The good news in CNN's latest update on Obama's approval rating is that it has inched higher, to 50 percent. However the bad news is, it seems to me, threefold.
One, the marginal body politic remains as fickle as ever. Obama is the same president with the same skills and same accomplishments that he possessed a month or a year or even several years ago, yet his approval rating bounces around as though he is somehow an ever-improving or self-degrading man. It's a perpetual source of dismay that the center is so inconstant; it's what we expect, nonetheless we never get used to it.
Two, his disapproval rating is 47 percent — a percentage that may strike you as familiar. Or at least it should, for it is also the percentage of the 2012 presidential vote that the strikingly incompetent Mitt Romney managed to rack up. This suggests that even though Obama's popularity has gained in strength, the dead-enders among us are as populous, negative, and determined as ever.
Which leads us to the inseparable problem of number three — inseparable, that is, from electoral fickleness and dead-ended determination. Perhaps you had hoped along with me that by 2016, the "vast middle" would have moved nearly as vastly to the center-left, as it is rumored to have already done. Yet in CNN's latest poll, center-left Obama's approval-disapproval ratings resemble rather remarkably the 2012 election's result (51 percent, Obama, to Romney's aforementioned 47 percent). This is a snapshot way of saying: Little has changed, and perhaps not a damn thing has changed, not yet anyway. The percentage of persuadable American voters remains stuck in the low single digits. It's quite likely that 2016 will be 2012 all over again.
Which, it should be admitted, is OK, since the presidential outcome will be the same as well. What I hoped for, though, was a Republican thrashing so bloody, that alone would persuade the party powers to conduct a more earnest autopsy. Another two to four years of these yahoos-as-are will seem unbearable, and in fact may be unbearable.