Hugh Hewitt: All GOP has to promise is change

Hugh Hewitt: All GOP has to promise is change -- from Obama Washington Examiner

RealClearPolitics.com provides a daily update of polls from across the country. While there are a handful of bright spots for Democrats among the numbers, almost everywhere the candidates with a (D) behind their names turn, they find news that is going from bad to worse.

For example, Republican Dino Rossi leads three-term U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., by 7 points in a Survey USA sampling.

The same outfit has Carly Fiorina outpacing "Please don't call me ma'am" Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., by 5 points.

Rasmussen has conservative Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey ahead of hard-left Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak by 8 points in the race to succeed Sen. Arlen Specter.

Also in the Keystone State, Republican Tom Corbett outpaces Democratic nominee Dan Onorato by double digits in the governor's race.

In the Ohio governor's race, John Kasich has a similar commanding lead over incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland.

All of these results are from blue states -- states which went, often by lopsided margins, for President Obama in 2008.

And none of these polls was taken before the mosque controversy took off with an assist from Obama.

None of them depends at all on misidentification of the president as a Muslim.

Some of the GOP gains no doubt do reflect dismay at the president's decision to sue Arizona over that state's attempt to buttress his administration's failing efforts to secure the border.

But far and away what drives all of these numbers and many, many more is the deep-seated conviction that the president's economic policies have failed, and not only failed, but exacerbated the downturn.

The president and his team promised a ceiling to unemployment of 8 percent, and of course it is 9.5 percent and the Congressional Budget Office has already concluded that it won't drop below 9.3 percent by year's end -- a forecast that arrived before last week's surprising jump in new claims for jobless benefits to 500,000, the highest rate since November. Consumer confidence must be ebbing, and employers, who are already skittish about the approach of Obamacare's massive mandates, now worry about everything from double-dips to deflation.

Confidence in the president's economic programs, his economic advisers, and his economic "theories," such as they are, have cratered. The noise about the belief among a small minority that he is a Muslim had almost to be a relief to a White House that could at last push back strongly against a story with effective outrage.

But the president's party cannot push back against the economic facts of life in America. Obama got everything he wanted in the stimulus, the seizure of GM, and Obamacare. He got the massive spending, the soaring deficit, the skyrocketing debt.

Obama baked this economic cake, and as he enjoys his third vacation in as many weeks, the public has decided from East to West Coast, and from deep blue to dark red, that a wholesale change -- real change -- is needed.

Nothing can change the fundamentals between now and November except a crisis abroad. And any crisis is likely to underscore, not alleviate, the fear that the president is an appeaser at heart, and no friend of Israel.

The only thing the Republicans must do is preach again and again that it doesn't have to be this way. The economy can turn around. Employers can be assured. Productive businesses can be grown and the government cut.

Again and again, the GOP needs to say that 2010 is the time for the real change that the country needs.

If every Republican candidate in every race from top to bottom talks about the pressing need for change from bottom to near the top, the recovery can resume late in the fourth quarter.

Republican leads can actually grow, and the size of the wave can increase. The pollsters have never seen anything like this year. It is possible that they haven't even begun to glimpse what is under way across the land.

Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/All-GOP-has-to-promise-is-change----from-Obama-534565-101262204.html