RUSH: James Carville and Stan Greenberg have a polling company. It’s called Democracy Now or some such thing. It’s Democracy Corps. Or, as Obama would say, Democracy “Corpse.” And they’ve just issued a new report, James Carville and Stan Greenberg — and, actually, Erica Seifert. They’ve got a third member of the group now. They’ve gone out and done a bunch of focus groups.

A focus group is a little bit different than a poll. You actually assemble the people and you chat with ’em for hours sometimes. And you videotape it. And you run all kinds of ideas by ’em. This is the stuff Frank Luntz does sometimes on Fox that you see. Those are miniature focus groups. And Carville and his gang have been out there doing a bunch of them. And they say that the data from the focus groups shows that Barack Kardashian “is taking the wrong approach to the campaign by focusing on economic issues.”

In fact, Carville says that Obama, quote “will fail,” unquote if he talks about economic growth. They “claim that the Obama campaign must ‘move to a new narrative’ in order to be successful in November. … The current campaign is focused on success in the economic recovery, but CarvilleÂ’s group says the strategy is ‘wrong’ and ‘will fail.’ The only reason Obama is keeping up in the campaign is because voters perceive Romney as ‘out of touch with ordinary people.'”

That’s the only thing, they say, that’s keeping Obama alive. If Romney’s able to bridge that gap and become more like a regular guy to people, it’s over for Obama. And I don’t care what… Dana Milbank has a column in the Washington Post today, “Pileup at the White House,” and it’s devastating. It’s just more of the same. People in the media and on the Democrat side of the aisle are coming right up against the reality here that this guy can lose.

They have been under the impression that his reelection was a slam dunk. It didn’t matter what any economic details were. It didn’t matter what polling data said. It was automatic. Obama was gonna be reelected, for all the various reasons and obvious ones. First black president. History continues! Smartest guy in the room. History continues! Just a fait accompli. And you and I, living in Realville, have known since the stimulus and then health care, that if this country is the same country we grew up in, he’s toast.

We’ve known this. Everything being equal (no cheating, no fraud, no implosions on our side or this kind of thing), we’ve known this. There was still some concern about the Republican primary race. We needed the best candidate we can get. But there was still this realization… Well, maybe I shouldn’t speak for you. I’ll just speak for me. I have always been confident that Obama could lose this reelection because of facts, because of reality.

The economy is horrible.

People are losing everything they’ve ever had! They’re in debt like they’ve never been before. The country’s in debt like it’s never been before. This is not the way this country has always operated, and this is not the way things have gotten done. This is not what the people of this country thought that they were electing. The health care? Nobody wants that. The numbers opposing it continue to rise. The economic destruction taking place is real.

But the Democrats and the media, they’re just now realizing it!

Last week was the first time it really hit them that Obama could lose. And you can see it in the way they’re talking on television and the way they’re writing. Milbank: “Job growth has stalled, the Democrats have been humiliated in Wisconsin, the attorney general is facing a contempt-of-Congress citation, talks with Pakistan have broken down, Bill Clinton is contradicting Obama, Mitt Romney is outraising him, Democrats and Republicans alike are complaining about a ‘cascade’ of national-security leaks from his administration, and he is now on record as saying that the ‘private sector is doing fine.’

“Could it get any worse?”

Well, depends on your point of view. If the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare, I’d say things are much better. But for Obama, they would be much worse. For Obama, it can get a lot worse. For Obama, you could argue that last week was not really that bad, as I attempted to illustrate yesterday. Back to Milbank. “Early Monday morning, Obama learned that it could. His aides delivered the news to him that his commerce secretary had been cited for a felony hit-and-run after allegedly crashing his car three times over the weekend.

“In one incident, the previously obscure Cabinet officer apparently rear-ended a Buick, spoke to the car’s occupants, then hit the vehicle again as he” drove away. Now, it’s interesting Milbank would include the commerce secretary’s misadventures in his car as somehow a blow to the president. How’s that? The most noteworthy thing about this story is: “We got a commerce secretary? Who knew!” I never heard of this guy. We got a commerce secretary. The guy gets drunk, drives his car around, and bashes into people. (interruption) Epilepsy? It may have been epilepsy? Okay. So he wasn’t drunk. We don’t know yet. They’ll come up with something.

