Obama appears to be running as if this is 2008, not 2012 — and as if the enormous damage of his presidency will be stuffed down a memory hole.

◼ Obama’s Dissociative Disorder Ploy - Commentary Magazine

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contains these two priceless paragraphs:

President Barack Obama pitched himself onto the political scene as a man who could rise above partisan politics, and despite presiding over a bitterly divided government, he is starting the 2012 campaign still casting himself as that guy.

On a three-day midwestern bus trip, Mr. Obama tried to portray himself as an outsider. “The only thing that’s holding us back right now is our politics,” he said three times at a town-hall-style meeting here on Wednesday. “That’s the message we need to send to Washington,” he said, as if he wasn’t part of Washington.

The mind reels at the brazenness of this strategy.

◼ Campaigning as Mr. Outsider - President Obama, Touring the Midwest, Seeks to Portray Congress as the Problem - Wall St. Journal

Jon Huntsman: Trust Science on Global Warming

◼ Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman leveled criticism again Sunday against Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and his positions on evolution and climate change.

Huntsman said taking a position like Perry's "that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man's contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science and, therefore, in a losing position."

◼ Hunstman Unleashes on Fellow GOP Candidates - FOX

◼ DNC Shows Love For Jon Huntsman - ABC

McCain: Gadhafi Will Be Gone In a 'Matter of Hours'

◼ “We will be rid of a guy who has practiced the worst kind of brutalities,” added McCain, one of the leading foreign policy experts in the Senate. - Newsmax

"I grieve a bit because this conflict didn't have to last this long," McCain told CBS' Norah O'Donnell. "The United States' air power could have shortened this conflict dramatically. Unfortunately we chose not to. We led from behind."

It seems that the Secretary of Education needs to repeat a course or two on research, honesty, and integrity.

◼ Dallas Morning News: (Education Secretary Arne) Duncan flat-out lied about Texas education - HotAir

We shouldn’t hear lies come out of the mouth of the nation’s top education official... when he discusses the record of millions of students and dedicated educators....

Here’s another clue: Texas caps student-to-teacher ratios in primary and secondary education by statute at 22:1. That limitation has been in place during the entire time that Perry has been governor in Texas. The nation’s Secretary of Education apparently doesn’t know how to do research before positing claims, or — as Jones accuses — deliberately lied for political purposes.

The obvious political purpose is to attack a Republican challenger to his boss, which would put Duncan out of work. Jones offers another motive: Perry’s refusal to join Duncan’s Race to the Top. Perry balked at the program as part of his general opposition to federal interference in state jurisdiction, which Jones calls “political,” but offers it as a reason that Duncan would want to make Texas’ education efforts look deficient. This one is a MUST READ

What if Obama quit?

◼ Nothing says that Obama has to run for a second term in office. - Ed Morrissey/HotAir

Obama’s numbers are plummeting in places Democrats can hardly afford to lose. In Pennsylvania, where Obama will top a ticket that also includes Bob Casey’s bid for a second Senate term, he’s either at 43% approval (Quinnipiac) or at 35% (Muhlenberg). Wisconsin turned Republican last year and a series of elections this year confirmed it, and Herb Kohl’s seat in the Senate is up for grabs. Obama can be expected to drag down the ticket in Virginia (James Webb’s seat is open), Florida (Bill Nelson), Ohio (Sherrod Brown), Maryland (Ben Cardin), and Michigan (Debbie Stabenow). Obama is underwater in New York and New Jersey already, two normally staunch Democratic states, both with Senate races on the line as well. If Obama runs at the top of those tickets, he might eke out victories in the two states, but his presence on the ticket will depress Democratic turnout and might endanger Kirsten Gillibrand and Robert Menendez; Democrats would almost certainly have to spend a ton of money to bolster them that they’d normally spend elsewhere.

Democrats will be looking at a massacre in the Senate, and that’s not even including already-endangered seats in Nebraska, Missouri, Montana, and New Mexico, which just elected its first Republican woman governor last year. Democrats could wind up losing enough seats to give Republicans a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate if Obama chases away the white working-class vote that he’s been alienating for the past two years on ObamaCare and now his disastrous economic performance. If unemployment starts rising and growth remains low in the next few months, Democrats may insist on Obama finding a graceful exit before the primaries.

BS removal