The chatter is already starting about 2012….
For as poorly as President Obama’s Democrats performed on Nov. 2, you can find several assessments of his re-election chances that seem doggone optimistic.
The Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone, in a careful analysis, suggests that Mr. Obama won’t be easy to defeat. Karl Rove, meanwhile, recently made comments to Fox News about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s electoral future, which seemed to imply that he expected Mr. Obama would still be president in 2016.
There are a lot of things that casual attempts at political science tend to get wrong, but one thing that observers seem to understand relatively well is that a poor performance by the president’s party at his first midterm election hardly dooms him. That is no doubt because of the recent experience with Bill Clinton as well as Ronald Reagan, both of whom witnessed their parties lose badly at the midterms and both of whom eventually won re-election by wide margins. Mr. Obama’s Democrats lost a few more seats in Congress than Mr. Clinton’s Democrats did — and more than twice as many as Mr. Reagan’s Republicans. On the other hand, Mr. Obama’s approval ratings are slightly better than Mr. Clinton’s or Mr. Reagan’s were at a comparable point in time, being in the mid-to-high 40s rather than in the low 40s.
MORE: Optimism for Obama Should Come With Caution – NYTimes.com.
Lost in the 21st Century 