Christie resisted, but the GOP still has reason for hope: Most presidential reelection campaigns turn on the incumbent's performance - and high unemployment, low consumer confidence, and slow economic growth are making Obama vulnerable.
"The Obama numbers are as weak as anything I've ever seen," said Mike Hudome, a veteran GOP strategist who advised Obama's last presidential opponent, John McCain, in 2008 and is unaligned in the 2012 contest. "Unless we nominate Fred Flintstone, we'll be fine. And we don't have a history of doing that."
Gallup's Thursday tracking poll, based on a rolling average of hundreds of interviews over three days, found that just 38 percent of Americans nationally approved of the job Obama is doing, the lowest mark of his presidency.
More worrisome to Democrats are signs that opposition to Obama is hardening, especially among independents.
In a Washington Post-ABC News poll of 1,002 Americans, released Tuesday, four in 10 "strongly" disapproved of the way Obama is handling the presidency, up from 28 percent in January. Forty-three percent of independent voters "strongly" disapproved.
The poll also found that support for Obama among his Democratic base was weaker than the opposition among Republicans.
So it is no accident that Obama's rhetoric has shifted lately from talk of compromise, which tends to please independents, to attacks on Republicans blocking his policies in Congress, which fires up dispirited Democrats.
"If Congress does nothing . . . I think the American people will run them out of town," Obama said Thursday during a White House news conference at which he was scathing toward GOP leaders in Congress who have stalled consideration of his jobs bill.
