President Obama's approval now hovers around 45 percent. It's certainly low, but then I think about all the open frustration, disappointment, and even bitterness towards the White House that I'm hearing from my friends on the Left. I can't picture them answering in the affirmative if they got a random call from a pollster asking whether or not they approve of the President, and some would even report that they'd refuse to vote for him. There's no doubt pollsters have reached many of these critics.
Would the President's approval be closer to 50 or 51 today - or even his 2008 election tally of around 53 percent - with their support?
Polling averages write a simplified narrative that lacks important information about where the country is ideologically, and currently emboldens obstructionist Republicans, who thinks that a 45-percent approval of the President proves that America leans Right.
So Republicans spin the President as a leftist - a claim that is increasingly ineffective as the facts prove otherwise, and anyone who lived through the era of fear in the last decade knows that all memes fade away when journalists and pundits get bored of them. Yet the White House compensates for accusations of "leftism" by moving to the center-right, with eyes on 2012 and concern over independent voters who are less likely to automatically come home than disappointed progressives.
But in a second term, would the White House face the same pressure?
I like this analogy: you live in a house with many pets. Both the back door and front door are open, and some are scattering out the front door (they are independents), and some are scattering out the back (they are progressives). Whether it is right or wrong, the human instinct is to chase the ones fleeing out the front because the ones in the back are easier to get later on.
And President Obama and all his staff are still quite human.
Then, consider that an independent who switches to voting Republican costs you two votes - you lose one while your opponent gains one - while an progressive who votes for a minor party or doesn't vote only costs you one vote.
In a second term, there is no prospect of re-election the White House must concern itself with. There is no reason to care more about independents than progressives; they are of equal value.
In a second term, the focus is instead on legacy. How does the president want to be remembered in history? Where does the President think that America will be in 20 years - on gay rights, on two unpopular wars, on a tax system that is going to have to change one way or another, and on the people currently in this country as undocumented immigrants, who will by then have children born in the U.S. who have come of age?
In a second term, the economy will likely have improved. Corporations that are currently sitting on their money hoping for a better economy in the future will not wait for that forever; even if it looked like the economy was never going to improve, they'd start to spend, and then it would improve. That means Americans would again turn their attention to long-term concerns like the environment and healthcare, and anti-immigration sentiment would also be less pervasive.
In a second term, another wave of young voters - who are more socially liberal and more diverse - would be joining the electorate.
In a second term, procrastination is no longer an option for the President.
Obstruction has been the story of the GOP for the last two years. Cooperation and compromise, though better for the country and possibly even better for the image of the Republican Party, would only have helped Barack Obama. (I guess they think it's better to hurt both your friends and opponents, than to help both your friends and opponents - but isn't that something that's always been a feature of the Right?)
In a second term, though, destroying Obama is no longer a primary concern, and the faction of the party that is persuadably moderate would be more cooperative.
In a second term, a re-elected Barack Obama would have provided compelling evidence that this country is not "conservative," and Republicans may abandon hopes of turning it back to the era of the "Wild West."
A second-term President Obama is undeniably stronger, more far-sighted and resolute than the President appears today. That possibility should give all of us hope.