Sometimes the scheduling just doesn’t work out. I’m not in St. Louis for President Obama’s visit. I wanted to be.

This from the Kansas City Star on March 9th:

….Since she [Robin Carnahan] also has a couple of campaign fundraisers scheduled while she’s in the capital, Zakula said the campaign is paying for the trip.

Still, the president is not the most popular guy in Missouri, lately. He only had a 40 percent approval rating in the state last month, according to a Rasmussen poll.

But Zakula denied that Carnahan was leaving town to avoid sharing a stage with him.

“She appreciates the support from Sen. McCaskill and the president and she’s looking forward to seeing them on the campaign trail this year,” he said….

“…He only had a 40 percent approval rating in the state last month, according to a Rasmussen poll…”

We never get out of junior high school.

Yes, lets take a look at Rasmussen polling:

….I want to stress that the only point I’m making in this post is that at least in national tracking polls, in any given timeframe, a Rasmussen poll is overwhelmingly likely to show better news for the GOP than any other poll.

To illustrate this point, I generated a series of scatter plot charts using pollster.com’s index of polls. Every poll in pollster.com’s index is represented on each chart by a dot, plotted horizontally by the date of the poll, and vertically by the results of the poll.

Rasmussen polls are in red; every other poll is in green. Shaded red areas on the charts represent areas where results would favor the GOP.

I think you’ll see that Rasmussen polls literally stand out from all the others and they almost always deliver good news for the GOP….

You’d think the Kansas City Star might mention that. If they even knew or bothered to try and figure it out.

The pool report forwarded this evening by the White House Media Affairs Office:

Air force one landed at lambert-st louis international airport at 323 pm local time (423 east coast time).

No gaggle on the flight to St. Louis. But Reid Cherlin stopped by to chat, and says, on the record, that Robin Carnahan had already scheduled her trip to Washington when Potus decided to come to St. Louis. “Her people have asked if President Obama would please appear with her in a future event soon,” Mr. Cherlin said. “We are working on that now.”

Helene Cooper

The New York Times

[emphasis added]

Avoidance? Not hardly.