In response to the reports that the Obama administration will be looking to George W Bush’s 2004 re-election strategy, one columnist gives caution. Bush-Cheney ’04 may have scraped through a victory, but the same tactics won’t work for Obama. John Avlon gives five reasons 2012 is different but they rest on the following premise:

The balancing act in politics is inspiring the base without alienating the center of the electorate. Ultimately elections in America are won by the candidate who connects with moderates and the middle class. Thirteen months out, it is clear that President Obama has an uphill climb toward reelection ahead of him. His greatest asset is the weakness of the Republican field and his still-high personal approval ratings. But everything from job approval numbers to the unemployment rate to the consumer price index bodes badly for the president. If he wins reelection, it will be a much narrower victory than he enjoyed in 2008. Swing states like Indiana and North Carolina are unlikely to come back into his fold. He won independent voters by 8 percent last election but now his independent approval rating is underwater at 37 percent, with Mitt Romney carrying a 55 percent approval among independents in a head-to-head contrast.

Reaching for the last presidential reelect playbook smacks of a lack of imagination by Team Obama. Yes, the president needs to reignite support of his progressive base, which has suffered because of unrealistic expectations that collided with an enduringly bad global economy. But while playing to the base might feel good to Democratic Party consultants, a look at the national numbers shows that it threatens to take a long-shot and make it worse, guaranteeing a razor thin reelect at best by focusing on the base at the expense of independents and the center.

No. and Hotair explains why:

“Absolutely no interest” in running again, she says, which in fairness is the same answer she gave back in October. Ace is skeptical about her denials, but come on: How exactly is Her Majesty going to reposition herself to Obama’s left in time for 2012? Between her hawkishness and her marriage to the man who Betrayed The Cause by governing from the center after his own health-care implosion, her liberal cred is shot. Remember, the nutroots treated her as more or less a de facto Republican during the primaries. Plus, if she challenged The One, all the nastiness — racial and otherwise — that was dredged up in “Game Change” about her campaign’s tactics would be revisited. And if she lost again, which she almost certainly would, she could be staring at so many burned bridges that a run in 2016 would be impossible. Besides, given the “dark valley” of unemployment that Democrats will be forced to defend in 2012, why would she even want the nomination? Having beaten Obama in the primary by painting herself as the “true liberal” in the race, she’d be a sitting duck in the general when the GOP inevitably ran to the center. It ain’t happening. Although it would be awesome if it did!

Time has some interesting revelations about the choice for Vice President when Tim Kaine was considered but ultimately passed over:

There was no great way to explain putting someone with no foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. If we chose him, we would need to rely on some of the same language we had used on this issue as it related to Obama — judgment vs. Washington experience, a new foreign policy vision vs. the status quo — but doubling down would make it twice as tough for us to roll this boulder uphill.

Later that night, we held a conference call with Obama to brief him on our day. “Well, it sounds like you both are for Biden, but barely,” he said. “I really haven’t settled this yet in my own mind. It’s a coin toss now between Bayh and Biden, but Kaine is still a distinct possibility. I know the experience attack people will make if we pick him. But if that really concerned me, I wouldn’t have run in the first place. My sense is — and you tell me if the research backs this up — that Barack Hussein Obama is change enough for people. I don’t have to convince people with my VP selection that I am serious about change.” (Read “Obama and Biden’s Chemistry Test.”)

But the money quotes are all about Sarah Palin:

We always knew this day was going to be a pain in the ass. Coming right off the exhaustion and exhilaration of our convention week and VP pick, we would have to jump right in and deal with theirs. But [Sarah] Palin was a bolt of lightning, a true surprise. She was such a long shot, I didn’t even have her research file on my computer, as I did for the likely McCain picks. I started Googling her, refreshing my memory while I waited for our research to be sent.

…

But here she was, joining our real-life drama. And given her life story, coupled with the surprise nature of her selection, her entrance to the race would be nothing short of a phenomenon. But I also thought it was a downright bizarre, ill-considered and deeply puzzling choice. The one thing every voter knew about John McCain’s campaign at this point was that it had been shouting from the rooftops that Barack Obama lacked the experience to be President.

