Obama Polls: Snapshot of Skydiver Who Doesn’t Know His Chute Is Broken

Take a look at our debt as a percentage of GDP, the one that will never reach the 2050 doomsday prediction because it's all going to crash and burn long before that... Pundits know Barack Obama is about to walk into a buzz saw of debt, but they show you the Polaroid polls of him smiling anyway. Stop looking down at poll numbers and look up at the debt avalanche that's going to take large swathes of the country out in the near future.

If I was about to jump out of an airplane and someone took a picture of me smiling before I flung myself out the hatch, you might think I was going to have a really fun day. If it turned out that my parachute was only filled with knives and forks, that picture would be an extremely misleading memento to give my wife before breaking the news. Likewise, polls showing Barack Obama improving in national standing are nothing but a snapshot in time, of a man who doesn’t even realize that when he jumps out of the campaign plane he’s going to fling himself right into a thunderstorm.

Between now and election day is a political eternity. Correction: It’s multiple political eternities. If you think of the campaign as a universe, it will have expanded and collapsed in on itself about five times before you go to the voting booth. People who get worked up over a few polls only succeed in raising their blood pressure and convincing gullible friends to do the same.

The economy is recovering, you say? Big deal, because our national debt is out of control. President Obama not only won’t talk about it, he’s making it worse. Much worse:

The Administration has tapped all its resources and can only recycle the President’s shopworn “vision”: bigger government, more spending, higher taxes, and deeper deficits. At a time when runaway spending and swelling deficits must be reversed, he worsens both immediately but, as usual, promises to fix them later. In his first post-debt-ceiling fiscal plan—delayed a week, with no explanation—the President appears to have offered an election-year campaign document, not a credible blueprint for addressing the nation’s fiscal and economic problems.

Spending in the President’s budget rises inexorably from today’s $3.8 trillion to $5.8 trillion in 2022. Throughout the decade, outlays hold stubbornly above 22 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), more than twice the New Deal’s share of the economy in its peak years. In constant dollars, outlays are more than three times the peak of World War II.

This will all end badly, mainly because the entire country is sticking its head in the sand. When the debt bomb finally explodes there won’t be too many Americans who escape the fallout. It’s increasingly looking like Paul Ryan will be left to pick up the pieces and Barack Obama will go down in history as the president who made Jimmy Carter look like George Washington.

In short, polls are generally for suckers, mainly because most pollsters don’t ask the right questions (and often don’t want to ask the right questions). There are some good ones out there, but even then you need an honest, intelligent person who can sift through the internals to come to an accurate assessment. I’ve lived in Washington, DC for years and one of the only guys I know who I can trust for solid analysis and an uncanny ability to read DC tea leafs is Adam Brickley. You may know him as the guy who helped launch Sarah Palin onto the national scene.

Take your wife out to dinner. Walk the dog. Keep tabs on your candidate, but don’t get too worked up over a flub here or there or a spike in the ratings because unforeseen events—and the 24 hour cable news cycle—can cause the modern political landscape to change overnight.

And with that, I leave you with Bhodi.