Obama’s Presidential Re-Election Campaign: Has the Strategy of the Politics of Divide been working?

I recently observed that Occupy Wall Street seem to be a part of President Obama’s re-election campaign strategy which fundamentally revolves around the groupthink “us against them” gimmickry.

Has this been working?

Current evidence indicates that there has been little impact in swaying the tide to favor President Obama.

Professor Brad Smith at the Division of Labor writes

In a column today in the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer excoriates President Obama's new style of more aggressively "scapegoating" Republicans and "the rich," and giving succor to the OWS crowd. But while Krauthammer calls it "dangerous," he concludes, "it's working."

Is it? In it's August monthly poll, Gallup showed the President leading a generic Republican by 45-39%. On September 8, the President kicked off his re-election campaign with his call for the "American Jobs Act," (the AJA) and spent the next several days pushing for it. Gallup conducted its September monthly from September 8 through the 11th. The result: Generic Republican led the President by 46% to 38%. In late September, Occupy Wall Street began to garner attention - it crowded the Brooklyn Bridge on the last weekend of the month and has been almost non-stop in the news since. But Gallup's October poll, released today, shows a generic Republican leading the President by 46-38% - exactly the same as a month before.

Amongst Independent voters, the generic Republican edge has grown from 40-35% in August to 43-30% in October (though down slightly from September).

When he gave his AJA speech in September, Obama's average approval was 43.8, per Real Clear Politics. Today it stands at 43.6, though with a slight uptick in the last week - almost entirely the result of a surprisingly strong (for the President) poll from Rasmussen, the pollster liberals love to hate. The most recent polls from other pollsters in the field since OWS briefly seized the Brooklyn Bridge, compared to their prior poll, show him down in Gallup, flat in Ipsos/Reuters, down in ABC/Washington Post, and down in Fox New.

The politics of promoting guilt, envy, hate, blame and anger will unlikely help advance Mr. Obama’s re-election chances, unless this has been more than just a re-election agenda.

Maybe sowing social divisiveness has been meant to promote a popular revolution that would justify the imposition of socialism, if not despotism.

As Ludwig von Mises wrote,

The worst consequence of the antidemocratic spirit is that it divides the nation into hostile camps. The citizenry lose confidence in the working of democratic government. They fear that some day one of the antidemocratic minority groups may actually succeed in seizing power. Thus they think it necessary to arm and defend their rights against the menace of an armed minority.