New polls show Barack Obama is beatable.

Republican Party strategists will be heartened by the first national polling conducted since Rick Santorum bowed out of the nomination race last week. Three separate polls have each given the presumptive (okay, okay, dead certain) Republican nominee Mitt Romney slender leads over President Barack Obama.

Rasmussen has Romney three points up on Obama in a hypothetical election contest, 47% to 44%. FOX News has Romney up two, 46% to 44%. Finally, Gallup's tracking poll also has Romney up two points, 47% to 45%. The Real Clear Politics average still shows an Obama lead, but this has been chopped down to 2.8%.

The most significant import of these numbers is that they go someway to showing that Obama is beatable. It seems unimaginably obvious to state this, but I at least get the impression that many (and, often, distant European) commentators think Obama just about has re-election sewn up. Sure, it’ll be a hard fight, but once party loyalists and independents see the stark binary choice presented to them, so the argument goes, they’ll fall into line and vote for the man they know. The problem here is that grassroots Republicans have or will come to adopt the very same line of thought. Romney may not exactly make the blood flow faster or the heart beat a little quicker, but the same Gallup poll shows he enjoys some 90% partisan support, as does Obama.

What explains Romney's sudden bounce? In the short-term, most agree that Romney met Santorum's exit with grace and dignity and tact (contrasting, by-the-by, with Santorum's cantankerous and slightly long-winded speech). Much more importantly, the American economy is plainly still deep in the doldrums. For all the talk that it is slowly improving, unemployment is still a huge 8.2%, and this figure is almost certainly much below the actual number of jobless as many people have simply given up and left the labour market altogether. Job creation has stalled. No President since FDR has won re-election with unemployment higher than 7.2%. More people want the hated Obamacare repealed than kept on the statute books. On top of all this, international affairs (particularly an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities) could throw the whole contest into turmoil. 

I would like to see Barack Obama re-elected as President, for what it is worth. But many had invested their hopes in the Republican Party nominating someone so ideologically extreme, so divisive, so devoid of ideas, that Obama would be able to start remeasuring the curtains in the Lincoln Bedroom come the late summer. Whatever one may think of him, Mitt Romney is not this godsend/nightmare. He is smart, well-known, thoughtful, and equipped with a bulging war chest. He stands a reasonable chance of winning. These were of course only three polls in what promises to be a long, expensive and, one would expect, bitterly polarising election campaign. Predicting or second-guessing the future is the lot of crank astrologers, not careful political observers. You have every right to be disappointed if Mitt Romney becomes President of the United States come November, but no right to be surprised.