Anyway, the Milbank column goes on. It’s not pretty.

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RUSH: Folks, I am kidding you not about this newly discovered commerce secretary. Whatever the reason, the guy runs into a car, and runs into it again when driving away from the accident. On the Today Show just today, they had correspondent Kristen Welker. She said the commerce secretary’s accidents over the weekend were “a sign of how contentious the campaign season has gotten.” No, I kid you not. We don’t yet know, but there was no alcohol in the commerce secretary’s blood. We don’t know what caused the accident. Don’t know. It might have been mini-stroke. Nobody knows. But an NBC infobabe actually said that it was “a sign of how contentious the campaign season has gotten.”

Now, continuing here with Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post. Again, it’s representative of the media and the left. They’re shell-shocked. This last week… You have to understand. They think (they’ve always thought) that Barack Obama is a 200-IQ genius. They just believe it. They don’t question it. They have assigned that super-genius intelligence level to him, and that’s it. They don’t consider any other possibility. Despite all the gaffes and all the evidence to the contrary, they just don’t even consider it.

Then this last week happens before the bottom falls out and they are stunned. They do not know how to explain it. They’re talking amongst themselves. They’re on television talking about it. They’re writing columns about it. And here’s Milbank in his column today: “Pileup at the White House.” He focuses a lot on the commerce secretary accident, but later in the piece, says, “The AP asked about the president’s unfortunate private-sector-is-fine remark. The Reuters correspondent asked about the economic ‘head winds’ from Europe.

“Ed Henry of Fox News Channel asked about the looming contempt-of-Congress vote against Attorney General Eric Holder. Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News asked about the Supreme Court striking down Obamacare. Norah O’Donnell of CBS News asked about calls for a special prosecutor to probe leaks. Victoria Jones of Talk Radio News asked about the stalled talks with Pakistan. Carney sought relief by calling on TV correspondents from swing states, but the one from Wisconsin asked about the failed attempt to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the one from Nevada asked about her state’s unemployment rate, the nation’s highest.”

The spokeskid got beat up yesterday!

The press corps actually did some journalism yesterday!

They had no choice. Their own credibility’s on the line. There was no way they could prop up what happened last week. There was no way they could recast it and there was no way they could excuse it. So everybody’s shocked: They’re asking these questions about the smartest president ever? “AP Radio’s Mark Smith asked whether [Commerce Secretary] Bryson ‘is now on medical leave,” and Carney just kept saying, “Can I refer you to the Commerce Department?”

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RUSH: Here is Mark in Shreveport, Louisiana. Welcome, sir. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Summa cum laude dittos from northwest Louisiana where Cajun meets cowboy, Rush.

RUSH: (laughing) That’s right.

CALLER: Listening to your point is preface to my main point. Other than things you say, one of the best quotes I ever heard about what liberals understand about economics and American exceptionalism came from Bush 41, no less. He said, “They love to tinker with the mechanism but they don’t understand the beauty of the machine.” And I’ve always loved that ’cause that captures in a thumbnail a lot of the stuff that you’ve been saying today and the last few days responding to some of their crazy actions. My main point that I announced to Snerdley was that last winter I wanted a good read and sat down by the fire and curled up with a good world almanac. And I was reading the ’56 election returns of president of the United States in our history, and I found what I think is a profound fact that I heard no one talk about. I’d like to share it with your audience and then let you run for the touchdown with it.

RUSH: Do it quickly.

CALLER: Okay, 15 presidents were elected twice. All 15, no exceptions, were reelected by a larger margin than they were first elected. What does that mean? It means the election, when an incumbent’s running, is all about his first term. It doesn’t matter how pretty the challenger is or how ugly. If the people think he deserves a second term, he’ll get re-upped, no matter how moderate, liberal, conservative he is.

RUSH: Well, I’ll tell you, the interesting stat that you mentioned: If these 15 incumbents who have won reelection do it by a larger margin than their original victory, that means that Barack Kardashian is in heap big trouble. Because he is backtracking. He’s not even treadin’ water, as we sit here today. That’s a fascinating stat. I’m glad you called. I’m glad we had time to squeeze that in.

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RUSH: Try this heartwarming statistic: Since 1825, more than two-thirds of US presidents were not reelected.