Inside Politics

TREND GAINS SPEED

“The Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia this month are a clarion call for centrist, bipartisan leadership - and a punctuation mark on a slow but steady movement by middle-of-the-road voters away from President Obama,” longtime Democratic consultant Douglas E. Schoen writes in the New York Daily News.

“The trend, under way since Obama took the oath, is now accelerating. Unless the president makes a course correction, he will live to regret it,” Mr. Schoen said.

“Over the course of the last 10 months, independents have abandoned Obama and the Democrats en masse. They’re not necessarily shifting to the Republican Party, but they are far less supportive of the president and the Democratic Party’s priorities.

“Back in the spring, Obama was consistently registering 60 percent approval among independents. Today, a majority of independents - 53 percent according to a recent CNN poll - actually disapprove of the president’s job performance. That erosion can only be called a cratering of support.

“The single biggest reason independents are breaking away from Democrats is that they feel he is spending too much money, increasing the deficit and not addressing the nation’s problems in a bipartisan way.

“Put simply, they think Obama is abandoning the political center he claimed to represent as a candidate.

“And when it comes to the judgment of centrists, perception is reality.”

THE ‘RECKONING’

No polls have been released on Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s decision “to hold the trials of key al-Qaeda suspects in New York City, but you can bet it won’t be a popular decision in the area of the country hardest hit by 9/11,” John Fund writes at www.opinionjournal.com.

“New York City cops that I’ve spoken with are furious about the move, despite the fact that Commissioner Ray Kelly is acting like a good soldier” and supporting Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s decision to go along with the trials. …

“The decision to take the most high-profile defendants and put them in civilian courts appears strange and hardly necessary, since the Obama administration is already using military tribunals - a system codified in law by Congress in 2006 - to try other terror suspects. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, writing at National Review Online, offers a theory about Attorney General Holder’s agenda, which amounts to putting U.S. counterterrorism efforts on trial along with the al Qaeda defendants.

“Says Mr. McCarthy: ‘The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies, coupled with the obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the “reckoning” that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. The defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and - depending on what judge catches the case - they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets.’ ”

WHICH IS IT?

The decision to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed “in a federal courthouse in Manhattan, where he and his four co-conspirators will receive the full array of rights enjoyed by American citizens, will show the world that our system of justice is an enlightened model for the rest of the world. It will ‘vindicate this country’s basic values’ and ‘stand as a symbol in the world of something different from what the terrorists represent.’ We will be adhering to the ‘rule of law.’ Or so Obama defenders argue,” Peter Wehner writes in a blog at www.commentarymagazine.

Story Continues →