It is time to call the 2012 election.  President Obama cannot win.  He will likely lose big, in a very lopsided election.  Pundits will claim to be surprised when the outcome becomes apparent.  They should not be, as the signs of such a result are everywhere, despite the mainstream media's attempts to suppress them.

There are numerous reasons why Obama will lose.  Incompetence, likeability, and duplicity are a few.  Obama has alienated too many in the electorate, including large numbers who supported him the first time.  In 2012, many will vote against him or (even better) just stay home.

How Did Obama Get Elected the First Time?

Barack Hussein Obama is a self-created myth, polished further by David Axelrod and a compliant media.  He is a chameleon who takes on whatever shape and form best suit his purposes and goals.  There is little substance behind the façade other than an Elmer Gantry style of politics.  He is completely malleable into whatever form and shape best serve his personal interests.

A few examples of this "flexibility" are the following:

• He changed his name when he believed it served him to do so.
• He is not a religious man, but he joined a Black Liberation Church to sell his bona fides to the black community in his early days in Chicago.
• He said that preacher Jeremiah Wright was like his father yet threw him under the bus when it became convenient (necessary).
• He claimed to have been born in Kenya in order to enhance book sales as a younger man.
• He likely lied on his applications to college to gain foreign student status.  At the time, that category provided more favorable admission and funding treatment than afforded domestic blacks.
• He claimed to be a constitutional professor when he was neither a professor nor particularly well-versed in the Constitution.

Little was known about Obama when he entered the primary campaign.  He became little more than a complex Rorschach blot with a sanitized past carefully scrubbed and scripted.  His campaign avoided specifics; his speeches contained no substance.  The imagination of observers defined him.

His greatest asset was his "unknownness."  As a blank slate, voters imagined whatever they wanted in the next president.  They were aided by a clever marketing campaign which emphasized his uniqueness:

As a political "newbie" and the first serious African-American candidate, he played well.  He was an outsider who would clean up Washington.  For many, he was the great healer who would bring unity to Republicans and Democrats, blacks and whites and America and its enemies.  His Kumbayah campaign was hailed by the media, and a large, naive segment of the electorate believed it.

Why Obama Will Lose the Election

Why Obama will lose this next election is less difficult to understand than how he won the first time.  Barack Obama was a fluke, an unlikely candidate with no demonstrated experience in anything other than reading a teleprompter and sounding good.

He was pushed to his party's nomination as a result of the media.  His election was a quirk, rather than something earned.  Any Democrat who gained the nomination was likely ensured the presidency.  Bush fatigue and the hapless John McCain made that almost certain.

Obama will lose the next election because his greatest asset, his unknownness, exists no longer.  Voter imagination can no longer be manipulated in the presence of facts.  Quite simply, Obama will not be re-elected because too many people now know him.  His biggest attribute has been taken away.

What people got was nothing like what they were promised or imagined.  What was a blank slate upon which to imagine an Obama presidency now is a full-blown portrait filled with failure, warts, and scars.

Obama's track record is abysmal. Floyd and Mary Beth Brown discussed four of Obama's failures:

• Obama's 825 billion dollar stimulus failed to keep unemployment below 8 percent as promised. Since President Obama's stimulus passed, America has lost 1.1 million jobs. If you count people who have become discouraged and are no longer seeking jobs, some economists believe that real unemployment rate is above twenty percent.
• Obama called his health care package one of his major accomplishments. He told CBS' Steve Kroft he was "putting in place a system in which we're going to start lowering health care costs." Yet it has failed to make health insurance more affordable. According to the fact watchdog website FactCheck.org, ObamaCare is actually making health care "less affordable." Workers paid an average of $132 more for family coverage just this year.
• Obama predicted his investments in green energy would create 5 million jobs, but the Wall Street Journal reports: "The green jobs subsidy story gets more embarrassing by the day. Three years ago President Obama promised that by the end of the decade, America would have five million green jobs, but so far, some $90 billion in government spending has delivered very few."
• Obama pledged to cut the deficit in half, saying: "And that's why today I'm pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office." Even if every part of Obama's deficit reduction proposal was enacted, the deficit at the end of his first term would still be $1.33 trillion, more than twice what he promised.

In addition:

• His Obamacare legislation, despite all the state propaganda supporting it, remains unpopular and is viewed by more than half the country as unconstitutional.  Recent hearings in front of the Supreme Court were embarrassing to the administration.  The legislation is wildly over-budget and threatens to accelerate the bankruptcy of the nation.  Further, the more people begin to deal with its implementation, the more unworkable it is considered and the more it is considered a mistake.  Obama's trophy piece of legislation is increasingly viewed as an unworkable, unmitigated disaster.
• Relations between Republicans and Democrats and blacks and whites are worse than at any time in my lifetime.  The former is on evidence every day.  The latter has been emphasized with the circus surrounding the tragic death of Trayvon Martin.
• The country's foreign policy is a growing embarrassment.  America has alienated many of its allies.  America and its enemies are not doing so well, either.  We don't have a Cold War, although we don't need one with what is happening.  Russia is not our ally.  China is exerting its newly developed muscle.  Iran openly mocks the president as it proceeds to nuclear weaponry.  North Korea plays Lucy with the football, and Charlie Brown falls for the trick every time.  The Mid-East is in shambles, with the Arab Spring being nothing more than the replacement of tyrants who were friendly to the U.S. with tyrants who are not.  Israel looks like it will have to act alone against its existential threat.
• The economy has not improved despite record stimulus.  Economic statistics are routinely "massaged" to make outcomes look better.  Suffocating regulations, increasing debt levels and regime uncertainty prevent recovery.  Capital and talent increasingly flee the U.S.
• Obama has mortgaged the country's future with his spending.  By the time of the election, he will have added almost $6 trillion in new debt.  There is no interest in cutting spending despite the doomsday warnings from multiple sources.  Markets will eventually choose how and when the spending will cease.  It will be at the convenience of markets when matters cease.  Likely this timing will not be favorable to the country's preferences.
• Gasoline prices are soaring.  The so-called "green energy" initiative has been exposed as corrupt political payoffs that will not produce economic energy for decades, if ever.  Coal is under attack, exploration for oil is unnecessarily restricted, pipelines are stymied, and power plants are closing.  Politically correct politics moves us away from modernity toward the Stone Age.
• Obama is no longer seen as The One -- just, instead, as another scheming Chicago politician.  He is increasingly viewed as arrogant, dishonest, and incompetent.  These are not messianic attributes.  He is just another politician, although more flawed than most.

