It all increasingly has nothing to do with success or failure of policies of the two sides. And has everything to do with tapping into people’s need to fit in with what is said to be fashionable.

1) Yes, many conservatives have litmus tests. But ask yourself: if McCain was president right now, what would his approval rating be? I can’t believe it would be as high as 44%. Not because of conservative purists, but because more people are more willing to “give up on” a Republican than on a tender-hearted Democrat. The crucial difference is not made up of disillusioned purist conservatives. Rather, it’s made up of those who self-identify as “conservative” but are actually liberals or Democrats, of whom there are very many indeed –

e.g., Pennsylvania, which is fully 38% “conservative” and all of 19% liberal, but 40% Republican and 46% Democratic;

or California which splits 33%/24% conservative/liberal, but 33%/47% Republican/Democrat;

or Illinois, which breaks down, respectively, 36%/22% to 35%/48%…

All told, there is not a single state where self-identified liberals outnumber conservatives while Republicans outnumber Democrats, but there are 29 states where the reverse holds. In fact, there is only one domain in the entire U.S. where self-identified liberals outnumber conservatives – Washington D.C.

There are two ways to interpret this oddness. First, it pleases most (actual) conservatives to see it as revealing a silent majority of people with conservative values. Second, it could mean that most people are DUGROs (Democrats Until Given Reason Otherwise). I think the latter view is more correct today, or rather, I think that regardless of whether a majority claim to have personal values that lean conservative, a majority also brings an a priori “lean Democrat” presumption to the voting booth.

I emphasize the DUGRO interpretation when I write because it’s the one that matters – the one, that is, that sets the height of the mountain every national conservative candidate has to scale in order to win.

2) Side note: Tim Groseclose’s new book on media bias lends my view some support. He argues that the media is directly responsible for 8-10 percentage points of the national Democratic vote; in other words, no media bias, no Obama presidency, and given an Obama presidency, around a 35% approval rating right now, which is where my gut tells me it should be. DUGRO-ism is directly attributable to media effects.

3) Contrast Obama’s situation with Bush’s. According to some polls, Bush was getting down to the present Obama-range before 9/11, and the economy was pretty good at the time (e.g., a Zogby poll in August 2001 had him around 47%; a Harris poll in March 2001 had him around 48%).

Granted, the low-ballers were outliers, but no poll had him higher than 60% roughly between July and September 11, 2001. The point being that nothing really happened until 9/11 except passing NCLB and tax cuts.

As soon as actual bad stuff began to happen, his approval ratings plummeted about 20 percentage points in a single year, STARTING from 50% approval in mid-2006. My argument boils down to this: No Democratic president could go that low in approval rating without a catastrophe we can barely imagine.

I’d wager that if unemployment is the same at this time next year, and even if we’re in a double-dip recession, Obama’s approval rating will at no time average 30% or lower, as Bush’s began to do in 2007. He will hover around 40% at worst, because the people, as it were, are biased about 10 percentage points in favor of indulging Democrats.

Again, imagine if, absent 9/11, at this point in Bush’s first term our national credit rating was downgraded, or he had rammed through, say, a privatization of Social Security on a party-line vote. Always when considering counterfactuals like this we have to take into account the pure rate of disapproval PLUS the amount added by media bias, which I think Groseclose shows convincingly is a huge. Best guess: 45%-10 percentage points. That gives majority influence to DUGRO’s.

4) Looping back to the litmus test issue, I’m not sure why you think ideological intransigence is a problem worth mentioning on the right. It’s not like we’ve been nominating conservatives for the past twenty years, and most purists wind up voting for the nominee. Even Romney, God help us, is doing rather well in GOP polls.

So, while it is true that no one is pure enough for some people, that doesn’t explain the general indulgence for Democrats by comparison to Republicans. That, I maintain, is due to the DUGROs.

Okay, I don’t approve of Obama at all, he’s a weak, narcissistic, dishonest, cowardly, vicious , untrustworthy, race baiting miserable excuse for a human being. And that’s his good qualities

2. When a President is popular, polls pretty much always have a higher percentage of respondents claiming they voted for him than was the case. When unpopular, the reverse is true. The same goes for political self-identification in reference to which party controls congress and whether it’s doing well or badly in the polls.

3. Given the perceived failure of measures aimed at helping the economy and the failure to even produce any serious attempt to reduce the deficit (which would help the economy in its own right), I’m startled it’s only 56/38.

On the general subject of the public’s view of Obama: I’ve got to think there is some sort of warpage going on, some kind of right brain not talking to left brain or discontinuity or hypnosis, magical loving, emotionalism, I don’t whatism, but something is not right. The polls or wrong and I don’t know why they are wrong except for that they are not going to be how the people vote!

A clue might be given by the race for Weiner’s seat. Who would believe that Turner had a chance? But, there’s been hard work and education going on, and the result is that the race is even. This is what happened in Wisconsin as well.

I’m thinking of Sergey’s quote that our nation is in a schizophrenic mode. One way here, another way there. Talk to me on the phone about Obama and I like him, but when I go into the booth on my own, it will be a different story.