EVEN IF IT'S AN OUTLIER, THE BLOOMBERG POLL DISPROVES THE "OBAMA'S HORRIBLE MONTH" MEME

I think it's conceivable that Barack Obama would beat Mitt Romney by a comfortable margin if the election were held today, but, yeah, he's probably not really leading Romney by 13 points, as the new Bloomberg poll suggests. This poll is very different from other recent polls:

According to Real Clear Politics, every poll over the last month shows President Obama and Mitt Romney somewhere between zero and four points of each other.

But why aren't the other recent polls showing that Obama is sinking fast? The meme-setters of the journalistic world have been telling us for weeks that Obama's campaign is flailing -- reviews range from "underwhelming" to "truly terrible" -- while Romney's campaign is increasingly "confident." So If Obama's doing such a crappy job, and Romney's campaign is so awesome, why isn't Obama averaging, say, a 6-point deficit, which an outlier Bloomberg poll might correct to something like a 4-point lead? How do you get a 13-point lead, even with a skewed poll, for a guy who's running the worst general-election campaign since Dukakis, which is what I'd understand Obama to be doing if I'd just arrived from another planet and started reading the political press?

The fact is that Obama's campaign isn't struggling, while Romney's campaign is gaining traction with precisely two groups: right-leaning older whites and mainstream journalists. Yes, it's probably still a tight race. But Romney remains the sourest, most unpleasant general election candidate since Bob Dole, and he seems to think that snarling like a talk radio host is what he has to do or he'll lose his base. This thing won't be a blowout, and the super PAC money really hasn't kicked in, but maybe Obama really will win handily.