We first picked up this change in sentiment a few weeks ago in our Purple Poll of 12 key swing states when we asked independent voters who “is just another politician?” Obama edged out Romney by 4 points. The candidate of soaring ideals has tumbled to Earth, muddied and mired in politics. Yet Team Obama has proved it can still effect change: Consistently, they make their situation worse.

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Same-sex marriage an election hot topic

Jay-Z backs Obama on gay marriage

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This past week, the Obama who supported gay marriage when running for Illinois legislature, then flipped against it as candidate for president, flopped once more to serve his re-election. The president’s reversal did not just evolve. Its politics became transparent.

Though same-sex marriage was not “right” earlier, it suddenly became a matter of conviction. With the Democratic Convention approaching, the president needed to energize his base and defuse the likelihood of a platform war over same-sex marriage. Miraculously, at that moment, he found the courage to do the most politically useful thing.

Many of us who support the president’s new position still found the politics as subtle as neon. The maneuvering became the message. The latest CBS/New York Times Poll reveals 67% of those interviewed said the president made his decision “for political reasons.” Less than a quarter of voters believe he acted on principle.

Americans have started to connect a swarm of dots, revealing politics as the pattern. Even when this president crosses oceans, Americans see him putting politics first.

Recently, in perhaps the most damning YouTube moment yet in a presidential race, Barack Obama was captured putting domestic politics ahead of foreign policy. He was caught on an open microphone, telling outgoing Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev that he would be more amenable to Russian interests on the issue of missile defense if he survived the November elections. “This is my last election,” Obama said. “After my election, I have more flexibility.”

The president’s mask slipped. The politician beneath was revealed. Voters, including the president’s core female supporters, got to see what they had only suspected: Obama’s priorities aren’t necessarily theirs.

While our economy was melting down, Obama spent his first two years compulsively advocating a health care plan. While moms struggle to stretch their family budget and fill the gas tank, Obama’s crusading for birth control and same-sex marriage. And now, as storm clouds from Europe’s exhaustion and California’s failure begin to roll into our heartland, trapping our economy without exit, the president offers tacit acknowledgment that this is the best he can do: His campaign is about everything but what will save us.

The latest CBS/New York Times Poll says 50% of voters believe the president is doing a good job. The problem? They don’t think it is the job he should be doing. Only 43% of Americans are voting for him.

Republicans have never been able to paint Obama as a flip-flopper, despite a litany of evidence.

Candidate Obama supported “pay as you go budgeting,” but the economic meltdown excused him from his commitment, allowing him to propose a decade of trillion-dollar deficits. He spent a trillion dollars on health care, but explained it was a practical strategy to save money. In the same moment, he has urged both expensive stimulus and deficit reduction. Still he has been excused, as a practical man, with long and short-range fiscal tools on his workbench.

He reviled the Bush tax cuts and the “tired and cynical philosophy,” behind them. Then he pragmatically extended them, calling his pirouette a “substantial victory for middle class families” who would otherwise have suffered a tax increase.

The Obama running for re-election is for everything and nothing at once, a creature of calculation. His oratorical skills are seen not as gifts that elevate him above the elite political class, but tools that enshrine him as its leader. Obama has become what he came to Washington to change: He is politics.

There is a good chance the Obama campaign is about to disintegrate, if only briefly. Obama is about to walk through “the valley of death,” where candidates lose their way and are tested on an arid march. In this familiar story, the campaign that could do no wrong can do no right. Pundits who predicted an Obama victory have reversed course and insist Romney is a sure bet.

Republicans should restrain their exuberance. The race will certainly tighten again if this president fixes a fundamental and possibly fatal political mistake:

Obama is asking America to be a polarized, angry country, where we are at war with each other, tearing at our own throats. Romney is asking us to be a country at peace with itself.

Unless Obama changes course, he will not make it through the valley. This is a race Romney wins.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Alex Castellanos.

Editor’s note: Timothy Stanley is a historian at Oxford University and blogs for Britain’s Daily Telegraph. He is the author of the new book “The Crusader: The Life and Times of Pat Buchanan.”

(CNN) — Barack Obama’s appearance on “The View” on Tuesday topped a week spent cozying up to the world of entertainment, including a dinner hosted by George Clooney that raised $15 million and a $5,000-a-plate extravaganza with Ricky Martin.

