why Obama is *so* re-elected

As stated on this blog previously, I thought Obama was going to win a second term anyway, just because of a weak pool opposing him. (The same logic governed my prediction in early 1995, against everyone around me, that Bill Clinton was easily headed for a second term. It was one of the best and seemingly riskiest predictions I ever made.)

But now I think Obama could almost survive a deep second recession, if that’s what things come to.

You can win a war and still lose an election for economic reasons. See George Bush Sr. Or see (even more surprisingly) Winston Churchill.

But this week Obama didn’t do something measly like win a war– he actually merged with the “dragonslayer” archetype. I can’t think of any parallels in human history at the moment. There have been other defeats of horrifying individual enemies, such as the Roman victories over Hannibal and Attila, but Rome wasn’t really a democracy at either of those stages and so there weren’t the sorts of electoral repercussions that we are likely to see with Obama. [ADDENDUM: And of course, the Romans didn’t actually succeed in bringing about the deaths of either of those figures. But the threat they posed was stopped with sufficient abruptness that it was something like deaths in the two cases.]

Sure, there are still plenty of people around sniping at him, demanding more proof than a birth certificate, and all such ploys. But just look at the sorts of reactions he’s receiving this week from New York police and firefighters, and you’ll see the sort of unparalleled psychic breakthrough he’s made with the electorate (and he had plenty of votes in 2008 to begin with).

Yes, there are a few things that have disappointed me as well. I’m just talking here about the 2012 election, and I really think Obama has it in the bag. The Republicans may as well run Sarah Palin and get it out of their systems, because I suspect that getting something out of their systems is the best they’ll be able to do at this point. They’ll probably be facing Hillary in 2016, so they ought to start working on that puzzle instead.