Via Mediaite, no matter how bad things get, there’ll always be one guy out there for whom empty rhetoric about “hope” is enough. Or maybe more than one? I wonder if we’ll see more of this from the media as we get closer to the midterms — strolls down memory lane to a simpler time when The One merely had to stand at a podium and blather about Change to enjoy an approval rating in the low 70s. In four years of blogging at Hot Air, I can’t remember a day where things looked as hopeless for Democrats as they do this afternoon, from terrible polls to gruesome projections to harrowing statistical models to various and sundry op-eds predicting total catastrophe. Maybe, faced with that kind of repudiation of the great blue wave that was supposedly going to realign America, it’s only human to retreat into the past. Here, I’ll throw Matthews a bone to keep his spirits up: 46/46 on the generic ballot in Gallup this afternoon, erasing the 10-point GOP lead from last week. Is that mere statistical noise? Probably. But there’s always Hope for lefties that it won’t Change.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Time’s recent piece on “Mr. Popularity” as it’s a precise refutation of what you’re about to see:

“The public is rightly frustrated and angry with the economy,” says Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s communications director, explaining the White House line. “There is no small tactical shift we could have made at any point that would have solved that problem.” In more confiding moments, aides admit that the peak of Obama’s popularity may have been inflated, a fleeting result of elation at the prospect of change and national pride in electing the first African-American President. As one White House aide puts it, “It was sort of fake.”