OK...The 2012 Presidential Election Is Over

The liberal advocates in the main stream media, which is most of the main stream media, have declared the 2012 Presidential election over, and Barack Obama is the runaway winner.  Now that he has successfully carried out the killing of terrorist Osama Bin Laden, no Republican can beat him next year.

It is true that President Obama’s gutsy decision to approve the raid on the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan has gone a long way toward erasing many of the doubts his detractors had about his leadership.  The way he has handled the aftermath of the successful endeavor has also been impressive.  Unlike the liberal advocates in the media, I can’t read minds and hearts, but I suspect Obama is downplaying his success because he may understand how short-lived that may be in the ever changing world of political opinion.

It’s too bad that Obama’s liberal cheerleaders in the media don’t have his perspective.  You only have to go back 20 years to see a President, George H. W. Bush, who was riding high with a 90 percent job approval rating following the first Gulf War, only to lose the 1992 Presidential election to Bill Clinton.  The economy back then turned sour, and the voting public quickly forgot about President Bush’s success in getting Iraq out of Kuwait, and largely blamed him for the economic decline.

Twenty years later, the current President is not experiencing nearly as high approval ratings, and he still has to struggle with a very sluggish economy that doesn’t look like it is going to improve soon. If next year at this time, gas is at $5 a gallon and the unemployment rate is between 8.5 and 9 percent, the political dynamics could be completely different for President Obama.  The fickle voting public may have forgotten all about Obama’s success in killing Bin Laden.

There are so many other things that can happen to President Obama both positively and negatively between now and November 2012.  His popularity will rise and fall depending on a myriad of circumstances, some he can control, others he can’t.  If fact, there are so many things that can happen before the first political primary in 2012 that I wouldn’t dare to predict what the political landscape in this country will look like then.

As I have often lamented, it’s sad that we don’t have many true journalists to put the President’s recent success in its proper perspective and proportion.  Since we have so many in the news media pulling for his re-election and a few openly campaigning against him, it is difficult for the public to gauge the political environment at any given time.  However, if the liberal cheerleaders forget the history of 20 years ago, they may be surprised to see it repeated next year.   Nevertheless, it’s way too early to be making any rational predictions about the outcome of the 2012 Presidential election, so I will take a pass.