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Some poll numbers are starting to come in on President Obama's announced withdrawal plans for American troops in Afghanistan. Overall, the polling shows public support is about as high as could be expected, given the fact that the opposition to Obama's plan is split between "pull more out faster" and "pull the troops out slower."
Well, it's certainly been an eventful couple of weeks, hasn't it?
We're back on our regular weekly schedule here after returning home from our second trip this month (this one to Netroots Nation), after which I can firmly conclude that flying, these days, sucks. Big time. Sigh.
Later today, President Obama is going to address the nation on the subject of the Afghanistan war. Specifically, he's going to make good on a promise made a year-and-a-half ago: to begin the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan next month. The big question everyone's been speculating about in the run-up to this announcement has been how big a reduction the president will announce.
The Republican presidential field for the 2012 presidential election will be on full display this evening, as CNN airs the second nationally-televised candidate debate, this one from the early-voting state of New Hampshire. Since the first debate was a little light on heavyweight candidates, this is the first chance a lot of Republican primary voters will have to assess the biggest names in the race.
This month was the best month President Barack Obama has ever had in the polls, when measured as change over the previous month. If you count it one way (measured by absolute values) Obama's best month was technically the second month into his term -- when he was still enjoying his "honeymoon" period, and had 63.4 percent support from the public. But in terms of actually changing public opinion, May was indeed the best month Obama's had, by far.
Barack Hussein Obama is not exactly the first name that springs to mind when the average person thinks of American politicians with Irish roots, to say the least. But Obama does indeed have Irish ancestry, and he certainly played this up in his recent visit to the Emerald Isle. Today, we are going to print the full text of Obama's address to an ecstatic Dublin crowd.
A word here about timing is necessary, I think. While the blog post is quite obviously meant as a semi-joke, wouldn't this have been more fun in, say, mid-October -- a few weeks before Hallowe'en? Instead of this week, with the "End of Days" prophesied for midafternoon this Saturday? I'm just saying....
This has been an unusual year, in terms of presidential campaign politics, because (so far) it has run counter to the conventional wisdom. A standard column for any pundit to write every four years is the "Campaign Starting Even Sooner!" article, in which you decry the fact that the presidential race is beginning earlier and earlier each cycle. Not many of those articles have been written this time around.
In roughly two months, President Barack Obama is going to announce the beginning of the end of America's longest war. He could not have known, when he initially set this summer for the beginning of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, that the timing would work out so perfectly. With Osama Bin Laden now dead, it's going to be a lot easier to begin pulling out of Afghanistan. The only question left to ask is how fast this drawdown will be accomplished.
I don't care how ironic that sounds to some, it's true. Osama Bin Laden declared war on America, waged that war for years (and killed Americans in doing so), then hid for many more years, and was finally hunted down and killed like an animal. Mission accomplished.