Governor Mitt Romney’s amazing performance in the first
presidential debate continues to propel him upwards in the polls.
Indeed, the former Massachusetts Governor is Gallup-ing towards
election day.
Gallup’s
polling of 2,700 likely voters from October 10th through 16th
reveals a 7-point lead for Romney, 45 percent to 51 percent with a
margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
The Republican-friendly Rasmussen poll has Romney up by 2
points, and the RealClearPolitics on line
average of all polls to date gives him with a one-point
lead.
It is possible that President Obama may yet reap some benefit
from the second debate, but Romney certainly has the Big Mo on his
side which is energizing volunteers, donors, and party regulars
throughout the nation. In my home state of Missouri, which, in
modern times, has always gone
with the winner, except for Stevenson over Eisenhower, once, and
McCain over Obama in 2008, is siding with the Republican candidate
by over 7 points (7.7 percent).
In my two adopted states of Virginia, where Romney is within
less than a point of Obama (0.8 percent), and Michigan, in which
Romney is now only 4.2 points down, things are moving in the right
direction and fast. In my wife’s home state of Wisconsin, Governor
Romney is, incredibly, within 2 percentage points. Thinking back on
Governor Scott Walker’s amazing victory in his recall election,
Romney will have the benefit of an outstanding voter turnout
organization still in place.
Pennsylvania, previously on no pundit’s radar, is getting very
interesting with Romney closing to within 5 points of the
President. North Carolina and Florida have moved, decisively into
the Republican column. Even Ohio, still a challenge for the
Republicans, appears to lean to the President by only 2.4 points,
again, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls.
The Obama campaign now faces several serious problems. First,
its unremitting barrage of negative, personal, ad hominen attacks
on Mitt Romney and all his works has failed, having been rendered
totally irrelevant by the Republican candidate’s masterful
performance in the first debate. All the money, all that television
time, all that political capital employed in that base pursuit of
character assassination is now kaput. The American people saw Mitt
Romney, the human being, and pronounced the Obama agitprop a
lie.
The failure of the Obama campaign’s personal attack strategy is
related to their second problem. They really cannot defend the
indefensible condition of the American economy, its lack of
vitality and jobs and the massive debt as evidenced in four
straight federal budget deficits of a trillion dollars each.
Besides these two problems, there is also the total dearth of
new ideas or forward (excuse the term) thinking about an Obama
administration’s second term. More of the same? That is not exactly
a winning formula. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The
Chicago crowd, having nothing to fill the void, must now stand by
and watch Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan Gallup their way to Election
Day on a platform of growth and opportunity.
The void in the heart of the Obama campaign was in evidence in
the vice-presidential debate in which Vice President Biden tried to
substitute theatrical mime and bombast for reasoned debate with
Congressman Ryan, who came prepared for a serious discussion about
the daunting challenges facing America. It was truly a spectacle
unbecoming a senior citizen like Joe Biden who was spared the
withering critique from the media, members of which readily
confessed on air they liked the guy.
Joe Biden’s misrepresentation of Catholic moral and social
teaching along with his apologia for the Obama administration’s
antipathy to religious freedom and the Catholic community was
offensive in the extreme. His characterization of Obama Supreme
Court appointees as “open-minded” on matters such as abortion was
laughable.
Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are mounted up and riding to the sound
of the guns in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Colorado. The prospects for
ultimate victory have never looked better.
