Writing at Yahoo News, Jeff Greenfield believes the President faces an almost insurmountable task this November:
If President Barack Obama is to win, he is going to have to overcome a set of numbers that no incumbent President, or incumbent party, has ever managed to surmount.
Those numbers include sluggish economic growth, low voter confidence and “a 32.7-60.7 negative answer” on the perennial right track, wrong track question.
How to overcome these bad numbers? Run against someone like Mitt Romney, whom Greenfield dubs “a bad candidate.” Perhaps. But it’s during his discourse on Romney that Greenfield puts forward an idea of local interest:
Some (very) brief history and a hypothesis. Six years ago, Mitt Romney and his team realized that he could never win the Republican nomination as the pragmatic, moderate-conservative with moderate-to-liberal views on everything from abortion to gun control to the environment to health care. (The mandate was a conservative position back then, but put that aside.) When Team Romney saw Sen. George Allen, the likely 2008 social conservative hero, lose his re-election bid in 2006, they found an opening, and decided to reach, or lunge, for that slot. (emphasis added)
Interesting, in its way. And as you may recall, Allen was at one time widely believed to be a solid presidential pick in 2008. Insiders liked him, conservatives nationally were comfortable with him…and then it all went to hell.
But was Allen really the only thing that was keeping Romney on the sidelines? Hard to fathom that one, particularly if we remember the other candidates who sought the GOP nomination the last time round (Fred Thompson, you’re almost forgiven…).
