Chris Dodd has Jon Corzine numbers, but this is what I found interesting in the article about his coming defeat.

Perhaps the real story is about President Obama. According to poll director Douglas Schwartz, PhD, "Barack Obama is still popular with independents, but voters say that his support of Dodd won't affect their Senate vote."

While Obama's personal popularity remains high, it doesn't appear he's able to nudge candidates up in the polls. Despite endorsing and campaigning for New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, Republican Chris Christie still won handily. A last-ditch effort to help Creigh Deeds in Virginia had no visible impact on Republican Bob McDonnell's blow-out victory.

So why doesn't Obama have "coat tails"?

I think the answer lies in another question--why was Obama elected? We had an open race for mayor of the city I live in, and I thought it was very interesting that both referred to themselves as "Reagan Conservatives". Is there such a thing as an Obama Socialist? Are there Democrats who would run on that tag line?

George W. Bush's coat-tails were a matter of prospective candidates wanting to be associated with his administrations actions vis-a-vis the war on terror. What administration policy would our current crop of candidates want to be associated with?

All this leaves us with the mystery of why Obama has been so personally popular, even as a majority of Americans disapprove of his policies.

The answer lies with that peculiar form of modern American racism--affirmative action. The tacit racism of a philosophy that says that a black person cannot be held to the same standard as a white person. A few extra points on your admission, a quota-driven promotion--it all has a potentially salutary effect on black culture, providing a desirable path of upward mobility, but at a steep cost. Solidifying the essentially racist idea that a black person is inferior to a white person. A century from now, our great grand-children will roll their eyes at us in much the same way we consider the 19th and early 20th century attitudes towards race.

Barack Obama is, by any objective measure, a bad president. The irony is that he's also a bad president by the standard the left employed to judge George W. Bush; yet as the second black president (Clinton being the first), Obama gets 'points' for being black. In turn, we get the highly-unusual and strangely unremarked dichotomy of a president who is personally popular, while every policy of his administration gets the thumbs down.

Obama's affirmative action 'points' aren't transferable and at the end of the day, folks who would prefer that their great-grandchildren not disavow them as ancestral embarrassments, may have to disapprove of President Obama on his merits.