Maureen Dowd Taps Into Buyer's Remorse Of The Obama Purchase

Maureen Dowd captures the buyer's remorse being felt by Democrats and many Independents that bought into Barack Obama's hope and change mantra from 2008.



She explains how Obama supporters have become disillusioned with the man who had no resume nor executive experience before becoming elected as President of the United States of America and now has a record of an ineffectual failed leader.

Faced with a country keening for reassurance and reinvention, Obama seems at a loss. Regarding his political skills, he turns out to be the odd case of a pragmatist who can’t learn from his mistakes and adapt.

Many of his Democratic supporters here, who once waited hours in line just to catch a glimpse of The One, are disillusioned.

Dowd says Obama has been "spectacularly unable to fill the leadership void in Washington."



She then provides a list of examples:

Obama’s response on Monday to Friday’s Standard & Poor’s downgrade and to the 22 Navy Seal commandos and 8 other soldiers killed by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan was once more too little, too late. It was just like his belated, ineffectual response on the BP oil spill and his reaction to the would-be Christmas Day bomber; it took him three days on vacation in Hawaii to speak about the terrorist incident when the country was scared about national security, and then he spent the next week callously shuttling from the podium to the golf course.

More:

His inability to grab a microphone and spontaneously assuage Americans’ fears is strange. If the American servicemen had died on a Monday, he wouldn’t have waited until Wednesday to talk about it. He doesn’t like the bully pulpit, just the professor’s lectern.



After failing to interrupt his Camp David weekend to buck up the country on one of its worst days in history, he tacked on his condolences for the soldiers’ families to his economic pep talk, in what had to be the most inept oratorical segue of his presidency.



He long ago should have gone out into the country to talk to Americans in person and come up with a concrete plan that people could print out from the White House Web site and study. Hasn’t he learned how dangerous it is to delegate to Congress? His withholding and reactive nature has made him seem strangely irrelevant in Washington, trapped by his own temperament. He doesn’t lead, and he doesn’t understand why we don’t feel led.



Speaking from the State Dining Room of the White House, he advised America it was still “a triple-A country” like some cerebral soccer coach urging the kids to win one for the London Interbank Offered Rate.



With traders hearing nothing new, just boilerplate about “common sense and compromise” on deficit reduction, the Dow Jones industrial average, which had already fallen 410 points, fell 20 more points while the president was talking around 2 o’clock. By the 4 p.m. close, the Dow was 634 points lower.

Buyer's remorse in it's full glory.



[Update] Dowd is not the only one feeling it.





(Correction made- headline fixed)

And The Time Has Finally Come When They Turn Against Barack Obama, Their Chosen One

The Huffington Post has a piece penned by Clarence B. Jones, Scholar in Residence, Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, where he proposes "Time to Think the Unthinkable: A Democratic Primary Challenge To Obama's Reelection."

Throughout his piece one can almost feel his regret that he is saying what he is saying. His profound sadness that the time has come to consider bringing up a serious Democratic challenger against Barack Obama, their chosen golden child, in the 2012 Democratic primaries for who the party as a whole wants to run as President of the United States of America.

It is time for Progressives to stop "whining" and arguing among themselves about whether President Obama will or will not do this or that. Obama is no different than any other President, nominated by his national party. He was elected with the hard work and 24/7 commitment of persons who believed and enlisted in his campaign for "Hope" and "Change."

You don't have to be a rocket scientist nor have a PhD in political science and sociology to see clearly that Obama has abandoned much of the base that elected him. He has done this because he no longer respects, fears or believes those persons who elected him have any alternative, but to accept what he does, whether they like it or not.

It is time for those persons who constituted the "Movement" that enabled Senator Barack Obama to be elected to "break their silence"; to indicate that they no longer will sit on their hands, and only let off verbal steam and ineffective sound and fury, and "hope" for the best.

The answer is blowin' in the wind

The pursuit of the war in Afghanistan in support of a certifiably corrupt Afghan government and the apparent willingness to retreat from his campaign commitment of no further tax cuts for the rich, his equivocal and foot dragging leadership to end DADT, his TARP for Wall Street, but, equivocal insufficient attention to the unemployment and housing foreclosures of Main Street, suggest that the template of the 1968 challenge to the reelection of President Lyndon Johnson now must be thoughtfully considered for Obama in 2012.

Recent polling has shown that Democratic supporters are split on whether Barack Obama sould be handed the Democratic nomination for presidency in 2012, with an AP-KN poll showing that among all 2008 voters "51 percent say he deserves to be defeated in November 2012 while 47 percent support his re-election."

Among Democrats the numbers are "47 percent say Obama should be challenged for the 2012 nomination and 51 percent say he should not be opposed."

Marist polling also shows an uphill battle for Obama with 48% of registered voters nationwide saying they will vote against Barack Obama and only 36 percent saying they will vote for him.

Large portions of the liberal base are upset with Obama for not pushing far enough to the left. Independents have run from him in droves because of how far left he has pushed America and conservatives were never going to vote for him anyway.

The problem lies with the diehard Obama supporters that will never admit they were wrong about him and will vote for him in 2012 come hell or high water, no matter what he does or how he has disappointed them.

Any challenger will have to understand that if they win the Democratic nomination from Obama, they may never get those voters to the polls to vote in 2012 if their "One" has been defeated within their own party.

We have seen this talk before from Obama supporters every time he does something unpopular with them, or to rephrase, any time he hasn't done what they want him to, but rarely do we see a person with the seriousness of Clarence B. Jones take to the pages of a site like Huffington to push the idea.

Recently though this talk of a primary challenger to Obama has become a chorus, with bloggers and media as well as pollster issuing it as a very real possibility as the cumulative effect of Obama's policies start becoming obvious.

