Great article by Drew Westen in the Post "If Obama loses the election! Here's why"
He's spot on with the keys to how a non-entity like Romney, a vulture capitalist in the age of Occupy Wall Street could be running even or ahead of Obama.
Even if Romney screws up and loses, and it is Romney's to lose Obama can't win it with 8% unemployment and under 50% approval,Obama's blunders have insured he will face a GOP Congress in 2012 with GOP having a lock on the House and leading in every key Senate race. And Obama has gotten rolled by GOP Congressional leaders on every issue even with Democratic Senate. With full GOP Congress, Obama will be even less effective.
1. Obama’s first mistake was inviting the Republicans to the table. The GOP had just decimated the economy and had been repudiated by voters.
2. instead of designing a stimulus that reflected the thinking of the country’s best economic minds, he cut their recommended numbers by a third and turned another third into inert tax cuts designed to appease Republican legislators whose primary aim was to defeat him.
3. There was no way to explain why Americans who saw how much their parents or grandparents liked Medicare couldn’t have at least one option not controlled by the insurance industry — without admitting that the administration had made a deal with the industry that guaranteed it 30 million new customers with no government competition.