Barack Obama’s presidency is quickly descending into Jimmy Carter territory. That means he is not only out-of-the-mainstream and out-of-touch, he is now being seen as an incompetent president. And once that happens, the vultures begin to circle.

Recent evidence that this is happening:

• Democrat Congressional candidates are begging the White House not to campaign for them this fall; these candidates do not want to be photographed with Obama! Who would have predicted that 18 months ago?

• The President’s performance on the New York City Ground Zero Mosque has roiled his weakening political situation;

• Rahm Emanuel spent three days this week on the phone begging Democrats not to split – as Harry Reid did – from the President over this Mosque issue;

• New polls show an increase in the number of Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim; and these polls were conducted before his ham-handed handling of the Mosque controversy.

• A new story has been published revealing that the President still has not joined a DC area Christian church. He says it “would be too disruptive for the church” if he joined. What hogwash!

• Add in the recent Michelle Obama Spain trip and the President being left alone on his 49th birthday and you have to wonder exactly what is going on inside the Obama White House and the Obama Family, too.

All of this makes political professionals scratch their heads. The smooth-running 2008 campaign operation has not translated to a well-run White House. Take the Mosque: Friday night at a Ramadan dinner in the White House, the President reads from his ever-present TelePrompter and clearly referred to the controversial downtown NYC Mosque, despite his next-day denials.

For that speech to make it up to the TelePrompter it had to go through a series of White House offices–ranging from speech-writing to the political office and probably the National Security Council as well–before getting to the Senior Staff for their review. So what Obama said that night was indeed the policy of the White House. This was not some off-the-cuff gaffe.

Clearly by the next morning the White House was besieged with calls of protest from stupefied Democrats running for office this year begging the President to back off. And thus Mr. Obama did try to retract his Friday night statement–thus now showing a lack of command for the issue.

He is indeed incompetent. He fumbles each issue–and reacts to criticism with lightning speed by often reversing himself.

If we use the Jimmy Carter analogy, then let us follow it all the way. By 1980 Democrats were split over re-electing Carter. And the GOP had an establishment candidate in George H.W. Bush versus the outsider, Ronald Reagan. Reagan trounced Bush and then trounced Carter.

So, is something similar shaping up for 2012?

Or will the GOP this time – like they did in 1996 and 2008–opt for a mediocre, boring, un-daring, timid candidate who will be easy meat even for Obama?

That is the question.

Although it is way, way too early to even begin to think of 2012, it is possible that President Obama will not choose to run again in 2012.

In fact, there is a 30% chance of this.

Why?

Because he already has planted the seed of possibility that he will simply walk away and not risk a humiliating defeat.

Three times in recent interviews he has raised the possibility of “not running again” or, as he told Diane Sawyer this week, being a “good one-term President.”

Why would a new President already float the idea that he might just chuck it all?

Is it because he is scared of losing in 2012?

Or is it a ploy to look as if he is “above” politics?

Or is it something deeper? Is it that he is a diffident, emotionally distant man who does not really enjoy the rough and tumble of inside-the-Beltway politics?

Sure, he loved all the adulation as The One and The Messiah as he campaigned for President. But since his honeymoon ended last summer, he has had a rough “go”—what with his patriotism, brains, judgement, and citizenship questioned.

Both Barack and Michelle Obama—going all the way back to the 2007-2008 campaign—at times acted as if it was a step down for them to deign to run for the Oval Office. She once said in 2008, as things were getting rough with the Clintons, that this would be the “only time” the Obamas would go through this.

Now, in office, President Obama says, “It’s better to be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”

Hmmmm… A “good one-term president” will get re-elected and thus have a chance to be something Obama never mentioned: a great two-term president.

So far Obama is not even a mediocre one-termer. He is on track to be a failed one-termer; another Jimmy Carter.

He does have time to turn things around. If the economy improves and if the unemployment rate drops substantially he can get re-elected.

He will—no matter what happens—be able to get re-nominated. An African American Democrat President can not be defeated for the 2012 Democratic nomination. Talk of a Hillary Clinton challenging Obama in the Democratic primaries is pie-in-the-sky. Ain’t gonna happen.

But what might happen is this: when 2012 begins and unemployment is at 9%, polling shows Obama in deep, deep political trouble. In polls he loses head-to-head match-ups to several Republican candidates. Democrats are panicked—especially after huge 2010 mid-term losses in the House and Senate. There is a sourness in the political system and among a nervous electorate.

In the midst of this, Obama surprises the nation by announcing that he will not run again; he says, “I want to devote this year to governing, not campaigning.”

It might happen.

A 30% chance it will happen.

President Obama had a bad end of last week. The jobs report indicated that Obama’s Stimulus Plan—so far—hasn’t done squat. We haven’t even bottomed out yet; the nation’s economy is still ill—and shedding jobs—and now the talk is about extending unemployment insurance after the end of the year.

Hardly material to generate consumer confidence.

But the real capper to the week was the Copenhagen Fiasco—a total political disaster from start-to-finish.

