Were I running the Obama ’12 War Room (and you’d better believe there is one), I’d be hitting the panic button right about now. The latest Gallup poll (the one the MSM likes because it’s not Rasmussen) has the President’s approval rating one percentage point from being upside-down. He’s sitting at 47-46 right now and the tip end of that trend line is starting to develop a certain hockey-stickish shape that the left should recognize very well.
That’s not the real worry, though. The real worry is that the President’s approval numbers are looking a whole lot like the approval numbers of a certain despised, ignorant, quitter of a chillbilly the left has been trying to destroy for over a year now.
Yep, here comes Sarah Palin.
But, the worry for the President isn’t where Palin is now but the shape of her trajectory. Palin’s approval number was at 39 percent when she resigned her office at the end of July. That means she’s picked up 7 points in four months, not a bad jump for someone who had to endure the silly “quitter” pig-pile and the breathless media coverage of every half-baked rumor Levi Johnston wants to spread. We also can’t forget that The Atlantic is paying a writer to support Andrew Sullivan’s obsession with Palin’s uterus.
So, what has Sarah Palin been doing in four months that might account for her uptick, the likes of which you usually only see in certain fraudulent climate change charts and Saturn V rocket liftoffs?
She’s been mixing it up a little on policy, holding down pretty solid, if not deep, positions that every conservative can recognize. She’s also been taking the fight to the President on several issues and driving the news cycle pretty much at will, almost entirely from her Facebook page. In other worse, she’s not been doing a whole lot, but what she has done has resonated not only with conservatives but with independents, too.
That should scare the heck out of the President, if for no other reason than we don’t even know if Sarah Palin’s going to run for President in 2012. Heck, we don’t even know what she’s going to be doing next week. He’s getting whipped by a Mom on a book tour with a Facebook account.
At this pace, Palin and Obama’s numbers should converge in a week or two, sooner if his furtive meeting with Senate Democrats results in crashing failure (what, Harry Reid is going to take an electoral bullet for the guy?) or if Palin writes another couple Facebook posts.
UPDATE: I’d say the panic has set in.
…White House press secretary Robert Gibbs mocked the reliability of the widely respected polling firm.
“I tell you, if I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG, I’d visit my doctor,” Gibbs said. “If you look back, I think five days ago, there was an 11-point spread, now there’s a 1-point spread. I mean, I’m sure a 6-year-old with a crayon could do something not unlike that. I don’t put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is the daily Gallup trend.”
He added: “I don’t pay a lot of attention to the meaninglessness of it.”
Repeated mention of how the numbers mean nothing? Check.
Superfluous descriptors to emphasize that the numbers mean nothing? Check.
Abundance of flop sweat? Check.
