The president, who has at times been known as Barack Obama, is clearly in trouble. No president except FDR has ever been re-elected with an unemployment rate higher than 9 percent. The erstwhile Barry Soetoro was an anti-war candidate who currently presides over no less than six foreign wars (three of them of his making), he has betrayed practically every campaign promise he made while running for president and he has apparently never met a Goldman Sachs executive he didn’t want to nominate to his cabinet. The only surprise about his low approval ratings, 42 percent according to Gallup and -15 as per Rasmussen’s Presidential Approval Index, is that they aren’t even worse.
It is clear that a Republican candidate should have little problem beating Obama in the 2012 presidential election, assuming he even decides to run for re-election. (I have been skeptical of the assumption that Obama would even be on the 2012 ballot since July 2010.) Gallup has the generic “Republican candidate” leading Obama by an 8 percent margin, 47 to 39. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, they cannot put forward a generic candidate, but must select a specific one.