YUP, AND IN 2006 BUSH WOULD HAVE LOST TO BOTH GORE AND KERRY

Politico is telling me this, so surely it must be meaningful:

As more bad poll numbers continue to pour in for President Barack Obama, a new survey finds that if the 2012 election matchup were held this month, Mitt Romney would hold the edge with the voters.

Romney topped Obama 49 percent to 45 percent among registered voters in the Washington Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday. Among all Americans, the 2012 rivals would be tied, at 47 percent....

You want a do-over on that, right-wingers? Fine -- if we get a do-over on the previous presidency, all eight years of it. From August 2006:

According to a survey by Scripps Howard News Service released by Ohio University which asked 1,010 "Americans to ponder their options in every U.S. presidential election held since 1964," two term President George W. Bush would lose to both Senator John Kerry and former Vice President Al Gore.

"46 per cent of respondents would support Democrat John Kerry in a repeat of the 2004 ballot, while 40 per cent would vote for Republican George W. Bush," according to Scripps Howard News Service / Ohio University poll....

In a "rerun" of 2000, the poll suggests that Gore would beat Bush with 46 to 38 percent. Gore did win a slightly larger percentage of the popular vote in the 2000 election (48.4% to 47.9%), but after a month-long battle that reached the Supreme Court Bush was awarded a majority of the electoral college vote....

The link in that excerpt is dead, but the Wayback Machine has it archived.

Oh, and History's Greatest Monster, George McGovern, beat Nixon, too.

Charlie Pierce is not impressed by Romney's numbers in the WaPo/ABC poll:

... "if the election were held today," the nation would get another look at the actual Mitt Romney -- smug, entitled, unlikable, and a truly remarkable liar -- and, I suspect, a lot of those numbers, especially the drop in liberal support and the president's support among low-income voters, would be back up to where it was in about 11 minutes. Are there really people outside the Romney clan who cling to the fiction that he actually won? Are these people living in my neighborhood? Are they properly medicated?

Yes, this is nostalgia for a Mitt Romney who's mostly disappeared into the woodwork, with only infrequent appearances in public. By contrast, John Kerry stayed visible in the Senate, while Al Gore returned to the public eye a couple of months before the Scripps Howard poll was taken when An Inconvenient Truth was released. (The right looks back on that movie as the most abhorrent piece of cinema since Triumph of the Will, yet you'll notice that it didn't seem to hurt Gore in this poll.)

None of this matters. Yeah, President Obama is looking bad right now, but we don't have do-overs in this country. When George W. Bush declined in popularity, he continued to rule in a way that reminded us he didn't give a crap what his critics thought. When 2006 midterm voters voted for an Iraq withdrawal, he responded with a middle-finger gesture known as the surge. That's how Republicans roll in these situations.