President Obama’s cheerleaders are starting to peel away along with his approval ratings, and it’s a fascinating sight to behold. They offer different reasons, but they all boil down to one obvious thing — Obama is first and foremost about Obama — and one less obvious: He has been a failed president. Democratic pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, admittedly more centrist than most of their Democratic counterparts, penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal urging Obama “to abandon his candidacy for re-election.”

The authors conclude that the only way Obama could possibly win in 2012 would be “to wage the most negative campaign in history,” because he has no successful record to run on.