in Ohio, according to a new Angus Reid poll.
Obama’s campaign has tried selling America on the idea that he needs four more years to finish what he has started. But a Wall Street Journal poll finds that a large majority of Americans want him to take a different direction even if he is re-elected. The Morning Joe crew read that number correctly: It means that his first-term agenda has failed and been rejected, and 62% don’t want four more years of what we have gotten from this president.
In the absence of a real, tangible agenda, the Obama campaign’s chief gambit has been to destroy Romney. They’re running ads with a new tagline in swing states: “Mitt Romney: Not One of Us.” If that sounds like a racial dog whistle, that’s because it is. The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty calls the Obama campaign out.
That’s the tag line to a tough new ad the Obama campaign is airing in Ohio. But it is one that, ironically, echoes a slogan that has been used as a racial code over the last half century or more.
The context of the ad is very different from the one in which the phrase “one of us” was used to divide the country along racial lines, but Conservative commentators quickly seized on it.
Obama’s critics said the fact that he would use such loaded language in the hard-fought race to win Ohio shows how much he has changed from the politician whose famous “one America” speech at the 2004 Democratic convention denounced “those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.”
Charles C.W. Cooke wrote in National Review’s The Corner blog that Obama was “moving a long way from the famous — if vacuous — ‘no red states or blue states’ speech.”
“Had Romney pulled this on him, we’d need a special two-hour episode of ‘Hardball’ to deal with the dog-whistle implications,” added Rick Moran on the American Thinker blog.
Indeed. Barack Obama and David Axelrod are making a big campaign for a big office, atop an America that faces big problems, about very small things.
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