Democrats Don't Believe Their Own Polls. Maybe We Shouldn't, Either...

...Which is odd on the face of it, as the party seems to take many of its talking points directly from the editorial pages of the national dailies, which tend to conduct many of these surverys.  But there's a lot of strange stuff going on right now.  First, there's these polls, which seem hard to square with reality:

Nationally, Barack Obama is at 47 percent and Mitt Romney is at 44 percent, according to the new NBC/WSJ poll.

 A trio of swing states polled by Quinnipiac University shows more bad news for Romney:
Florida: Obama edges Romney 45 – 41 percent; 
Ohio: Obama over Romney 47 – 38 percent; 
Pennsylvania: Obama tops Romney 45 – 39 percent.

Democrat firm Public Policy Polling, however, gives Obama just a 3-point lead in their poll this week of the Buckeye State. Not shockingly, PPP also shows Obama leading by 8 points in Oregon.

These numbers surprised me - all the news about the economy, foreign affairs, and the future of the nation are relentlessly bad, yet Obama - the man who refuses to do anything about it all - is leaping in the polls?  Seems counter-intuitive, at best.

But if those polls ran true, why would Democrats be fleeing from the president?

There may be some extra hotel space in Charlotte, N. C. come the beginning of September, as several Democratic elected officials have announced that they will not be attending the Democratic National Convention this year.

Earlier today, Talking Points Memo reported that Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill will not be attending the convention, becoming the third Democratic senator, and eighth Democratic member of Congress, to opt out of the event.

However, her decision to stay away is significant because she was an early endorser of Obama in 2008, and a big surrogate for his campaign...


Could be that the red states will just be more red this year, and the "Blue Dogs" need to disassociate themselves from anything Democratic in order to survive.  Or maybe not:  Because the next oddity is this comment from the head of the DCC itself:

The man responsible for getting Democrats elected to the Congress this fall has a message for his party’s candidates: Stay away from the Democratic National Convention in September. 

 “If they want to win an election, they need to be in their districts,” New York Congressman Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told the Reuters Washington Summit on Tuesday...


WTF???

So what is really going on out there?

Are things worse than polling indicates?  Are Democrats expecting to see a Bradley Effect, or even worse, a Walker Effect, is which the embattled Republican governor defeated his opponents by almost double the final polling figures?

Not sure.  But the animals in the barn are getting mighty skittish right about now.  And sometimes it just seems as if they are the first to know when something bad is about to go down...