As you can see, as the months have passed the American people have grown less-enamored of Barack Obama and now . . . the majority think he’s doing a good job and those who like the job he’s doing outnumber those who dislike it:
What’s more, more than zero people who don’t like Obama anymore don’t like him because he hasn’t been leftwing enough.
An objective setback is an objective setback. It can’t be spun away. But the good thing about the availability of these tracking polls is that if we want to know what people think about Barack Obama we can look it up very easily. We don’t need to draw inferences from how Creigh Deeds or Martha Coakley does, we can look it up. Something that I think congressional Democrats haven’t really grasped since November 2008 is the full implications of the fact that Obama polls radically better than either “Congress” or “Congressional Democrats.” They could cooperate, and try to bask a bit in his relative popularity. Or else they can do a lot of screwing around, pulling him into prolonged congressional negotiations and letting some of their unpopularity rub off on him.