Some months ago, when Barack Obama’s polling numbers were in the dumps and Mitt Romney was either tying or slightly exceeding the President’s performance across the board, I felt that the general malaise of the Democratic electorate after four years of somewhat disappointing progress and major Republican gains in Congress would combine to kill Obama’s chances. My wife told me then that if — better yet, when — the President defeated Mitt Romney, she would expect a complete and public retraction of my previous statements on the subject. This is that retraction.

As recently as mid-October I was still feeling gloomy after Obama’s wretched performance in the first debate, and reasoned that even excellent performances in the following debates (which he gave) would not be enough to rescue him. Then I will admit I became very interested in Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times, in which noted statistician Silver had begun forecasting with greater and greater confidence an Obama victory, based upon analysis of various state polls. The national numbers were all tied up, but elections in the United States are won state by state, not by a survey of everyone all at once, and it was here that Silver saw an increasingly likely scenario wherein the President would win re-election.

I still worried when Silver’s numbers were in the 70% range and I worried a bit less when they passed into the 80% range and then I started to take the gas off my anxiety in a more substantial way when the number, on the last two days of the campaign, exceeded 90%. Despite all my doomsaying, it looked like Obama was going to be able to pull this sucker off.

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So the second debate of the 2012 presidential campaign was last night and the word on the street is that Obama showed up Mitt Romney in definitive fashion. Unfortunately, we may be looking at a situation where Obama provided too little, too late.

If you’ve read my earlier entries about this campaign, you will probably remember that I’ve never been bullish on the President’s chances of winning this thing. Before the one-on-one campaigning got started in earnest, Romney was meeting or leading Obama in pretty much every poll and it didn’t look like Obama was going to be able to break Romney’s stranglehold on those numbers. It got even worse when Romney and the Republicans repeatedly out-fundraised the President and the Democratic Party to the tune of tens of millions of dollars per month.

And then something happened. Pretty much from out of nowhere, Obama started to show major gains in swing states and even started to pull away from Romney in national polls. I even got into the act by donating, something I said I wasn’t going to do this time around. I’m paying for it with multiple calls per day from the campaign wanting more money, but I’m not going to get into that right now.

It had started to look like Obama was going to run the board on Romney and even the Republicans were starting to jump ship. September was a particularly bad month for Romney, with mistake after mistake shaking his campaign. He was a goner for sure, I thought.

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I haven’t blogged much about the 2012 election, and if you’re curious as to why that is, you can always click the Barack Obama link in the tags and read more on the subject. Suffice it to say that I was less than enthralled with what I felt was a watered down version of the president we were promised, though I’d take an Obama presidency over a McCain one any day.

We are unfortunately faced with an even more unpalatable alternative this time around: Mitt Romney. There’s a reason he didn’t catch fire as a candidate in the 2008 race, and that’s because he’s an awful selection. That was true then and it was true now. Sadly, the Republicans in this country will rally around anyone who runs against Obama, regardless of who that someone might be. The Republican Party could run a rock and he’d still get about 50% of the vote. Such is the political division in this country.

It’s been my contention for a while that if Obama does lose this election — and it seems more and more likely that he will, as I am about to discuss — it will be because people are voting against him and not because they’re voting for Romney. See the rock example above.

Would this have happened if Obama had followed through on his soaring rhetoric and actually governed as the return of FDR we were promised? I tend to think not. It was clear in 2008 that Obama had touched a powerful chord in the electorate. They wanted change, but what they actually got was Reagan Republicanism in the guise of a Democratic presidency. I know of no one, save for the deluded Republican masses, who wants a return to the bad old days of the 1980s, when the middle class began to be dismantled in earnest, the rich were given huge gifts by the government and spending was outrageously wasteful. I sincerely doubt Reagan would even past muster with today’s Republican Party, what with his support for targeted tax increases. The rich would still get grossly richer, but they wouldn’t get richer so quickly.

So Obama squandered a great opportunity. That will work against him. The numbers are already there, showing a great deal less enthusiasm for the election than was shown in 2008. People just aren’t “fired up and ready to go” the way they were four years ago and that’s proved critical to Obama’s sagging poll numbers. At first Romney lagged behind Obama in polling. Now Romney ties or beats Obama in virtually every poll. Given that there’s only five months to go until the election, this is pretty much the kiss of death.

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