One of the more recent memes bouncing around the press lately is, “Why isn’t Obama doing better?” Barack Obama would appear to have everything going for him: youth, charisma, money, and good press. Shouldn’t he be ahead by more than just a couple points in the polls?

Each of these articles cite the following statistic: Democrats are up by about 10 points or more in the genericcongressional vote polls. So if Obama is up by four points and Democrats are up by 10 points, than Obama must be underperforming by six points, right?

These pieces (written by journalists as disparate as Adam Nagourney of the liberal New York Times and Robert “Prince of Darkness” Novak) all go on to suggest why Obama is underperforming — Obama’s black, McCain’s a maverick, it’s only July, non-incumbent elections are always close, and so on.

If this all seems a bit familiar, that’s because it is. The press was saying the same thing about Obama in November of last year, when he was running against Hillary. John Dickerson wrote in Slate of a colleague asking, “Why isn’t he killing her?” after an Obama speech. Back then, he was behind in the polls “everywhere but Iowa.” Well, we all know how that turned out.

The press has long been befuddled by the seeming disparity between enthusiasm for Obama (off the charts) and his poll numbers (good, not great). But this isn’t a disparity at all. Obama voters may very well be more enthusiastic than McCain voters, but they still only get one vote. Richard Nixon won a landslide victory in 1972, despite the fact that an entire generation was smoking pot and burning their draft cards. He called his voters the Silent Majority.

And then there’s the inconvenient problem with the congressional generic polls. It’s no surprise that Democrats are ahead by double digits. The weird part is that Congressional Job Approval is just 17 percent. That’s 12 points lower than Bush’s job approval rating. So either voters don’t know that Democrats control congress, or they plan on voting for Democrats other than the ones in office.

Isn’t it a little ridiculous to be judging a candidate’s strength not just by if he’s ahead in the polls but by howmuch he’s ahead? It’s not as If Obama needs to get past a certain margin and then he’d be declared President without a vote. The fact is, most Democratic vote counts showed much wider margins of victories than the RCP average showed the night before the election. New Hampshire was just about the only race (at least that I recall) where the polls predicted the wrong candidate to win. But the margin of victory was usually way off target.

Still, you can find interesting information in these polls. Democracy Corps asked people what gave them a “warm feeling” or a “cold feeling.” Bush got 32 % warm. Obama got 47 % warm. McCain got 43 % warm. The Democratic Party is 42 % warm, five points under Obama, while the Republican Party is 32 % warm. This survey suggests that Obama is outperforming his party by five percent, while McCain is outperforming his party and his president by 11 %.

This disputes the claim that other Democrats would be doing better than Obama. It backs up the claim, however, that voters see McCain as being separate from the Republican Party. Which brings us to another meme: that this election is about Barack Obama, and that he controls his own destiny. This would appear to be totally without merit, especially since McCain has been successful in getting across that he’s not like George W. Bush.

Does that mean that it’s up to Obama to define McCain as George W. Bush: the sequel? Probably not. That’s for his surrogates, and organizations like MoveOn.org. Obama’s mission should be showing voters why Obamais different than George W. Bush.

The fact that the press thinks Obama is campaigning better than he’s polling doesn’t necessarily suggest that they’re in the tank for Obama. A recent study found that ABC, NBC, and CBS were all tougher on Obama than McCain in the first six weeks of the general election.

It’s not that Obama gets better coverage than McCain, it’s that he gets more coverage than McCain. Perhaps reversing this would even benefit Obama. If people had more information on John McCain, they might not think he’s such a maverick after all.

– Hillel Aron