Presidents have always chased Hollywood’s vote. Herbert Hoover’s first overnight guest in the White House was Louis B. Mayer, and Richard Nixon had dinner parties with John Wayne. So Obama’s willingness to dish dirt on the “View” sofa is historically in keeping.

Some in the news media are convinced that Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage was designed to raise Hollywood dollars. They may have a point, but Obama wasn’t just after money. The movie community is enjoying a renaissance of cultural power this election cycle, and that’s what the president wants to harness.

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It’s noteworthy that Obama’s relationship with Hollywood is far from strong. His biggest problem has always been his lack of enthusiasm for massaging the egos of movie stars.

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In 2008, he was certainly happy to take Hollywood’s cash: One Beverly Hills fundraiser alone pulled in $9 million. But after the election, Obama remained aloof from those who had supported him, and invitations to the White House in the first year of the administration were surprisingly few.

There’s a glimpse of that alleged awkwardness in Edward Klein’s new book about Obama. In “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House” Klein writes, Oprah Winfrey arrives at the White House for an interview and is shocked to find that she has to join the queue at security like everyone else. She even has to talk to staff who make only $75,000 a year (yes, Klein lists that as a complaint), and Oprah is humiliated when Michelle Obama fails to treat her as an equal. Clearly the wife of the leader of the free world needs to learn a little humility.

As a result, there had been rumors in the Hollywood press, before the gay marriage endorsement, about declining political and financial support for the president. Matt Damon’s complaint that Obama is too centrist (“I no longer hope for audacity”) summed up the mood of the liberal movie community nicely. When Obama visited Hollywood in September 2011, he was reduced to appearing at an event hosted by a sitcom actor at the House of Blues rock club.

Yet Hollywood is so good at raising cash that reliance on just a handful of loyal friends can still produce impressive results, as the astonishing $15 million takeaway from last week’s Clooney dinner suggests.

The biggest bundlers, bringing in $500,000 each, include producer Harvey Weinstein and DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, while actress Eva Longoria has raised at least $200,000. There have been $38,000-a-plate dinners with Will Smith, Spike Lee, Tom Hanks and Will Ferrell. Of course, the same-sex marriage endorsement has increased Hollywood enthusiasm for the president and induced liberal skeptics to give more. Producer Norman Lear, who had withheld support until now, announced that he and his wife would give the maximum $40,000 each.

Hollywood isn’t just about money; it also exerts a quiet cultural power. Joe Biden was right when he credited “Will and Grace” with shifting popular attitudes towards homosexuality. Television has the power to acculturate and acclimatize viewers to social change. Consider that “Modern Family,” which features a gay couple and their adopted daughter, was ranked the favorite sitcom among Republicans in 2010. Incredibly, Time magazine put “Glee” star Chris Colfer in its 2011 listing of the 100 most influential people in the world. That’s right: A comedy-musical star is just as important to humanity as Christine Lagarde or Kim Jong Un.

Hollywood’s soft power has been augmented in the past four years by two innovations. First, Twitter has dramatically expanded the reach of stars who aren’t even explicitly political. In 2009, actor Ashton Kutcher entered a contest with CNN to see who could reach a million followers first. Kutcher won. Today, he is followed by 10.6 million people, far more than Mitt Romney’s 500,000. Were Kutcher to write something political, it would require only 10% of his followers — and then 10% of each of their followers — to retweet it for it to become a viral sensation.

Second, Hollywood’s activist base has moved away from pushing candidates and toward campaigning for ideas. The falling price of media technology, and the platform that the Internet provides, means that moviemakers can now “do it for themselves” rather than wait for the Democratic National Committee to recruit them.

Same-sex marriage is at the center of this revolution, resulting in a plethora of homemade Hollywood ad campaigns.

Local Republicans and Democrats are often united in supporting legal efforts to support gay rights, and their focus brings attention to the issue. In March, Dustin Lance Black’s play about California’s Proposition 8, which blocked same-sex marriage, was performed in Los Angeles with an all-star cast. Such events, which pursue political rather than strictly electoral goals, are worth millions in publicity to the gay rights movement.

All this means that even as the money keeps rolling in, Obama has to stay on the right side of the moviemakers. Perhaps this is another reason why he’s intent on playing the culture war card.

Hollywood is full of rich people, so health care and jobs aren’t issues that interest the new power players. But two people denied the right to express their love through marriage? Now that’s a great story.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Timothy Stanley.

