With the stock market’s major plunge today, we have another datum suggesting that the economic recovery may not be as robust as some have been reporting. Couple that with the big drop reported earlier this month about the big drop in factory orders and shipments and it’s no wonder the president is feeling anxious about his chances this fall despite improving poll numbers.
Those poll numbers seem to have ticked upward in conjunction with continued acrimony among Republicans presidential candidates and increasing reports of economic improvement. Well, that acrimony will eventually diminish. And those reports might be fewer and farther between.
And now we have reports of the president hoarding his campaign cash:
President Barack Obama has a bleak message for House and Senate Democrats this year when it comes to campaign cash: You’re on your own.
Democratic congressional leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have privately sought as much as $30 million combined from Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee — a replay of the financial help they received from Obama in 2008 and 2010.
But that’s not going to happen, top Obama aides Jim Messina and David Plouffe told Reid and Pelosi in back-to-back meetings on Capitol Hill on Thursday, according to sources familiar with the high-level talks.
Ed Morrissey (to whom I tip my hat for this report) finds “only two conclusions to reach if this report is true. Either Barack Obama is so self-absorbed that he can’t share the wealth himself, or his fundraising is going so poorly that his campaign has little wealth to share.”
I would add another that he may be husbanding his resources in anticipation of a potentially uphill contest this fall.
UPDATE: Over at Hot Air’s Green Room, Karl offers a similar sentiment, asking “You know who doesn’t think Obama won the election already?” And answering:
Barack Obama. There is bipartisan doomsaying about the GOP, but he does not believe it. No, in recent weeks Barack Obama has flip-flopped to take SuperPAC money, because GOP groups are raising so much. He reportedly told Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi there would beno cash transfers to the DCCC or DSCC from OFA or the DNC before Election Day. He reportedly will lower himself to joint appearances with Bill Clinton at a series of fundraisers, including one aimed at the financial services industry.
President Obama is still trying to find a new slogan while Americans live under his totalitarian despair.
The stock market is a funny thing, and it is going to play a funny role in this election.
Masses of people feel better when it is “up”, and worry when it is “down”. Including Obama. So, Obama is going to be pulling out all the stops to make it “up”, including leaning on his bankster friends to manipulate it “up” (yes they know how – I’m talking about the Too Big To Fail, venture-socialist banks who put Obama in office in 2008, and comprise most of the market’s volume via High Frequency Trading), and as well, leaning on the Federal Reserve to do more “quantitative easing” (QE), also known as money-printing.
But the Fed must maintain the appearance of being independent. Stung by past Tea Party criticism of QE (thank you, Sarah Palin among others including Ron Paul and Peter Schiff), they won’t officially do more QE until more people are sufficiently panicked first by the stock market going down. So Obama is in a bit of a bind; he needs things to keep looking better, but he can’t pull all the stops needed to keep them looking better, until they look worse for awhile longer here.
So I’m not at all sure what the sequence of events will be here. The viewscreen is further complicated by the facts that:
– The stock market may crash for fundamental reasons, getting well beyond the control of Obama / Bernanke / Goldman Sachs.
– The decline of the last couple of days is actually still pretty minor. (The S&P500 has not even breached its 50-day moving average yet.)
So I’m not sure what the master plan is, or how things will unfold. I just know that the Fed continues to print money behind the scenes (disguising it as technical measures to ease Europe’s crisis and so forth), and will keep doing it, and will probably do it more openly (or in yet larger scale) before 2012 is over.