You know what this whole Chicago Olympics in 2016 was? A paean to Obama—by Obama! This was a plan—by Obama—to immortalize himself by having the Olympic Games in his hometown as he ended his presidency—all conjured up beforehe was even elected!

As a friend of mine puts it “Obama has a problem with the vertical pronoun.” In other words, he is in love with the word “I.”

Listen to any of his speeches and you will hear that one word—“I”—used more than by any other POTUS.

Word out of the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen was that the delegates were “put off” by both the President’s speech and the First Lady’s as well. Too much about “them” and not enough about “why Chicago was the best place to host the Olympics.”

The Obamas have fallen prey to a common problem among people who rocket to fame: they begin to believe their own press releases and press clippings.

Barack Obama is a young man. Elected at 46 - with almost no experience at all. It is easy to see how he has already lost his way. He can no longer distinguish what is best for the country from is best for himself.

And he is surrounded by enablers—these pathetic suck-up staffers who last week had the temerity to utter this phrase about why they were certain Obama’s quick four hour in-and-out IOC speech would do the job for Chicago: Obama is “the best brand in the word.” Other enablers are in the so-called mainstream-media. They are totally in the tank for the Obamas.

Boy, did they get their comeuppance or what?

Obama needs to understand the limits to his appeal: he is indeed the anti-Bush and anyone following Bush would get heaps of praise just for not being Bush.

But Obama’s ideas, thoughts and approach have not been judged to be mystical or prescient or the ideas of a genius. He is instead a mere mortal. And an inexperienced, surprisingly naïve one at that.

It has taken ten days of lies, tear gas, baton-beatings—and finally cold-blooded murder by the corrupt, filthy-rich, fraudulent hypocritical Iranian mullahs and their marauding militias to get our new President to even seem outraged.

He finally read a statement—after all, he reads everything that comes out of his mouth—at his Press Conference Tuesday afternoon that came close to echoing the feelings of most Americans that we stand with the protestors who have the right to an open and honest election.

Having the President of the United States make a statement like this is not provocative or “Bush-the-Bully-like”—something Obama is clearly afraid of seeming.

Go back to the early days of Solidarity. Lech Walensa was thrown in jail by Soviet-backed General Jaralelski. What did our then-new President Ronald Reagan do? He had Solidarity candles burning in the White House windows at night.

That image flew ‘round the world—and let everyone know just where America stood.

Why doesn’t our new President wear a green arm band—an image that would say more than any TelePromptered-statement read at a Press Conference?

Richard Wolff in his new campaign book about the 2008 Obama-Clinton race, reveals that back in 2000 when Obama ran for the House in a Democrat primary against Congressman Bobby Rush, Michelle Obama saw her husband as “cold and distant.”

That is how he now appears as President. He hides his emotions too well. He is too self-controlled, too self-disciplined in not allowing the people to feel his emotions.

A leader must connect viscerally. His approval up to now is more for the “change” we all wanted after G.W. Bush—not for anything Obama has done or fought for. In fact, he has never fought for anything—except his own political advancement. His election and the racial apect of it has made many people admire Obama-the-Symbol. But when you get past that and look at Obama-the-Man, he is hidden, cool and indeed distant.

Now we are beginning to see the polarizing of the American electorate—again. The new President’s honeymoon is coming to an end. The out-of-control spending is scaring Independents away from Obama. And he is beginning to suffer from a self-created over-exposure - a speech per day plus fawning media ‘availabilities’ like this ABC-from-the-White-House health show.

It is inevitable that people are going to grow weary of Barack Obama. And he is then going to learn that his—any President’s—coin of the realm are his appearances, his speeches, and access to him. By doing so many such appearances, speeches, YouTube weekend speeches, Town Hall Forums and Press Conferences, he is cheapening his power.

He needs to be seen a little less frequently.

And he needs to re-focus on one Big thing at a time.

As of now there are too many balls being juggled at once—and none of them are particularly popular.

As predicted here last year, by this coming October Obama will not be too popular. Yes, the Democrats will adore him and the conservatives will oppose him. But the middle—where the action in politics and government really is—is where Obama will lose support. These self-described Independent voters—many of them former GOP voters who split for Perot in 1992 and still searching for sane fiscal policies—will have abandoned Obama by the fall. But they will not be going back to the GOP either. They will sit—alone—unhappy—and wait to see if anyone speaks to their issues of responsible spending and budget practices.

The Republicans?

They have not even begun to figure out how to come back from the Bush Years.

If Barack Obama wins this election, what will the next four years be like in this country?