Summoning the wisdom from “the philosopher she turns to most”, besides Mother Theresa, then campaign adviser Anita Dunn offered advice on Palin, whom she had worked against unsuccessfully in Alaska’s 2006 governor’s race:

…warned us that she was a formidable political talent — clearly not up to this moment, she assured us, but bound to be a compelling player and a real headliner in the weeks ahead. (Read about where Sarah Palin is going next.)

“All of you on this call should watch video of her debates and speeches,” Dunn counseled. “The substance is thin, but she’s a very able performer. And her story is out of Hollywood. She’ll be a phenomenon for a while.”

The Obama campaign was mostly annoyed that McCain had chosen a VP nominee that, they claim, had less experience than Obama:

Our strategy with the other potential picks would’ve been to start by saying that choice X subscribed to the same failed George Bush policies as John McCain; all they were doing was doubling down on the same out-of-touch economic policies that had hurt American families. We should have gone the same way with Palin. But McCain had been haranguing us for months about experience, and we were incredulous that he had picked someone with zero foreign policy experience who had been a governor for less time than Obama had been a Senator. Galled by the hypocrisy, we moved in a more aggressive direction.

We decided to call McCain on the experience card directly. The value was in making him look political — essentially, calling him full of shit — and we sent out a release making that clear. “Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency,” it read. “Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies — that’s not the change we need; it’s just more of the same.”

For some reason, the poll speculates about Palin running under a 3rd party:

Just 21% of voters nationwide say Palin should run as an independent if she loses the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Sixty-three percent (63%) say the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee should not run as an independent. Sixteen percent (16%) are not sure.

If Romney secured the GOP nomination and Palin chose to run as an independent candidate, Obama would win the resulting three-way race with 44% of the vote. Romney is the choice of 33% of the voters under that scenario, with Palin a distant third with 16% support. Three percent (3%) like some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided…

When Romney is the Republican nominee, he beats Obama among unaffiliated voters 48% to 41%. But when Palin is the GOP candidate, unaffiliated voters prefer Obama by a 47% to 41% margin…

In a three-way race, Palin hurts Romney by drawing 28% Republican support. Romney captures 52% of the GOP vote in that scenario.

Campaigner Obama: “As president I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.” President Obama: “Ixnay on the EnocideJay”

President Obama on Monday declined to repeat his claim that the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians during World War I was a “genocide,” stepping back from his campaign pledge to Armenian Americans that the “widely documented fact” would be fully commemorated during his presidency.

During a joint news conference alongside Turkish President Abdullah Gul, Obama said he did not want to “focus on my views” or in any way interfere with delicate negotiations between Turks and Armenians on what the president called “a whole host of issues.” 
Obama sidestepped the issue — a key tension point between Turks and Armenians and a rallying cry among Armenian-Americans — saying he was trying to be as “encouraging as possible.” 

“I want to be as encouraging as possible around those negotiations, which are moving forward and could bear fruit very quickly, very soon,” Obama said. “What I want to do is not focus on my views right now but focus on the views of the Turkish and Armenian people. What I told the (Turkish) president is I want to be as constructive as possible in moving these issues forward quickly. My sense is that they are moving quickly. I don’t want to, as the president of the United States, want to preempt any possible arrangements, announcements that might be made in the near future.” 

When asked if his views had changed or he was tempering them in light of the fragile Turkish-Armenian talks, Obama said he is not interested in “tilting these negotiations one way or another while they are having useful discussions.” 

NY Times notes the common error:

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”

Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, “to say.” But in English, infinitives like “to go” and future-tense forms like “will go” are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.

All in all, things are getting off to a bumpy start for the new administration…

Welcome to the post-racial age! *que audience laughter*
This ridiculous poem was made at the inauguration that was made triple-diculous considering its basis is that he hopes for a day when whites will do whats right (good thing that’s not racist). I guess electing the first black president wasn’t enough. C’MON WHITE PEOPLE!

Google News Search for “Rick Warren” and “controversial” and you’ll get hundreds of hits. Warren’s controversy was that he agreed with Obama on same sex marriage, which upset gay activists because they assume Obama is and has been lying about his non-support for same sex marriage, so palling around with this pastor who “agrees” with him is an outrage. Bill Ayers, notsomuch. And the racist poem guy? Ya. not a big deal either.