The glowering Obama campaign

Hugh Hewitt:

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“Staggering around” is the best way to describe the president’s actions since the first debate in Denver. Mitt Romney has grown larger, more confident, full of energy and optimism, and not just about his campaign and the election, but for the country.

Barack Obama has grown increasingly gloomy, incoherent and strident, careening from Big Bird to binders to bayonets.

In a panic over falling poll numbers, the president and his ace team of consultants in Chicago rushed out a brand new glossy pamphlet of 20 pages, full of pictures of the president with children, and called it a program for the next few years.

Pundits mocked the transparent ploy and the president grew angrier still. Never --never-- has an incumbent tried to win a second term by glowering at the electorate, but Barack Obama is trying.

The rebuke that is headed his way will come from many directions, but most significantly, polls of the military are showing a huge advantage among those on active duty for Mitt Romney.

Some of that lead might be because of the massive defense cuts the president has already imposed. Some of it might be as a result of Obama’s abandoning Iraq without a new “status of forces agreement” in place. Some of it might be the relentless claims of credit for killing bin Laden when everyone in the military (and millions and millions of civilians) know who did the dangerous part.

Among the worst moments of the campaign was the president’s dismissiveness of the role of the fleet when Mitt Romney spoke of the need for more ships in the last of the three debate meetings. Shocked sailors and their families heard the president make light of the mission of the Navy, noting that we have aircraft carriers and nuclear subs enough, and asserting that building the fleet beyond what it currently was --283 ships, far below the minimum 313 the Pentagon has said we need-- was akin to buying bayonets.

There are tens of thousands of sailors afloat, far from home in uncomfortable and often dangerous circumstances, who are not serving on carriers or nuclear submarines, but who are projecting the force that defends the United States.

Their pay is low and the jobs hard, and the president is threatening now even their medical care, but they serve on.

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The biggest challenge for many of the military voters is getting their ballot and getting it filed on time.  The Obama administration has not been eager to help.  There will be opposition from other sectors of the electorate.  This race should not be as close as Obama supporters are predicting.