Obama and the Democratic Super Majority in the Congress, led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, will certainly move to the extreme, hard Left:

There will be no one to check or block or restrain their worst, i.e. most liberal, instincts. Here is some of what they will do:

• Try to move the nation to Western European-style socialism. Hillary would have done this, too, had she won and Obama will, too, beginning in January. Each had dozens of new FDR-style spending programs they featured during their campaigns;

• This means heavier federal involvement in health care; perhaps the Federal Government will eventually take this over and nationalize it;

• Cradle-to-grave federal programs; all aspects of our lives will be affected - from schools to energy subsidies to doctors’ salaries to regulation of hospital costs to corporate governance to federal mandates on states and municipalities to a federal take-over of many pension funds;

• Yes, these un-restrained liberals, drunk with power, will re-impose the incorrectly named Fairness Doctrine to nail Rush and Hannity and Savage and their local acolytes. The Left sees Talk Radio as the one bastion of the media they can’t penetrate - so they’ll simply neutralize it and neuter it with this doctrine;

• They will cut defense spending - perhaps by up to 25% - they always do - as a quick way to move money into social programs;

• They will create massive new government spending programs - supposedly to re-build our “crumbling infrastructure” - but as a payoff to their labor pals;

• Whenever someone in the media dares to question what they are up to, these newly arrogant-with-power lefties will say, “Look what Bush and the Republicans did? Socialism? It was the Republicans who took over the banks and pored over one trillion dollars into bailouts!”

• The liberals will go after corporate pay and try to legislate limits on CEO salaries;

• NEWSWEEK or TIME will have a cover story on The War Against The Rich;

• For the first year or two, the so-called mainstream media will remain totally in the tank for Obama and for this leftist agenda;

• Some writer will coin a phrase, i.e. the Square Deal, the New Deal and the Great Society, which will describe what Obama is trying to do;

• There will be talk of massive amounts of USG money being sent to Africa;

• The idea of sending US troops to African hot spots, i.e. Darfur and Kenya, will come up soon after the Inaugural;

• Some Civil Rights leaders will raise the idea of ‘reparations’ for the descendants of slaves;

• Michele Obama will be un-leashed and will quickly become the most unpopular First Lady - ever. Some people will almost miss the days of Hillary Clinton. Stories will abound about how she is hurting her husband’s political standing. His staff will try to muzzle her - and stories will then surface that there is a war between the Obamas inside the White House;

• Pakistan will deteriorate and almost fracture - and Obama will be more aggressive toward Al Qaeda and the Taliban than Bush was;

• Obama will tilt pro-Palestinian - and his relations with Israel will deteriorate; no American President will have had such bad relations with our staunchest ally;

• By the Fall of 2009, Obama’s approval rating will be down to 42%; his disapproval rating will be 45%; the nation will - again - be divided and polarized;

• Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will not be frequent visitors to the Obama White House; the savvy Obama staff will try not to allow the Obama Administration to be painted with the Sharpton/Jackson poisonous paint;

• Teddy Kennedy will die - and the funeral will be a Who’s Who of the Left and of the DC Establishment. His funeral will be on national TV - and his “accomplishments” will be touted for weeks, while the death of Mary Jo Kopechne will be a small footnote; the media will fawn all over the Kennedys - all over again;

• Iran will smell weakness in Obama and make a move of some sort - perhaps in Lebanon; or, possibly, Tehran and Obama will make peace first and have a Summit - and then Iran will take advantage of a weak Obama;

• Leftists of all stripes will emerge as new ‘stars’ in the Obama Era. They will be products of today’s ‘progressive’, race and gender-based education system - and they will flaunt their arrogance and haughtiness;

• All sorts of crazy ideas will surface - from nationalizing certain companies and industries to God knows what; remember Lani Guinier? She is nothing compared to what is coming from this crowd;

• The anti-gun crowd on the Left will change federal law and try to end gun shows;

• Using Bush's "faith-based" programs as cover, the Left may allow some sort of disguised federal aid to church groups- especially leftist churches ala Jeremiah Wright's church and others preaching African Liberation Theology;

• Capitalism will be seen as an evil; all the anti-capitalistic nonsense taught in our colleges and universities will rear its ugly head in statements, confirmation hearings and interviews with new administration figures;

• The Congress will try to free hundreds of thousands of prison inmates who are serving time for drug and non-violent offenses; and then they’ll try to register them to vote for the Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections;

• Most of G.W. Bush’s Executive Orders regarding family planning, stem cell research, and foreign aid coupled with family planning will be reversed;

• Obama and the Democrats will grant amnesty to the 12-30 million illegals already here - and the Border Fence will never be built; millions of new illegals will continue to stream into our nation; the Democrats will try to register these new voters as Democrats, of course, and that will alter all our politics for years to come;

• The Obama-Democratic Congressional Axis will nominate and confirm the most left-leaning federal judges in our history as payback for what G.W. Bush and the GOP did in the 2001-2007 period. Watch out - some real whackos are coming onto the bench;

In sum, the Obama Years will be the culmination of the last forty years of horrendously biased education coupled with a climate of liberal guilt and Political Correctness. Let’s close with this quote from the British Spectator - which sums up what is about to happen here in the USA. (The Brits Have a Way With Words):

"You have to pinch yourself—a Marxist radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshiped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States.
"And apparently it's considered impolite to say so."

— Melanie Philips, The Spectator (UK) 10/14/08