President Obama is looking pretty good in the polls right now.
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama holds a comfortable lead over all 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls, according to a new poll taken days after the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The president holds double-digit advantages over each of his potential 2012 challengers, a Reuters-Ipsos survey found Wednesday. Former governors Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts came closest.
Although Obama received a three-point approval bump after bin Laden's death, his robust lead reflects the weakness of a presidential field that should be substantially benefiting from stubbornly high unemployment and surging gas prices.
This is a good point to make.
The Republicans should be benefiting from the stubbornly weak economy. They should be benefiting from gas prices reaching 2008 levels. They should be benefiting from prolonged unemployment. They aren't, though. They never will either so long as social issues like abortion, gays, guns, and god dominate their discourse.
An even bigger problem for the Republicans is the fact that the only candidates who poll anywhere close to as well as President Obama are Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Mike Huckabee so far doesn't appear to even be running for president, and the chances of Mitt Romney winning the nomination are slim from my perspective.
Mitt Romney may have the distinction of being a moderate, and Americans increasingly favor moderates, but Republican primary voters are not sufficiently entertained by moderates. Romney couldn't win the nomination in 2008 during a time in which the political climate was much more favorable to moderate candidates. How will he win in 2012 when the conservative base is more radicalized than it has ever been?
In a separate poll, the Associated Press found that a majority of Americans now believe President Obama deserves a second term in office in addition to having a 60 percent approval rating.
A new poll by The Associated Press has found that a full 60 percent of Americans say they approve of the job President Barack Obama is doing -- his highest rating in two years.
Poll figures showed that the president has improved dramatically in the minds of most voters across nearly all key metrics, like his handling of the economy, competence in foreign policy and his ability to protect the nation from terrorist threats. [...]
The most important measurement -- whether he deserves reelection -- is not an exception to this surge in love for the president. The poll found that 53 percent believe Obama deserves a second term, marking the first time an AP-GfK poll has found a majority favoring his reelection.
It was entirely expected that the president would experience a bump in the polls following the death of Osama Bin Laden, but barring any major setbacks over the next year, it should be possible to maintain at least current levels of approval if not improve upon them.
If President Obama manages to once again pull a rabbit out of his hat and con the Republicans into playing the game on his terms rather than theirs, like he did during the fiscal 2011 budget compromise, no amount of kicking and screaming from either the far-left or far-right will stand in the way of re-election.