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ON THE POLITICAL FRONT, the speed with which President Obama’s public support has fallen is really quite breath-taking, trumped only by the swiftness with which President Bush’ drop took place following its flight into the upper atmosphere following 9/11 and its plunge as we moved into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Everyone has seen the figures.

The President’s support is very quickly falling and we needn’t report on the figures here this morning, relying instead upon the attacks now being made upon him by his own supporters on the Left. We could not help but note the suddenly strident anti-Obama tone on that most left-of-centre television station, MSNBC, which heretofore had been relentlessly pro-Obama.

Chris Matthews, the host of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” had been almost embarrassingly supportive of the President from the time his campaign began into the election, into the inauguration and for the first ten or eleven months of the President’s tenure in office. It was Mr. Matthews who leapt beyond all levels of supposed professional reporting balance or nuance to say on the day of the election back in November of ’08 that

I have to tell you, you know, it's part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often.

Now Mr. Matthews is expressing very real concerns about this Administration’s spending policies and about the massive and growing debt that it is piling up. He said recently, when appearing on the show hosted by the even more left-of-centre Rachel Maddow,

I look at the numbers and I’m worried….I’m worried about this government committing itself to so many entitlement programs and committing itself to such a level of taxation that supports those entitlement programs…The debt is too big. The government’s taking on too many responsibilities....We’re a dissatisfied people. We are easily drawn to a candidate who promises deliverance. Two years ago, we voted for deliverance with Barack Obama. We will vote for deliverance again in two years if we’re not happy.

When your own most vocal supporters begin to jump ship, something rather awful is taking place in your government. We believe that President Obama is a wise enough young man to understand that his drive to the Left has proven to have fallen very flat. The United States is a centre-right country, and the President mistook his election victory over John McCain as a mandate to move centre-left. It was an error of judgment on his part and that of his closest supporters and it must be rectified quickly or further, material political damage shall follow. The victory last week in Massachusetts by a manifestly centre-right candidate who favors smaller government, lesser spending, lower taxes et all makes that very, very clear. The President’s advisors may not understand that fact, but we would bet that the President himself understands it. If he does not, he and the centre-left Democratic Party are heading toward a disaster this coming November.

- For more on interesting comments, you can subscribe to The Gartman Letter by contacting Dennis Garthman: Phone-Fax:or email: dennis@thegartmanletter

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