President Obama, after ten months in office, has fallen below 50 percent in the polls for the first time, with the average being 47 or 48 percent depending on the poll utilized.
Is this a problem for the President? It could be with the controversy over health care, the economy, and the imminent speech next Tuesday on Afghanistan.
However, the fact that Obama is below 50 percent should not be in itself alarming, as it is not unusual for any President to have ups and downs in polls, and a similar situation occurred to President Ronald Reagan after ten months, and yet three years later, he won by a landslide.
As Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia has pointed out, going by polls three years out, Nixon would have lost in 1972; Carter would have won in 1980; and George H. W. Bush would have won easily in 1992!