Obama’s presidency might be a lost cause, but for the good of the country, the soul of the Democratic Party must be saved. And the only way to do that is to challenge him for the Democratic nomination in 2012.

It is easier for Independent thinkers that voted for Obama in 2008 to look back and suffer buyer's remorse and admit publicly they have made a mistake. One recent example is Kiss Rock Star Gene Simmons stating "If you take a look at (Obama's) resume, you couldn’t find somebody, in retrospect, more unqualified".



These are the type of things people are supposed to learn before voting but I give credit to Simmons who has incredible courage to publicly acknowledge he was wrong and regrets his decision. Hopefully in 2012 he will use his vote more wisely.

If Democrats do unite in the the goal of issuing a primary challenge to Obama in 2012, who would it be, especially after Hillary Clinton already shot down the possibility of it being her?

Here is another question.. after losing the support of Independents and portions of the liberal left, the elderly, women and white males... would Barack Obama have any chance to win the 2012 Presidential election?

Mark Halperin from TIME seems to think it would take a lotttttttaaaaaaaa luck.

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Gallup Polls Shows Likely Voters And Independents Giving GOP Double Digits Lead

The pattern is established and continuing now that Gallup is using a likely voter model, which has proven more predictive than simply using all registered voters, and that pattern shows the GOP, among likely voters and Independents, with a double digit lead over Democrats in the generic ballot for congress.

Gallup:

Republicans maintain a substantial advantage over Democrats among likely voters in Gallup's generic ballot for Congress -- in both lower- and higher-turnout scenarios -- fueled in part by the GOP's strong showing among independents.

With the majority of Democrats (90%) and the majority of Republicans (90%) stating they will vote for their respective party candidates, Independents will be the deciding factor in the midterm elections.

The Republican advantage among all registered-voter independents is 10 percentage points, 46% vs. 36%, underscoring the Republican tilt among independents even if all registered voters were to turn out. But among the two groups of likely voters, the Republican margin among independents expands to 21 to 25 points.

With only three weeks to go before midterms, there is very little Democrats can do to not only stop this pattern but to turn it around, which perhaps is the reason for their latest Hail Mary attacks on the Chamber of Commerce.

In other polling news, almost half of Obama supporters have given up on him.

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Barack Obama- They Don't Know Him, They Regret Believing In Him

Piece at Newser points out how disliked Barack Obama is becoming and asks "What Do We Do With Barack Obama? "

How did everybody get it so wrong is a question many people seem to be asking themselves—not least of all these people slinking out of the White House.

It is not just that he has turned out to be something different. In fact, reasonably, he isn’t that different. The more powerful sense of remorse or at least sheepishness may come from people now asking themselves how and why they came to think of him as different than he was. More confounding, they may not really now be able to remember just who exactly they thought he was.

So to refocus the story: Some mass misperception put Barack Obama in the White House and now nobody knows what to do with him.

Can there be a more awkward situation?

Well said.. buyer's remorse is setting in big and no one likes to admit they got something so wrong...especially when they warned beforehand and instead let themselves be bought in by pretty words and empty promises.

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'The Entire American Spirit Is Being Broken'- Buyer's Remorse From Obama Supporters

Time:

.....The fear most often expressed is that Obama is taking the country somewhere they don't want to go. "We bought what he said. He offered a lot of hope," says Fred Ferlic, an Obama voter and orthopedic surgeon in South Bend who has since soured on his choice. Ferlic talks about the messy compromises in health care reform, his sense of an inhospitable business climate and the growth of government spending under Obama. "He's trying to Europeanize us, and the Europeans are going the other way," continues Ferlic, a former Democratic campaign donor who plans to vote Republican this year. "The entire American spirit is being broken."

Page #2 of Time article shows many Obama supporters in disagreement with Obama's policies:

It wasn't long before deep cracks in Obama's coalition began to appear. This past June, Peter Brodnitz of the Benenson Strategy Group, a firm that also polls for the White House, asked voters which they preferred: "new government investments" or "cutting taxes for business" as the better approach to jump-start job creation. Even among those who voted for Obama, nearly 38% preferred tax cuts. When Brodnitz offered a choice between tax cuts to reduce the deficit and investments in "research, innovation and new technologies," one-third of Obama voters chose the cuts. The evidence throughout the poll, commissioned by the think tank Third Way, was unmistakable: roughly 1 in 3 of the President's 2008 supporters had serious questions about government spending solutions for the economy. In Nevada, a state Obama won with 55% of the vote, only 29% of likely voters this year think the President's actions have helped the economy, according to a recent poll by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research. "A lot of this was really inevitable, or at least pretty predictable," says Indiana Senator and former governor Evan Bayh, a Democratic expert at getting elected in the Rust Belt. "We have a lot of government activism at a time when skepticism of government efficiency is at an all-time high."

Page #3:

Yet all of Obama's personal and financial appeals have been swamped by the depth of the recession and have had little visible effect. Donnelly, who flies home every weekend to work in his district, felt obliged to run against Obama to save his job. And his Republican opponent, Jackie Walorski, says she is often approached by Obama voters who want to vent. "This has burned people," she says. "Their words, not mine: 'Betrayed by the health care vote.' 'What are they thinking when it comes to spending?' 'Broken promises when it comes to jobs.'" At one recent Walorski house party, held at dusk beside a cornfield, two attendees, Matthew and Frances Napieralski, identified themselves as former supporters of the President. "He's not what I voted for," said Matthew, who runs a plastic-injection-molding shop in town. "It's a shame that they led us to believe one thing," said Frances, "and then everything changes."

Buyer's remorse.

Obama is here until 2012 when those same voters can vote to replace him, but in the short-term the only thing they can do is vote in November 2010, hand control of Congress to the GOP and allow them to stop Obama's agenda from destroying any more of this country than he is already has.

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