One Term Barack? Not so fast

“Despite the quibbles we’ll undoubtedly hear from predictable partisans,” UVa. politics professor Larry Sabato writes in this week’s Crystal Ball, “we are certain of our earlier declaration: Barack Obama, henceforth called OTB in our work, is a one-term president. We look forward to the many columns and television commentaries that will echo our conclusion.”

Um, no, not here.

(And you can cut the predictable partisan crap.)

Thing is, the 2012 elections aren’t next week, and even if they were, the evidence would point to Obama being at least an even bet to win re-election with, one, job-approval ratings in the high 40s to low 50s, and two, the clear divisions among Republicans about the future direction of their party.

Yeah, the elephant in the room. Republicans, much more so than Democrats, have a Tea Party problem, with the relative success of Tea Party-backed candidates in the 2010 midterms – about a third of the 140 Tea Party candidates running for congressional seats won on Nov. 2, meaning two-thirds earned silver medals – not at all serving as a damper on the rhetoric from the Tea Party leadership set. Shifting their attention from Nancy Pelosi to Speaker-in-Waiting John Boehner, they’ve put Boehner on notice now, signaling that the ideological purge that prevented Republicans from adding the Senate to their conquests last week will continue into the 2012 cycle.

What does this mean to the 2012 presidential race? Two words: bruised and battered. That’s what whoever emerges from the Republican nomination field will be once the bloodletting is over. We are almost guaranteed to see from that process one of two types of candidates emerge as the victor – a fringe candidate who is the darling of the conservative base that tends to vote in primaries but is utterly unelectable in the general (think Democratic nominee George McGovern in 1972 as an example of how badly that can go), or an establishment candidate who runs hard to the right to appease the base but emerges from that effort both hollowed out from the inside and still not at all trusted by the firebrands in the base (see John McCain in 2008).

Sabato dismisses in his analysis the linkage that some analysts see between the present day and what happened in the 1994-1996 time frame, which saw Bill Clinton emerge from the ’94 midterm debacle to a relatively easy ’96 re-election over Bob Dole.

“Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama is an inflexible liberal who couldn’t find the center with both hands, even if his career depended on it,” Sabato writes. “And there is no chance at all the new Republican leadership in Congress could over-reach and repeat the errors of Newt Gingrich and his allies. The GOP legislative caucus contains no core of rigid ideologues that might go too far and create an opening for Obama.”

“Inflexible liberal who couldn’t find the center with both hands”? Wrong. See Caving on tax cuts for the superwealthy, Quick pivot from single-payer to the health-care overhaul first proposed by Republicans in the ’90s, Dawdling on don’t ask, don’t tell, Gitmo, etc.

“No chance at all the new Republican leadership in Congress could over-reach and repeat the errors of Newt Gingrich and his allies. The GOP legislative caucus contains no core of rigid ideologues that might go too far and create an opening for Obama.” Seriously? The top stated legislative priority of the new Republican leadership is defeating Barack Obama in 2012. They’re already overreaching. The lack of ideologues observation, meanwhile, is almost comical. It was precisely the rigid hyperpartisan discipline that the GOP was able to maintain in legislative dealings in the House and the Senate that created the political atmosphere that allowed for the gains that were made in last week’s elections.

I’m not going to go out on any limbs to suggest that Obama is a lock to win a second term, but I do think he has to enter the 2011-2012 cycle as the favorite, and barring something unexpected – a scandal, an international incident, an economic collapse – I’d personally be surprised if he doesn’t win by at least the margin that George W. Bush defeated John Kerry by in 2004.

As to the analysis and, yes, borderline predictable partisan rhetoric from Professor Sabato – well, methinks he’s taking being a regular Fox News contributor a bit too seriously for his own good.