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OPEN BIAS: In 2008, the Washington Post’s columnist Ruth Marcus actually admitted in a column that she was advising Obama on his election campaign. With nobody thought to ask if this was objective reporting. John Edwards, the Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, Chicago corruption, non-existant Presidential credentials weren’t important enough. The press rolled over and was shameless about it. Now instead of trying to get things straight, they are gearing up for an encore – and this one will be hysterical. No wonder everyone wants this over – the Democrats and their media allies will rob, steal, pillage and burn to keep their guru asleep at the wheel.

To believe that this man can get re-elected is pretty much of a stretch. He’s destroyed the health care system, squandered our credit rating, literally busted the bank, increased unemployment and put half the nation on food stamps. Data shows that his humongulously expensive “stimulus “ plan made things worse by squandering billions on ridiculous “green” energy con schemes and :shovel ready” projects that were nothing of the sort. Guantanamo is still open. Besides a few “teaching moments” (just what we need) and hysterical rhetoric about the unfair “millionaires” that got him elected in the first place, it’s hard not to assume that things would be better if Jimmy Carter was still President much less George Bush.

UNEMPLOYMENT: Obama will be running amidst the higher unemployment rate than any other president seeking a second term in 76 years. The Iowa caucuses, which will start will be held Jan. 3, to be followed by the New Hampshire primary a week later and the South Carolina and Florida primaries by the end of January. Most presidential elections turn on the economy, but that figures to be especially true this time. There have been a few, tentative signs that the nation's bleak jobs picture may be improving, which would certainly help the president. But it will be long uphill fight with an approval rating in the low 40s and especially weak among the important independents.

Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal has assembled some numbers. The unemployment rate stands at an unhealthy 8.6%, and few analysts think it will drop fast enough to reach the 7.4% rate that prevailed when Ronald Reagan won re-election in 1984, or even the 7.5% when Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid in 1980. Not since Franklin Roosevelt won re-election in 1936 has a president faced a worse jobless situation.

More broadly, Mr. Reagan set the modern standard for gauging the economic mood of voters in an election year in that 1980 race, when he unseated Mr. Carter in large measure by asking voters simply: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" “If the coming election is determined by that maxim, or by most traditional measures, President Obama would seem to face bleak prospects,” he says.

SNAPSHOTS: Consider just a few snapshots of leading economic and political indicators:

● Unemployment, the economic statistic that packs the most political punch, has risen to 8.6% now from 7.8% the month Mr. Obama took office. It topped 10% briefly in 2009.

● The misery index -- the combination of the unemployment and inflation rates -- has risen to about 12 now from 7.83 when he took office.

● Median family income fell in the first two years of the Obama term, after rising the previous four years.

● As of September, 12.6% of U.S. mortgage borrowers had missed at least one payment on their mortgage or were in foreclosure, down from a peak of about 15% but still well above the normal range of 5% to 7% in the last two decades, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association.

● In large measure because of a decline in home values, household net worth dropped 1.7% over the last year; under every president since 1948, it rose in the year preceding the election.

● Mr. Obama's job approval stands at 46% in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, below the levels George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had a year before they were re-elected, and below where George H.W. Bush stood a year before he lost his re-election bid.

● Approval of Mr. Obama's handling of the economy is even lower; it stands at 39%.

The upshot: By most normal standards for gauging a president's chances of re-election, Mr. Obama would appear sunk.

MALAISE: Jimmy Carter was castigated for suggesting that America was suffering a “Malaise” in the late 70s because of the energy crisis. Obama recently said Americans was lazy and had lost its edge and nobody blinked – despite the fact that its massive regulatory and tax regime is making it more and more difficult to work and be innovative. Hundreds of women were fighting this week in front of stores to buy the new Michael Jordan sneakers. The Atheists are winning the war on Christmas. Crime is ballooning. Government is growing like a fungus and suffocating the nation. To read the Drudge Report is like reading a police blotter. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have IQs so low they couldn’t pass a written exam to get into Sing Sing. The bad guys are winning and I despair for our future.