Obama's pragmatism remains popular, leaving some in the ideological dust

Despite inherited wars, a debilitating economic hangover, a disagreeable Congress and the increasingly unpleasant media, President Obama, reports Gallup, has slipped only slightly in his job approval rating: 58 percent for the first week of July, compared to a 61 percent average for June.

What identifiably shifting trouble he does have comes almost entirely from independents; their thumbs-up is now at 53 percent, while last month it hovered near 60. This comes as little surprise, however, given that independents' overall lack of an orienting political philosophy tends to manifest in greater volatility of opinion. If you don't know where you've been, and why, it's much more difficult to know where you wish to go.

Nevertheless, the above was a veritable plunge compared to Republicans. Within the last month their approval of the job Obama is doing has merely inched downward from 25 percent to 23 percent (a gap, by the way, that also represents the margin of sampling error), having already accomplished most of their amplifying disapproval from January through June. So that seems to have leveled out, for the time being, anyway; and any way you cut it, support for Obama from one out of every four Republicans is still counterintuitively sizable.

The mother lode of consistent opinion comes from self-identifying Democrats, who, reports Gallup, "have remained stalwart in their support for Obama all year, with this month's average rating of 90% roughly in line with where it has been all year." In fact, it's ticked up a point in the last few weeks.

And that's rather remarkable when you stop to consider that just a year or two ago many of those self-identifying Democrats weren't Democrats. Their ranks have since been swelled by youthful newcomers to the electoral process, profoundly disaffected Republicans, and, even if temporarily, party-committing independents.

Hence, while Obama's 90 percent approval rating from Democrats is a partisan rating, it also isn't -- not in the sense of hidebound, lifelong partisans who literally can be counted on, no matter what.

Even more remarkable, however, is, after six months, the generally favorable hue of the statistically aforementioned when juxtaposed with this piece's lede: that is, Obama's headaches of inherited wars, a debilitating economy, a disagreeable Congress and the increasingly unpleasant media.

And a little perspective, especially on the economy, which is just about all that most voters care about, indeed spotlights the genuine remarkableness of those favorable numbers.

To wit, yesterday evening I was reading the July/August issue of The Atlantic and had made my way to James Fallows' interview of economist Nouriel Roubini, better known as "Dr. Doom." The article's first paragraph was jolting, because in it, Fallows noted (for reasons I won't go into here) that on March 28, 2007 -- "on that day" -- "the Dow Jones industrial average was above 12,000, the S&P 500 was above 1,400, and the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.4 percent."

While those circumstantial figures of our then-economic welfare now seem almost surreal, they decidedly are not forgotten. They come from only yesterday, whose bright future -- as far too many read it -- seemed boundless. Despite stubborn underlying problems of, for instance, wage stagnation, at least interest rates were low, employment was high, credit was easy, and before long every one of us would be couched in our very own five-bedroom estate.

Yet well within only two years it would all come crashing down, like the ill-constructed Tower of Economic Babel it was. We were systemically, foundationally flawed, and the fault lines were more, much more, than merely subprimed. Said Dr. Doom, "It was subprime, it was near-prime, it was prime mortgages. It was home-equity-loan lines. It was commercial real estate, it was credit cards, it was auto loans" -- and, as Fallows wrote, Roubini's "list was just getting started."

Obama now owns a full six months of the crushing aftermath, well outside the honeymoon bubble. And yet, although there's been some expected slippage in job approval, he still commands, notwithstanding soaring unemployment and careening deficits, the support of six out of ten Americans -- who largely and patiently see recovery as does Dr. Doom, who gave "relatively high grades [to] Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner ... [and] overall support ... for the administration's response to the economic crisis."

In short, the average American remains more in sympathetic and comprehending tune with the stubborn realities Obama is facing than do the putatively well informed and hyperopinionated, who, after all, should know better.

And I find that remarkable.