Obama on the Electoral Offensive against Republicans

U.S. President Barack Obama, in a weak position before the mid-term elections in November 2010, threw himself into battle wielding a new irony against his opponents.

This week, the Democratic president has gone to test this weapon, rarely used against the Republicans during the 2008 presidential campaign, during two days of contact with “his” candidates in the American West.

To better acknowledge the opposition of extremism and incompetence, for example, he laughed at a Republican parliamentary apology to … BP after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

He has severely taunted the leader of the Republican representatives, who had compared the administration’s efforts to save the economy to the use of nuclear weapons to crush an ant. “You got to make a movie: The Ant that Ate the Economy,” launched the president at a rally to support a Democrat in Las Vegas, Nevada.

On the economy, which still promises to be the great battleground in November 2010, Barack Obama called on Americans to make “a choice between the policies that got us into this mess and my policies that got us out of this mess.”

On Sunday [July 11], David Axelrod, chief adviser to the White House, echoed the offensive and took on the Republican Party, “a party that has an economic theory, and it was tested, and it led to catastrophe.”

“So people have to decide,” he added, “do they want to go forward or do they want to go back?”

The fall elections will occur during the middle of the president’s term. They will cover the 435 representatives and a third of 100 senators.

If the outcome still seems very uncertain, the polls are less encouraging for the Democratic majority. There is a chance of Republicans regaining control of the House of Representatives, while Democratic presence in the Senate risks severe reduction.

Such a scenario would allow the opposition to block the program still in charge of the president’s reforms.

The Democrats are suffering from a lack of progress in the economic recovery process.

The multicultural and young voters who brought Obama to the White House are struggling to get mobilized since their champion does not appear this time on the ballot.

The president’s popularity rating stands below 50 percent, the lowest since his election in November 2008.

The mood of voters is concurrently affected by unemployment still bordering 10 percent, a recovering stock market, the interminable war in Afghanistan and the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

This level of dissatisfaction actually concerns the outgoing of the two major parties.

Many Republicans are nervous about the emergence of the ultra-conservative “Tea Party” movement.

There is great success among the Republican base that comes from attacking those who have failed to criticize the Obama administration’s “big government.”

For the primary, the “Tea Party” has already caused casualties among the heavyweights of the opposition party.

Some analysts believe, however, that the Republican candidates from the “Tea Party” — a designation referring to the war of independence against the British — will suffer in November 2010 against Democrats who are closer to the sacred center of the political chessboard.