Obama needs to be liked

President Obama, getting hammered by disenchanted Democrats and hyper-energized Republicans, at least can take solace — a la Stuart Smalley’s affirmation mantra on “Saturday Night Live” — that “doggone it, people like me.”

Favorability is important, the experts say, because people generally tend to vote for candidates they like. Given the widespread unhappiness with Obama’s handling of the economy and low approval of his performance in office, it may be key to his chances in 2012.

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And people do like him — just not as much as they once did.

Obama’s favorable ratings are down 32 percentage points from an inaugural high of 79 points, to 47 percent in last week’s Washington Post-ABC News poll, Post polling manager, Peyton Craighill tells us. Obama started from a higher perch, however, as no recent presidents started out with favorables above 70 percent.

Still, his drop rivals the swoon of George Herbert Walker Bush, who started at 65 percent, rocketed to 80 percent after Desert Storm in 1991 and then dropped 39 points in one year to 41 percent a year before the election, which he lost in a three-way race to Bill Clinton.

Clinton’s favorables held up better than Obama’s in his first term. He started at 68 percent and never dropped below 50 percent. Going into the 1996 campaign, he was at 54 percent favorable and handily beat Sen. Bob Dole.

Post data for George W. Bush show his popularity still at 66 percent in December 2002 — a year after the 9/11 attacks. He dipped to 47 percent in March 2004 — where Obama is now — and stayed in that range for the rest of his term. But he won reelection, beating Sen. John F. Kerry by 2.4 percentage points in the popular vote.

Going further back — and using data from other national polls — we see that Ronald Reagan was under 50 percent in 1983, but by 1984 he moved above that percentage and stayed there, wiping out former vice president Walter Mondale.

Jimmy Carter bounced around the 50 percent mark in 1978 but dropped to 40 percent in the spring of 1980 and lost in a landslide to Reagan.

So, unless the economy improves a lot or the Republicans self-destruct, it would appear that Obama needs to keep his favorables no lower than they are now.

Large scandal, extra cheese

Former pizza-parlor worker Jack Abramoff has a new dish to serve: He’s hawking a book.

Abramoff, who might as well add the phrase “disgraced superlobbyist” to his legal name, has written a tome that promises to be, according to a publisher’s blurb, a “corrective” account of his much-chronicled scandal, our colleague Emily Heil reports.

Publishing sources say Abramoff had been shopping around a first-person telling of his rise to the top ranks of the Washington influence game — and his epic fall, which included a stint in federal prison for fraud, corruption and conspiracy. After several major houses passed on the project, Abramoff finally found a publisher in WND Books, which turns out a number of fine titles, including “Where’s the Birth Certificate: The Case that Obama Is Ineligible to Be President” and “Climategate: a Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam.”