I don't really remember it being so.

War Fleet dispatched to Libya... to do nothing.

Now a free trade protest with the WTO about China being unfair in the car markets right before an Ohio press top?

That's some convient timing...

and also stupid timing for actual foreign policy and running the country issues since we're trying to convince China and Japan to work together.  Nothing is going to make China listen to us more then filing a protest at the WTO at the same time.

I seem to recall Clinton finding a new place to put a cruise missile every time the polls were looking bad for him, so yeah. Of course, Bush was pretty much always up to his neck in warfare, so not much need for the tough guy act on his part.

If you need something to feel good about, at least long-range bombings and sabre-rattling don't get American soldiers and NATO allies killed.

And when I thought my english level was already acceptable, here it comes "brazenly electioneering" and lets me completely clueless.

Can someone translate please ??

To a certain extent I think all of them have done similar things but other presidents had more subtlety.

doing things really really blantatly last minute just for the votes it would get in swing states.

there is always some at election time (everyone's elections). but all obama does is play politics, so you would expect more of it.

You don't want to look at the end, you want the middle. The middle of Clinton's administration, he had a big fight going on with Gingrich and the house Republicans, where the big struggle was to try and avoid gridlock. In Bush's case, he had pretty much everything going his way still rolling into 2004 (Iraq was messy, but it had been less than a year since the capture of Saddam so America was still in a more celebratory mood)

In Obama's case, political gridlock has already been reached, so there's nothing but the petty incidents for either side to use.

I remember clinton having a lot of electioneering going on, but I don't really remember Bush doing that much.  Clinton had the monica war, and I remember he came out to Utah and created a new controversial nation monument, stuff like that.  However, Obama seems to be doing a lot of last minute things in office to push the election.  Starting with the timely conclusion of Iraq and announcement of ending things in afganistan.  Then he rolled out the change in policy on deporting younger illegal immigrants.  He also seems to be channeling Mccain on foreign policy with his involvement in libya and his recent complaint against China.  All in all, I think most of what Obama has done here has been good, but the timing is incredibly conspicuous, especially Iraq, immigration, and china.  Immigration and china should have been addressed during his first year...

Regarding the op: the slanting of polls is, by far, the worst case of media slanting of reality I have seen in my lifetime (I'm old enough to remember, with pristine clarity, 1984's prez election).

Obama is going to lose *very* badly, but the polls make it seem like he actually has a pretty good lead...then you look at the metrics used and Dems et al are over-sampled by many percentage points giving the illusion he's actually in good shape. Normalize the polls for actual electoral make-up (i.e. the correct number of Rs vs. Ds vs. Is), eliminate registered voters and use likely (registered, for those that don't know, is a meaningless stat, predictive of nothing), and he's looking at a Mondale-esque loss.

However, it will be interesting the day after election day when all the pundits and papers, etc. are (again) scratching their heads over how the polls could be so wrong about Obama's electoral chances because (again) they'll blame the sudden, literally last minute, shift in the mood of the electorate instead of pinning the blame for not seeing this coming squarely on themselves and their blinkered worldview.

Such is the fault of having terms for the president. I wonder if we would be better off limiting them to one term, maybe even 6 years. As it is now we lose about a year to campaigning. Then again there are benefits to an election that essentially could have a presidents time in office. Pros and cons....well that and the difficult process to change term limits.