But the GOP’s self-correction in Virginia is also a warning for Democrats. Republicans, now aware that they are on a losing track, may begin to engineer a series of course changes. The fact that House Republicans reached agreement with the president to continue the payroll tax holiday is the clearest sign that the party realizes how a far more assertive Obama is dangerous to them in a way that the conciliatory Obama of last year’s debt-ceiling battle was not.
Moreover, while Obama’s lead in some polls is significant — in Sunday’s Real Clear Politics poll averages he led Romney by five points and Santorum by six — his job approval ratings are still in the middling range. A recent Pew survey, for example, pegged his approval at 45 percent among independents, a big increase over his 37 percent rating last month but far from commanding. Any reversal of the economic recovery could endanger even this level of support.
All of which explains why Romney desperately has to win Michigan this Tuesday and effectively shut down the nomination fight by the end of the Super Tuesday primaries on March 6. A Romney no longer driven by the need to pander to the right could regroup and reposition himself. He could spend some quiet time with his consultants who need to give him intensive retraining on how to talk to (and about) average Americans. And the super PACs, fueled by millionaires eager to avoid the tax rates Obama is promising, could fire away freely, field-testing messages and searching for the president’s points of weakness.
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