Prez slinging mud to stoke his base
May 11th, 2010
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN, New York Post
Obama goes on the attack to fire up his base
He said he had the audacity to hope that America could rise above the politics of partisan polarization and embrace the sunlight paths of compromise and cooperation. But that was then and this is now.
Faced with falling polls and the chance of wholesale obliteration of his majorities in Congress, President Obama has plainly decided to pursue the very politics of division and partisan animus he once claimed to eschew.
To grasp the reasons behind Obama’s descent into the mud, start with some basic facts. In 2008, he won almost exactly the same percentage of the white vote that John Kerry won in 2004. The reasons he won and Kerry lost were all demographic:
* Obama generated an African-American turnout three points higher than Kerry, and almost all of those new voters supported him.
* Latino-American voters gave Obama a margin of 45 points while they supported Kerry by only 10 — and they constituted 1 percent more of the vote in ‘08 than in ‘04.
* Obama offset his losses among older white voters by increasing the turnout and the Democratic margin among whites under age 30.
