Why Obama is in trouble & Ashley Judd is Dangerous

Two pieces of news came out yes­ter­day that at first glance might seem totally unre­lated, first a poll con­cern­ing Pres­i­dent Obama

His approval rat­ing has dropped to the low­est level in more than a year, with more vot­ers now turn­ing thumbs down on his per­for­mance than thumbs up, accord­ing to a new McClatchy-​Marist poll. The mea­sure of how much peo­ple like him also has dropped.

He’s still vastly more pop­u­lar than Con­gress, par­tic­u­larly con­gres­sional Repub­li­cans. But in the biggest polit­i­cal clash of the year – over the fed­eral bud­get and how to curb deficits – vot­ers split 44 per­cent to 42 per­cent between pre­fer­ring Con­gress or Obama.

Ok so polling shows Barack Obama is hav­ing some trou­ble in the num­bers, big deal, polls go up and down all the time. It’s the nature of things, and any­way why on earth would this have any­thing to do with this:

Don­ald Trump thinks actress Ash­ley Judd would make a “great” Sen­ate can­di­date, the real estate mogul tweeted on Tuesday.

“All reports indi­cate Ash­ley Judd will be run­ning for Sen. McConnell’s seat,” Trump wrote. “She’s going to be a great can­di­date. …Re: Ash­ley Judd: Keep @KarlRove away. He already made her a viable candidate.”

Asked to clar­ify the remarks, Trump told POLITICO in a state­ment: “Ash­ley Judd’s can­di­dacy was cre­ated by Karl Rove’s ter­ri­ble ads; even before she thought seri­ously about run­ning. The ads made her look great and now she prob­a­bly will run.”

Trump has pre­vi­ously said that an ad from Rove’s super PAC was “the best thing that ever hap­pened to Ash­ley Judd — sim­ply increases her profile.”

DaT­e­chGuy you’ve totally lost me, why on EARTH are you quot­ing Don­ald Trump opin­ion in Ash­ley Judd when every­one from Glenn Reynolds to Stacy McCain says she’s a joke, and what on earth does this have to do with the president’s poll numbers?

It’s actu­ally pretty sim­ple, celebrity cul­ture and low infor­ma­tion voters.

One of the rea­sons why Barack Obama beat all the odds and won re-​election with a bad record and an even worse econ­omy com­bi­na­tion was the inabil­ity of Mitt Romney’s mes­sage to break through to low infor­ma­tion votes. The president’s ad blitz made sure the back­ground noise had noth­ing to do with the reality.

This time it has had the exact oppo­site effect, par­tic­u­larly on the sequester. The pres­i­dent pushed the evil of sequester and pointed to it as a direct cause of the White House can­celling kids tours and the media lapped it up.

Those EVIL repub­li­cans, on every net­work and on CNN in every air­port peo­ple who do not pay atten­tion to the news say school kids not about to tour the white house. The real­i­ties that other cuts could be made didn’t mat­ter, the peo­ple who only see news in pass­ing while check­ing on Lady Gaga or their favorite movie star knew the money wasn’t there for par­ties because of Repub­li­cans then they picked up their mag­a­zines to find out about Adele and Bey­once and read this:

The same week that Pres­i­dent Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion announced that due to seques­tra­tion, White House tours would be can­celled, sources at the White House announced that it would be host­ing megas­tars Adele and Bey­once at Michelle’s 50^th birth­day party next year. “America’s First Lady will be hold­ing a huge celebrity-​packed party for her birth­day at the White House next year and, as she adores Adele and Bey­once, she has asked them both to sing,” the source told the UK Daily Mail. The source did say that “The Oba­mas will pay Adele’s expenses as it’s a pri­vate party, not a State one.”

OK they likely didn’t read that because low infor­ma­tion vot­ers don’t read Bre­it­bart, they check out enter­tain­ment sites like this one:

Today it was revealed that direc­tor Quen­tion Taran­tino is des­per­ate to have her com­pose a song for his new film after he fell in love with her Oscar-​winning song for Skyfall.

And just a few hours later, it has been reported that the Lon­don lass has now been asked to per­form at Michelle Obama’s 50^th birth­day along­side Beyoncé.

and the drop, and BET, and hello, and in enter­tain­ment sec­tions else­where.

Bot­tom line the “White house can’t afford tours” story and the “White House has Bey­once & Adele to sing” story hit the exact same places that the low infor­ma­tion vot­ers go at the exact same time and the same vot­ers who wouldn’t be caught dead on Fox (or any news site) sud­denly had the mes­sage that Bri­et­bart was try­ing to make

It’s been sug­gested the GOP get involved in the cul­ture pages this is why.

And that’s why Ash­ley Judd is dangerous.

At first glance Judd is a joke with an entire per­sona that is totally oppo­site to what wins in Ken­tucky, but remem­ber those same low infor­ma­tion vot­ers are not going to be read­ing any of the sto­ries we are writ­ing about her. They will see her celebrity, they will see var­i­ous stars turn out for her, maybe a singer or two

We can have story after story about Judd and her pro­nounce­ments but if they don’t break though to the voter who sim­ply sees a pretty Ken­tucky girl who man­aged to make it big, who does work for “char­ity” its not going to make a difference.

Granted Ken­tucky went heav­ily for Mitt in 2012 but it becomes a ques­tion of which mes­sage gets through to the peo­ple. A celebrity like Judd can break through to peo­ple in ways a reg­u­lar pol sim­ply can’t and there is absolutely no way for Mitch McConnell to por­tray him­self as any­thing else like a Wash­ing­ton insider.

And when Mitch McConnell an estab­lished long time pol starts run­ning ads against this pretty Ken­tucky girl who man­aged to make good watch how peo­ple react.

Does this mean she can romp, par­tic­u­larly if there is not a Tea Party Can­di­date divid­ing the GOP? No, but it means that if the GOP takes Judd, a woman who can raise money and get cov­er­age at will, they might be vul­ner­a­ble to the same mis­takes Mass­a­chu­setts Democ­rats made in Jan­u­ary 2010 in a race they couldn’t lose.

We are in a brave new world, after two gen­er­a­tions of the sec­u­lar cul­ture reach­ing that low infor­ma­tion voter whose prepa­ra­tion for exer­cis­ing the fran­chise our fore­fa­thers fought for is People’s mag­a­zine and the Super­mar­ket tabloids are a fac­tor. Some­times it gives, some­times it takes away and we ignore it at our and the country’s peril.

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I’ll be in tran­sit to DC today and I have a cou­ple of posts sched­uled before I land. While I’m going to travel far today the quest for that elu­sive $300 pay­check hasn’t moved an inch since yesterday.

We had a fair amount of traf­fic the last few days with our cov­er­age of the SF ads and CPAC is going to hope­fully drive more, but with­out those 14 peo­ple will­ing to kick in that $20 this week, all the traf­fic in the world won’t matter.

So if you can give a hand to keep inde­pen­dent con­ser­v­a­tive blog­ging going con­sider hit­ting DaTip­Jar and get­ting that ther­mome­ter moving