So why is this man smiling? Possibly because he’s looking at the
polls, which tell a bizarre story. Obama’s disapproval rating is higher than his approval (running about 55%-45% averaged across several polls), 65%-70% of people feel the country’s going in the wrong direction, and when people are asked to choose between Obama and any Republican candidate, they choose the latter by 6% (about 48%-42%). By any measure, those are bad numbers.
Unless of course, you compare them to the other guy’s numbers. For if Obama’s 10% approval gap is serious, Congress’s — a Republican Congress’s — are catastrophic, approval dipping below 20%. Four times as many people disapprove as approve of Congress, the public face of which is Republican speaker John Boehner. True, Boehner inherited a low-approval rating for Congress — about 30% when Nancy Pelosi was in charge. But from there they have, almost inconceivably, gone down.
Furthermore, when you go to the specifics of who people would prefer to Obama, an even stranger effect emerges. Any Republican candidate in general will do — but none in particular. When Obama is put up against real contenders for the GOP nomination, he comes out trumps. That he easily beats Michele Bachmann by 12%-15%, or Governor Rick Perry (who is yet to announce) by 8%-10%, is no surprise; but more interestingly, he’s also leading solidly against Mitt Romney by about 3%-6%. Not only do these results include Michigan — where Romney’s father was governor — but they also include a Fox news poll, something the network has not been desperate to promote.
This bizarre result points to the dilemma of the Republican party going into next year — for the first time in its history it has no front-running candidate who is a moderate (yes, in this respect, John McCain was a moderate). The fact that Romney — a Mormon, anti-abortion, hardline conservative (in his current image at least) — is seen as the party centre’s candidate, demonstrates how far the party has wandered from the mainstream of American life.
Clearly many people are desperate to vote for someone other than Obama; but the current set-up of the party will not allow it to be offered to them. Tim Pawlenty, an early candidate for the centrist spot, launched in a lacklustre fashion and quickly fell away; Jon Huntsman, whom Obama appointed as ambassador to China, is hoping to make a late run, which is far from impossible (late, as in starting a mere six months before the first primary).
