"Flopulism": Obama's Ultimate Fail

I love that word: Flopulism.  Coined by Mickey Kaus a few days back:

So pro-business, centrist chief of staff William Daley is demoted, Obama moves to a feisty, fight back, progressive posture, casting Republicans as the party of the 1% , and … he loses three points in Ohio? Isn’t Ohio one of the states where populism is supposed to work? … The poll in question was taken before Obama’s big “inequality” speech in Kansas. Still … the shift’s been going on for weeks. … Look at this chart of the President’s national approval rating and tell me it’s working.

Mickey is prescient. Via Gallup:

Americans' concerns about the threat of big government continue to dwarf those about big business and big labor, and by an even larger margin now than in March 2009. The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession... Almost half of Democrats now say big government is the biggest threat to the nation, more than say so about big business...

Maybe that's what Obama gets for listening to the editorial pages of the New York Times. Or maybe he has no choice, having no credible, believable record to run on.

But no one forced him to make speeches like his now-infamous Osawatomie, Kansas, stem-winder, where he said the following:

They want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.

I am here to say they are wrong. I’m here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we’re greater together than we are on our own.

The pundits blame Obama for not communicating, or the nation for not understanding. But neither assertion is true.

The American people have listened to the president, and weighted his words carefully. He has given them a choice, over and over: Choosing a political party that will tell them to go it alone while they stay out of the way, or a president and party who will force them to work together - under one yoke. Where those who are the strongest are forced to work the hardest, to carry those who refuse to do so. Where we all receive subpar health care, doled out based on skin color and political connections by a corrupt government. Where we sit under expensive, harshly-lit government-mandated light bulbs, and shiver away the winter while China gets Canadian oil, and ours sits untouched, underground. Where the unemployment line never ends, in a recession that grips us like an ice age.

The American people have given this choice by the president. And they have decided, quite clearly, that they would rather go it alone.

Flopulism. Possibly the biggest fail by Obama to date. The question is, where does he go from here?

Should be interesting....