Dan Boren is a Democrat who knows how to win in a conservative district. In three tries for Congress, he has never had a close race - exceeding 70 percent in each of his last two elections. He’s taken advantage of a famous name to make his GOP-leaning seat relatively safe from challengers.

It’s interesting to see how far Boren will go to try to preserve his image as someone acceptable to conservatives:

Ten feet from the desk, in the main hallway of Boren’s new Durant headquarters, the congressman beams from a portrait, his arm draped around President George W. Bush. A photo with the current president is nowhere to be found.

“Barack Obama is very unpopular,” said Boren, who represents Oklahoma’s 2nd Congressional District. “He got 34 percent of the vote statewide, and less in our district. If he were to run for re-election today, I bet it would be even worse.”

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Wow. This is just about the nastiest insult liberals can dish out:

I’m not too happy with the policy justifications we’re getting from the administration. It’s perfectly clear that the stimulus was too small; I think they know that too. But they’ve made a political judgment that (a) they can’t push another round through and (b) the thing to do right now is defend the policy they already have.

Maybe they’re right. But it does bring back unpleasant echoes of what I thought of as the Bush administration’s Vegematic approach to tax cuts: it slices, it dices, it purees! In other words, whatever policy they had been advocating in the past was still the perfect answer to whatever problems the economy faces now.

Krugman follows by asserting that ‘Obama is nothing like Bush.’ Right - except for trying to sell his preconceived spending agenda as the perfect answer for everything that was wrong with America, he’s nothing like Bush.

It’s worth noting the implicit criticisms Krugman levels: Obama either doesn’t understand the problems with the economy or lacks the conviction to address those problems. Chalk up one more case of buyer’s remorse.

Fresh on the heels of yesterday’s poll showing that support for Barack Obama is collapsing in America’s leading political bellwether, today we learn that Virginians are souring on the president as well:

A new Public Policy Polling survey looking at how likely voters for this fall’s election view Barack Obama finds his approval rating at just 48%, with 46% disapproving.

A poll looking at his numbers among an even year general electorate would likely be more favorable because of the greater number of African Americans and young voters that would be represented but PPP is gauging approval ratings in the context of the Gubernatorial race.

Obama’s reviews are highly polarized with 95% of Democrats but only 9% of Republicans giving him good marks. His overall numbers are weak due to poor numbers among independents- 52% of them say they disapprove of Obama’s performance with only 38% giving him favorable ones.

Frankly, even I didn’t expect the Obama spell to wear off this quickly. It’s beginning to seem that no matter where you turn, political independents and ’soft’ Obama supporters are contracting OFS - Obama Fatigue Syndrome. The bad news for Obama is, he can only be new and exciting once.

And by the way - Public Policy Polling is considered a Democrat-leaning firm.