Dawg, it's a failure from your perspective because your position is only supported by one in five people, Basically young folks, old hippies, professors, and a great deal of minorities.
What's wrong with young folk, old hippies, professors, and minorities? Three of those four are explicitly BETTER than their equivalent right-wing groups, namely, older folk, anti-environmentalists, and the uneducated.
Your position is the minority position and the only way you can win is convince moderates you are right. Obama did not get elected because he was this great person, Obama got elected because moderates got tired of the republican bull crap. Think about it, as long as the economy was good, they stuck it out with Bush. Just as soon as the economy tanked, they where for Obama because they wanted change.
Exactly. Americans have this strange obsession with the economy and think that the president has magical powers that can control it. They don't understand how the economy or the government actually work, and they seem to have no long-term memory whatsoever. Whenever something goes wrong, they don't care how, why, or even WHAT is wrong, they just want vague and non-directed "change."
Further, Americans have this bizarre notion that "truth must lie somewhere in the middle," no matter what the two endpoints being compared are. They think that the correct answer must lie somewhere
in between reasonable and ridiculous, instead of simply going with the reasonable answer. The Republicans, figuring this out, have shifted rightwards over the past three decades or so, dragging the center with them. The Democrats, instead of doing the right thing and fighting back, decided to try and accommodate the new right-wing culture. As a result, the Democrats are deservedly failing as a party, and even when the Republicans fail as a party, their ideology (which is what's important) is continually promoted in the process.
Obama is screwed because he cannot run on change this time. People who want change this time around will be voting for Mitt. Think about it, how many people are satisfied with the current situation?
Precisely. Obama won through a combination of some people actually liking his liberal image, and other people liking the fact that he wasn't Bush. But then he turned around and started acting conservative and strangely Bush-like, in a feeble attempt to appease moderates and conservatives. Now the conservatives still hate him, the moderates are still apathetic nobodies, and the liberals won't trust him.
Like I said, few people bother to understand the actual issues. They alternate between parties, without actually looking at what each party believes. These sorts of people aren't the entire electorate, but they're usually the deciders of an election, and correlate strongly with the "moderates" you describe. All they need to know "Obama bad!" and "Romney =/= Obama, therefore Romney good!" Obama first got into power by playing the "Bush bad! Obama =/= Bush..." card, but it was temporary because most people didn't actually understand what made Bush a terrible president (ie, the haphazard invasion of Iraq, the tax cuts, the Department of Faith-Based Initiatives), they just knew that they had less money than they did before. (Conversely, Reagan, who is rather similar to Bush ideologically, was hailed as a great president, because they believed that the economy was improving. This actually wasn't true, but Reagan was a decent actor.)
