Obama 2012?

I think his continuation of the politics of empire and military domination that were brought to the fore by George Bush deserve laser-like scrutiny to determine how much of it he could actually discontinue if he tried without any decrease in our security as a nation.

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_4ruQ7t4zrFA/Ss79Qkq4v5I/AAAAAAAADb8/DFruf4hE27s/barack-obama-nobel-peace-prize.jpg

A day after some national polls showed President Obama’s edge over Mitt Romney evaporating, he responded first thing on Tuesday with a new commercial featuring Big Bird of “Sesame Street” and Mr. Romney’s debate-night vow to cut financing for PBS.

It did not exactly take flight.

The creators of “Sesame Street” had asked Mr. Obama to leave Big Bird out of it. And even some Democrats said the ad, suggesting that Mr. Romney would be tougher on “Sesame Street” than on Wall Street, was not the salve that nervous party activists and volunteers were looking for.

“The right message is that on Friday, we saw great economic news,” said Brian Moran, the chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party, referring to new data showing that the national unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent in September. “Things are moving in the right direction. That’s where the focus should be, and not on the debate.”

Big Bird was part of a broader effort by Mr. Obama and his team to reassure supporters — many of whom were confident a week ago that the election was all but assured — that his campaign had not lost its intensity or focus. By later in the day, Mr. Obama was delivering a spirited campaign appearance in Columbus, Ohio, his aides were reaching out to big donors with a calming message that they had always expected a tight finish, and the campaign had released new ads in battleground states on issues like potential cuts to Medicaid.

The Big Bird ad may not have inspired universal confidence among Democrats. But if nothing else, they said, any sense of complacency in their ranks was now gone.

“Certainly, you’re not hearing anyone out here saying this is in the bag, and you were beginning to get that sense,” Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado said in an interview. “Dire is the wrong word, but I do think it is a wake-up call.”

Speaking at a rally in Columbus late Tuesday, Mr. Obama accused Mr. Romney of showing “salesmanship” but “not leadership,” telegraphing a new line of attack that Mr. Obama’s aides hoped would help to bolster his supporters.

Inside Mr. Obama’s Chicago headquarters, senior advisers had already worked to calm younger staff members by counseling them to tune out the natural, if jarring, gyrations of a closely fought presidential race. Supportive Democratic governors were doing the same on Tuesday. “Did we forget no-drama Obama?” Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana asked in an interview, reprising the go-steady slogan of Mr. Obama’s 2008 effort.

After a Pew Research Center poll on Monday that suggested Mr. Romney’s debate performance had helped him erase Mr. Obama’s lead nationally, a Gallup survey released Tuesday showed a similar result, with the candidates statistically tied.

But polls in battleground states appeared to show the race to be back where it was before Mr. Obama went on a run, and Mr. Romney stumbled, after their party conventions, with Mr. Obama for the most part holding slight but shrinking edges in surveys, within their margins of sampling of error.

A new CNN poll of likely voters in Ohio showed the president to have a four-point advantage. (A Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll and a Washington Post poll before the debate had shown a lead for Mr. Obama of 8 to 10 percentage points.)

And a new survey by WMUR and the New Hampshire University Survey Center showed Mr. Obama to have a 6-point lead in the state, down from 15 points a week ago.

Officials at the pro-Obama “super PAC” Priorities USA Action, and at unions including the AFL-CIO, said that the electoral battleground, and their plans to tackle it, have not changed.

“You can’t deny that he could have done a lot better in the debate and that would have continued the confidence people had in the outcome,” said Mike Podhorzer, the AFL-CIO’s political director. “But in terms of what we do, which is we only focus on the ground, people are committed and are still committed because the economic issues and choices are so stark.”