Barry Flies In – And It’s Not Fair

As Barack Obama begins his tour of Europe, realisation is slowly dawning among the right leaning part of the Fourth Estate that not only are many of the photo opportunities likely to figure in next year’s election campaign, but also that there is as yet no half decent candidate to oppose his return to the White House.

Nowhere is that realisation more keenly felt than at the Maily Telegraph, where smirking buffoon Nile Gardiner typifies the mood. Gardiner, telling that it’s “about next year’s presidential election”, then sprays his credibility up the wall by also asserting that Obama’s approval ratings “have been nose-diving”, blissfully unaware that anyone so minded can look up those numbers and thereby demonstrate that Gardiner is talking out of the back of his neck.

Obama’s Rasmussen approval rating may be just 26% “strongly approve”, but taken with the “somewhat approve”, makes 49%. “Dubya” Bush, going in to the 2004 election, was on 48%. Bush won. Go figure, Nile. And while you’re figuring, take the loathsome Toby Young along. Young also has problems with numbers, this time on the US economy. Neither of these clowns, nor their fellow commenter Christina Odone, who tries and fails to smear Obama as “anti-Catholic”, gets it.

So, for all those at the Telegraph, here’s a few facts. The electoral cycle in the USA more or less dictates that campaigning never stops: Presidential polls every four years, but then, the whole House of Representatives every two years. Plus every two years, a third of the Senate comes up for re-election. Factor in the need for fundraising, and the primaries, and you’ve got a perpetual cycle of electioneering.

And that – something that Telegraph hacks might like to take on board – was a fact of Stateside life well before Barack Obama came along. Moreover, to start talking about campaigning as if it only just started misses not only the taking out of Osama bin Laden, but all the months prior to that. The Obama re-election trail started not earlier this month, but in January.

More precisely, it started on January 12, at the University of Arizona, at Tucson. It was there that Obama gave a speech at the memorial to those killed by Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree the previous weekend. His was a Presidential performance, something that will be shown again and again as the 2012 election approaches.

Yes, Telegraph people, electioneering in the USA is one perpetual cycle, and has been for decades. Barack Obama wants to be re-elected, so he too is a participant in that cycle. That is all.