{"id":3187,"date":"2012-03-13T17:52:33","date_gmt":"2012-03-13T23:52:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3187"},"modified":"2012-03-13T17:52:33","modified_gmt":"2012-03-13T23:52:33","slug":"calm-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3187","title":{"rendered":"Calm Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I&#8217;ve noted many times before, it doesn&#8217;t take much to send us liberals into a panic attack. Over the past couple months, as the economy slowly improved and the Republican primary became a parody of itself, we became increasingly confident about Obama&#8217;s re-election prospects. Some of us even began making comparisons to the snoozefest that was the 1996 presidential election. But both <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/03\/13\/us\/politics\/obama-approval-rating-down-in-new-york-times-cbs-poll.html?pagewanted=all\">The Times<\/a><\/em> and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/gas-prices-sink-obamas-ratings-on-economy-bring-parity-to-race-for-white-house\/2012\/03\/11\/gIQAuhYO6R_story.html\">Washington Post<\/a> have released discouraging poll numbers over the last couple days and now Obama supporters are wringing their hands together and asking themselves <a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/daily\/intel\/2012\/03\/obama-poll-drop-mystery-explained.html\">what it all <em>means<\/em><\/a>. Are voters pissed about high gas prices? Are they reacting to all the talk of war with Iran? Are they tired of the President <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=y6uHR90Sq6k\">bursting into song<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t pretend to know the answers, but I&#8217;m not hitting the panic button just yet. Two data points don&#8217;t make a trend and there are bound to be any number of peaks and troughs for Obama between now and Election Day. While I&#8217;d be happy to see him coast to a second term, my operating assumption remains that this will be a close election. If the liberal blogosphere continues to hyperventilate whenever the poll numbers drift south, I&#8217;m going to have to trim my Google Reader subscriptions until all that remains is Ars Technica and Fleshbot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I&#8217;ve noted many times before, it doesn&#8217;t take much to send us liberals into a panic attack. Over the past couple months, as the economy slowly improved and the Republican primary became a parody of itself, we became increasingly confident about Obama&#8217;s re-election prospects. Some of us even began making comparisons to the snoozefest <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3187' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-18-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-Pp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3187"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3188,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3187\/revisions\/3188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}