Editor’s note: Cecile Richards is president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

(CNN) — A woman in Ohio recently wrote us about her struggles in finding the time and the money to take care of her health. Billie wrote, “I am 33 years old and without Planned Parenthood I would have never found out in time that I’m a woman with precancerous cells in my uterus and cervix. I cannot afford to pay for my health care, and by them having a sliding scale I could afford it or else otherwise I may have died from cervical cancer. I wouldn’t have found out about it in time. … (Now) I can see my children grow up.”

This week, as we celebrate National Women’s Health Week — a time when women are encouraged to make our health a priority by scheduling wellness checkups — Billie’s story came to my mind. Like many women, Billie is busy with her family, balancing bills and struggling without health insurance. But she finally took the time to put herself first and went to get a checkup. It’s amazing to think that those few precious moments she spent in an exam room potentially saved her and her family from mounds of medical bills and emotional agony.

But for a significant number of women in this country, accessing preventive health care services such as lifesaving cancer screenings, birth control, and well-woman exams is becoming more difficult, thanks to legislators who are putting politics before women’s health.

In fact, in Billie’s home state of Ohio this week, the legislature is debating a bill that if enacted would hurt thousands of women by eliminating federal funding for Pap tests, breast exams, STD prevention and treatment, and prenatal care at Planned Parenthood health centers throughout the state.

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For many women, Planned Parenthood is the only doctor’s visit they will have all year. Billie doesn’t come to Planned Parenthood to make a political statement, but to get high-quality, affordable health care.

Yet what is happening to patients in states like Ohio is just a preview of what women can expect from Mitt Romney if he is elected president. His promise to strike down the Affordable Care Act and its requirement that health plans cover birth control without co-pays, along with his pledge to end the nation’s family planning program — which provides preventive care to nearly 5 million women — and his vow to “get rid” of Planned Parenthood would have real and serious consequences for millions of women nationwide.

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Unlike Mitt Romney, we won’t let politics interfere with the health care that one in five women in America have relied on at some point in their lives. Planned Parenthood’s doors are open today and they’ll be open tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean these attacks aren’t dangerous for all of us — our mothers, sisters, daughters, nieces, and grandmothers.

Mitt Romney prides himself on being an astute businessman, but any woman balancing her checkbook right now could tell him that attacking basic preventive care is fiscally irresponsible. Unintended pregnancies already cost taxpayers $11 billion a year. Breast cancer caught late can be deadly, and it leaves families emotionally and financially bankrupt. Preventive care saves lives and money.

My hope this National Women’s Health Week is that together we can shine a light on the irony of these legislative maneuvers. Most important, I hope that the annual observance provides an opportunity for lawmakers to take pause. They must be made to see that attacks on health care threaten the lives and well-being of real women.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Cecile Richards.

Editor’s note: John Avlon is a CNN contributor and senior political columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He is co-editor of the book “Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns.”

(CNN) — Here we go again.

Confronted with record-low approval ratings, Congress seems determined to drive them down even further by planning another game of chicken with the debt ceiling this fall.

The last time they tried this game, the United States lost its Triple-A credit rating as Standard & Poor’s opined that “the political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policy making becoming less stable, less effective and less predictable.”

Talk about a zero percent learning curve. As you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Well, this asylum is being run by the inmates.

House Speaker John Boehner told CNN’s Erin Burnett at the Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit that “allowing the debt ceiling to go up without addressing our fiscal challenge would be the most irresponsible thing I could do.” In other words, there’s a showdown waiting on the other side of this election.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell essentially promised a replay in less responsible terms right after the last fiasco, telling Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, “I expect the next president, whoever that is, is going to be asking us to raise the debt ceiling again in 2013, so we’ll be doing it all over.”

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This followed comments by McConnell that are recounted in the essential new book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” by the bipartisan team of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein: “Some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage worth ransoming.”

Take a second and think over that language from the Senate minority leader: “It’s a hostage worth ransoming.”

That’s not just the debt ceiling he’s talking about. That’s the full faith and credit of our country. That’s our economy. That’s your bottom line.

There is a fiscal cliff coming toward us. We do need to rein in our deficits and debt. They amount to generational theft. The world’s largest debtor nation cannot remain the world’s sole superpower for long.

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