According to a new Hotline poll, voters have lost trust in Obama:
Seven in 10 voters say the economy will improve over the next 12 months, according to the new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll, while just 27% believe the economy will worsen. But 56% of voters say they have less confidence that elected officials in DC will make good financial and economic decisions. …
Voters have lost faith in Obama to craft solutions to the country’s economic challenges. Just 39% say they trust Obama more than GOPers in Congress, while 32% say they believe the GOP has the right ideas. That 7-point gap is down from a 29-point Obama advantage in the April ’09 poll.
Only 39% of voters said they would vote to re-elect Pres. Obama if the election were held today, while 50% say they would vote for someone else. A quarter of voters would definitely vote to re-elect Obama, while 37% would definitely vote for someone else.
The reasons for this are clear: unemployment remains high, the recovery is unsteady, and home prices haven’t recovered. But the voters haven’t just soured on the economy — they’ve soured on Obama. Maybe by pulling off a grand bait-and-switch (running as a moderate and governing from the left), he lost the voters’ confidence. Perhaps saying so many things that aren’t so — ObamaCare would save money, the relationship with Israel is rock-solid, George W. Bush is responsible for the deficit — wasn’t the best idea. Over time he has frittered away the precious commodity of presidential credibility. And maybe the public simply doesn’t buy the holier-than-thou routine from Obama (in which he is civil while others are not, he is nonpartisan while others are craven hacks). They now see him as a big-government partisan liberal who hasn’t fixed the economy. It’s a wonder his numbers aren’t worse.
I don’t know that it’s the election so much that’s driving the refusal to sell refueling tankers to Israel. I suspect it’s more that the current administration wants to keep the potential “problem” of Israel precipitating an incident with Iran — one that we would have to get involved with — within its existing boundaries. Israel’s tanker capability does limit her options for air strikes on Iran, and in predictable ways. Expanding the permutations for those options make US contingency planning more difficult.
Either a McCain or an Obama administration is highly likely to see things the same way. For the time being, our own options are still open. From a US perspective, the option of an American air campaign against Iran remains feasible until the Russian-made SA-20 air defense system has reached full operational capability there. That is virtually certain not to happen before the end of next year, at the earliest. If any significant elements of the system were already deployed in Iran today, we would be extremely likely to have had some indication of it. Foreign sales and deployment of such systems rarely escape news coverage entirely, and information would be likely to leak from one intelligence service or another.
The US sees action by Israel against Iran as something that will require a US response to contain and stabilize, and doesn’t want to be pushed into that on Israel’s timeline. It is entirely understandable that Israel sees things differently, and can’t plan to rely on the US to act against Iran on OUR timeline. We have no history of effectively averting the nuclearization of declared enemies. It’s a tough spot for Israel, and she may have to decide to do what she can with what she’s got.