THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE – AT 8:29 A.M. ET:  I don't like the thought any more than you do, but what would happen if Obama wins on Tuesday?

Well, the first thing that would happen is much high-fiving in newsrooms all over the East and West Coasts.  After that...confusion and gloom.

Should Obama be re-elected he will be the only president in modern American history, and perhaps in all American history, to be re-elected with less electoral support than in his first successful run for the presidency.  That is no ornament, not the kind of asterisk you want in the history books.

He will be disliked.  The candidate of hope 'n' change of 2008 deteriorated into a snarling, cheap-shot Chicago politician in 2012. 

He will be rejected by the most productive people in the country. 

He will not only be a lame duck, as all second termers are to some degree, but a wounded duck who might well flail out at opponents.

He will have zero legislature clout.  Republicans will still control the House.  The Senate may remain Democratic, but Democrats will be looking to 2016, not terribly loyal to the guy who just made it back in 2012.

But, blind to reality, he will still have the swagger of a man who never quite got the job description.

Other than that, he'll be in great shape.

Peggy Noonan, who has developed an appropriate contempt for Obama, sums it up in The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama may yet emerge victorious. There are, obviously, many factors in every race. Maybe, as one for instance, the seriousness of the storm has sharpened people's anxieties—there are no local crises anymore, a local disaster is a national disaster—so that anxiety will leave some people leaning toward the status quo, toward the known.

Or maybe, conversely, they'll think he failed to slow the oceans' rise.

We'll know soon.

Whatever happens, Mr. Obama will not own the room again as once he did. If he wins, we will see a different presidency—even more stasis, and political struggle—but not a different president.

COMMENT:  That is well said.  My great fear, though, is in foreign policy, where even a wounded president still has great power.  There has been substantial damage done in the last four years.  It can get worse.  And a weak, indecisive and destructive foreign policy leads not to peace, but to war.  We have a right to be concerned for our children.

November 2, 2012