A great mistake was made in 2008.  That mistake is now blatantly apparent to most voters and most political analysts around the world.  Nothing Obama promised has been accomplished.  Furthermore, much of what he did added to the country's problems.

Even the fawning media and the Democrat establishment recognize his failings, although neither is willing to publicly discuss them.  Democrats should have replaced this defective candidate long ago.  Now is too late.  Democrat sympathizers can only hope that this election does not destroy what remains of the party.  Based on the debacle that was the 2010 election, that fear is not unfounded.  If anything, the mistake that was Obama is better-known now than it was two years ago.

James Taranto pointed out the despair among Democrats and their PR arm, the national press.  In an editorial, he cited several examples of disillusionment.  Howard Portnoy was quoted in the piece stating:

What I believe is happening is that the left is reading the handwriting on the wall and resigning itself to the harsh reality [that] the man they trusted to "fundamentally transform America" is on the verge of being unelected.

Mr. Taranto added his own thoughts to those of the generally liberal pundits:

Not only does Obama's re-election look to be in serious jeopardy, but his presidency has been an almost unmitigated disaster for progressive liberalism, nearly every tenet of which has been revealed to be untenable either practically, politically or both.

This despair was expressed last October.  Things have only worsened since then.

Obama Stumbles Out of the Gate

Several different recent weeks have been described by various pundits as "Obama's worst week yet."  The rate of his decline steepens as the campaign season heats up.

Now the Obama political campaign is seen as being in disarray.  Politico described the early stages of the Obama re-election campaign as follows:

That's the unmistakable reality for Democrats since Obama officially launched his reelection campaign three weeks ago. Obama, not Mitt Romney, is the one with the muddled message -- and the one who often comes across as baldly political. Obama, not Romney, is the one facing blowback from his own party on the central issue of the campaign so far --  Romney'shistory with Bain Capital. And most remarkably, Obama, not Romney, is the one falling behind in fundraising.

Obama's campaign was run so smoothly four years ago that it likely created a false impression on political observers.  The campaign cannot be run the same way again for obvious reasons.  Nor can it run smoothly this time.  There is nothing on which Obama can run on regarding achievements other than the overhyped bin Laden killing.

He looks silly trying to blame Bush for the last four years, although he must make voters believe that he had nothing to do with the failures.  Perhaps he should blame even earlier presidents for his woes.  After all, Madison and Jefferson provided the Constitution, which he considers a roadblock in his attempts to remake America.

A Bigger Democrat Problem

There is a bigger problem for Democrats than one election and a failed candidate.  The strategy adopted long ago and responsible for most of their success over the last eighty years has played itself out, and they are left with nothing.

Franklin Roosevelt, during the Great Depression, saw the value of buying votes by spreading benefits around.  It was successful and a strategy refined by other Democrats over the years.  It was based on identity politics that focused on certain segments of the population and won them over with "gifts."

It was a strategy of winning elections rather than a strategy of governance, and it was therefore very successful in winning elections, but not so in governing. The Democrat coalition is a motley collection of interest groups with nothing in common other than "we want more."  That makes it impossible to have a coherent governing strategy.

Some are amazed that Democrats have not developed a budget for almost three years.  It really is impossible to do so without offending their coalition.  In a time of monetary constraint, they cannot afford to show who will benefit at the expense of others.  That is just an example of how governance becomes impossible with an election strategy based on Santa Claus.

Now the country is near its Thatcher point, where there is no more money to buy votes and goodies will eventually be taken away rather than increased.  This condition has serious implications for both political parties, but especially for the Democrats.  The Democratic Party now exists and survives for one simple reason -- making dependency more attractive.  It has become the party of plunder, taking from the productive and giving to the unproductive in an attempt to buy enough votes to remain relevant. 

The party approaches this election as an ogre driving an ice cream truck with no ice cream in it.  Democratas will lose this election and will lose many more unless they redefine themselves in terms of something other than Santa Claus.  Sadly, for Democrats (and some Republicans), Santa is dead.

Qualification

My projection of Obama's defeat is based on some semblance of sanity among the electorate.  H.L. Mencken might consider that a dangerous assumption, but I am still hopeful.  However, if Obama wins, get the hell out of Dodge!  Even if the election is close and he loses, leave if you are less than fifty years old and have any ambition and ability.  If the election is even close, the country is lost!

Monty Pelerin blogs at EconomicNoise.Com.