Am I the only one who notices the droll inconsistency of your advice to address the data, not the person, uttered in the same breath as an inaccurate personal attack? I dunno, maybe it's a blind spot or something.

IN other news, a NYTimes blogger opines:

"This final hour of the health care battle looks promising for Barack Obama -- political analysts say he is winning back the base, and even the skeptical Paul Krugman is "impressed."

But this conventional wisdom is wrong. Obama never actually "lost" his core supporters in the first place. He does have a problem with the base. But it is about energy, not loyalty.

The current danger for the White House is not losing its coalition, which has shown it can stomach a lot, but rather mistaking its allegiance for enthusiasm.

According to a metric just introduced by Gallup last week, only 27 percent of Democrats are "enthusiastic" about voting in the midterms. Republicans are far more pumped: Forty-three percent say they are eager to turn out.

Put aside all the coverage of Obama's political woes. The fact is that this president is unusually popular within his party and strongly backed by self-identified liberals and the cohorts who propelled him to victory in 2008.

About 82 percent of Democrats currently approve of Obama's job performance. By historical standards, that's gangbusters. At this point in a first term, no Democratic president has held such high standing within his party since Lyndon B. Johnson. (LBJ clocked in just 3 percentage points higher.)

By ideology, Obama still does very well on the left: Seventy-nine percent of liberals approve of his job performance. And that number jumps to 89 percent among liberal Democrats. By contrast, moderates are at 58 percent, while conservatives hover at a sour 26 percent.

Meanwhile, the young, educated and multiracial coalition that Obama built is still in his corner.

About 61 percent of voters younger than 30 currently approve of Obama, while every other age bracket stands below 50 percent. That is a departure from the past two administrations, in which the approval gap by age ran only 3 to 6 percentage points. And a whopping 91 percent of black Americans approve of Obama's job performance.

A White House official told me these numbers show that while the base is "frustrated," given the current political process, Obama's supporters still think he is on the "right track."

"The core of the president's support, young people and African-Americans in particular, are still seeking change in Washington," the official said, but they "understand that changing that system is not going to happen overnight.""