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Obama’s days of greatest power and popularity lie before him. But be warned: he might not do what you want with it.
Barack Obama’s popularity should not be judged by the day-to-day, media-driven vagaries of politics — nor by the wishful thinking of his opponents.

Barack Obama’s popularity should not be judged by the day-to-day, media-driven vagaries of politics — nor by the wishful thinking of his opponents. Current Republican leaders — trying to capitalize on momentary blips, and hoping to boost optimism and activism within their diminished ranks — are nonetheless trying their best.

The Obama skeptics are fond of invoking comparisons between 2009 and 1993. That was the year that the last Democratic president took over from a Republican predecessor, and it led to dramatic GOP off-year gains the following election — in reaction, it is said, to the same liberal over-reaching we now see with Obama.

It’s the wrong analogy. A more apt precedent is 1981, when Ronald Reagan was struggling with a recession in his first year in office.

Then, as now, the president had charged into office with a majority of the popular vote (unlike Bill Clinton, who won just 43 percent of the vote in 1992) — along with a wave of party gains in the House and Senate.

But by early November of 1981, according to a New York Times poll, Reagan’s approval rating had dipped to 53 percent. (Obama is right around the same figure today.) Reagan’s numbers continued to decline, plunging into the low 40s (and even lower by some measures), as unemployment continued to climb through his second year in office.

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