By ABC's Jane Cowan


Are Barack Obama's re-election chances looking up?

For the first time a new poll shows the US president holds a clear edge over his most likely Republican challenger, Mitt Romney. If the election was held now, Barack Obama would beat Romney by nine points - and he'd win by an even wider margin if the nominee was Newt Gingrich.   

The poll also shows Barack Obama garnering higher marks than Romney when it comes to protecting the middle class. And those surveyed trusted the president more than Romney to handle international affairs and terrorism.

The president's job approval rating has risen to 50 per cent, its highest point in a Washington Post – ABC News poll since a brief ascendency immediately after Osama Bin Laden was killed in May last year. In his annual pre-Super Bowl interview, Barack Obama said he thought he deserved a second term. But voters were split; 49 per cent saying yes and 49 per cent saying no.

Perhaps the best news for the president is that the survey was conducted partly before the latest jobs data came out, showing an unexpected burst of growth.   

The timing suggests public confidence in Barack Obama's economic stewardship was perhaps already on the improve. The new figures, showing unemployment unexpectedly dropping to the lowest level of Barack Obama's presidency (8.3 per cent), can only help.

It is an undeniable spot of good news for the White House.   

If the economy proves to be on a genuine upward trajectory it poses a problem for Republicans, who've sought to cast Barack Obama as an economic failure incapable of turning things around. Romney's main rival Newt Gingrich is fond of calling Obama the "food stamp president", but if unemployment is still trending down in November, it undercuts the GOP's main line of attack.

It also makes it more likely debate will pivot from the economy to other issues including international affairs and counterterrorism, where Barack Obama is generally perceived as stronger. More broadly, it increases the chances the election will boil down to a comparison between the president and the Republican alternative, rather than a straight referendum on Barack Obama's record.

At the same time, the Republican presidential contest has turned into a veritable punch-up.   

With the top contenders slinging increasingly personal attacks at one another, it's a bruising spectacle some fear could do the party more damage than good. The official line is that a competitive primary season only girds the GOP for an eventual showdown with Barack Obama. But with Republican candidates doing their best to enunciate each other's weaknesses, the Obama administration must be hoping it goes on for as long as possible.

Take a look at the former Pennsylvanian senator Rick Santorum.

After campaigning in obscurity for weeks on end, he's persisting with an underdog campaign and not seen as having any real shot at the nomination. But Santorum's determined to stay in the race and the longer he does, the more he undermines the other contenders. In the wake of the Nevada primary, for instance, Santorum was on the airwaves declaring the GOP couldn't win a general election with either Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich as the nominee.

Gingrich was an undisciplined loose canon, he complained. And he accused Romney of being a "one dimensional candidate" whose sole apparent claim to the presidency was his business credentials, burnished during his time at Bain Capital, the private equity firm where Romney made his personal fortune. Santorum argued Romney couldn't provide a stark enough contrast with Barack Obama, pointing to the healthcare reform Romney instituted as governor of Massachusetts, which became the template for Obama's national reforms, so loathed by conservatives.

A wounded Newt Gingrich, too, still smarting from his thumping defeat in the Florida primary, has been denouncing Romney in harsh terms, branding him a "moderate" and even a "pro-abortion, pro-gun control, pro-tax increase liberal".

With fellow Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?

And that's to say nothing of Romney's own tendency for gaffes.

He managed to harsh his own mellow in the afterglow of his Florida victory by clumsily telling a journalist he was "not concerned about the very poor" because they had a safety net. He meant to convey his focus was on improving the lot of America's vast and struggling middle class. But he spent a news cycle trying to argue he'd been misquoted and taken out of context before eventually apologising and admitting he'd flat misspoken. It's a sore point for a multimillionaire candidate who's frequently accused of being out of touch with the plight of ordinary Americans. Weeks earlier he'd copped flack for saying, at a time when millions of Americans are out of work, that he liked being able to "fire people". He'd been trying to make a point about insurance companies' responsibility to serve their clients properly, but it handed instant ammunition to his opponents.

Then there was the endorsement of real estate tycoon star Donald Trump, a positive development on the surface of it. But it had Romney standing awkwardly side-by-side with the reality TV star whose signature line is "You're fired" and who's made a virtual fulltime enterprise out of flaunting his own wealth.

Democrats are far from reaching for the champagne – you won't hear any corks popping at the White House. No matter how fiercely fought the nomination battle, Republicans will surely band together once they settle on a nominee, and they're united in their desire to make Barack Obama a one term president.

January jobs figures are notoriously unreliable and, in a fragile recovery, the jobless rate could still go up again before Americans go to the polls. There are other threats to the economy too – a Republican-dominated House continues to block Barack Obama's agenda and the situation in Europe remains dicey.

But the cover of the February edition of the New Yorker magazine captures what must be the White House's glee over the Republican nomination fight. In the cartoon, the president drinks beer and eats potato chips as he watches not the Super Bowl, but Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney in full gridiron get-up, taking a spill as they tackle each other on-field.

Overblown for laughs, yes.

But maybe, just maybe, the president has allowed himself a small smile behind closed doors in recent days.   

Jane Cowan is a North America correspondent for the ABC.

Topics: us-elections, obama-barack

First posted February 07, 2012