OBAMA LOSING THE INDIES - AT 7:55 A.M. ET:  President Obama and his party are losing the most crucial voting bloc of all - the independents.   From the Washington Examiner:

Independents gave Obama the White House last year with a vote for pragmatic competence. They have been repaid with partisanship and dithering. And unlike liberals who Obama has quickly re-energized after their summer doldrums, independents are devilishly hard to win back once they lose faith.

The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, the Rolls-Royce of public surveys, showed that for the first time, independents disapproved of the president's performance, 46 percent to 41 percent.

For the first few months of the Obama administration, independents, who make up about 43 percent of the electorate, reflected overall public opinion in giving the president consistent approval ratings of about 60 percent. But now, unaffiliated voters are less positive than the overall electorate, which is holding steady at 51 percent job approval for Obama.

It gets more grim, if you're living in the White House:

More shocking is that independent voters now favor a Republican-controlled Congress by a four-point margin and would overwhelmingly like to see their own member of the House replaced.

Those are the kinds of numbers you see before electoral hurricanes like 1966 or 1994.

What is particularly striking is the reason for the independent defection:

The cause of the drop is foreign policy, where the approval for the president's performance dropped 7 points since July to 50 percent.

This is the first time we've seen foreign policy produce such bad polling news for the White House.  And why?  Americans hold the military in very high esteem.  Obama seems to be in conflict with his own military leaders:

We hear that Obama is waiting to see what happens next before deciding to continue with his own strategy of an Afghan surge. His team is reading a book about how the Kennedy administration was led astray by the military and holding a series of meetings about the way forward.

A flip-flop on what Obama called a "war of necessity" just last might well send the independents to the exits for good.

And we'd be so, so sad.

September 24, 2009