NP: Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Nate Silver looks at the correlation -- or lack thereof -- of presidential approval ratings at the end of the first year, the second, and the fourth, concluding that there's no statistical evidence that Obama's presidency is teetering on collapse, or whatever breathless headlines political pundits are offering up. The interesting bit, to me, is in the footnotes:

I think you can make a good (although probably not rock-solid) case that the idea of a substantially progressive Obama presidency is on the line right now. But there are a lot of scenarios where the combination of voters getting a little something out of their system in 2010, combined with (eventually) an improving economy and perhaps a foreign policy success or two, could leave Obama personally in fairly good shape in 2012.

This is a pretty good summation of what I think may happen, and in a large part, it's because the Obama administration has done completely unsexy things to help the economy that will take more than a couple of months to show up, but less than four years. Plus, I do believe the line of reasoning on health care that, if it does get passed, people will realize it's not the bogeyman the right has made it out to be, and may actually realize it helps them.

The problem is that very few political journalists seem genetically capable of looking past the current polls, which is why I end up going on and on about the analysts that I really like.