“President Barack Obama returned from a couple of days R&R with his family, trying to appear relaxed …” actually, the prez, striding (he trots, much less runs) across the White House lawn in open-necked shirt and slacks, looked utterly, unquestionably relaxed, as he almost always does.

Yet, the assumption that this was all a put-on was understandable. Following the bruising battle over raising the debt ceiling, in which Obama was assailed from right and left, and the brokering of a last-minute deal, Standard and Poor’s lowered the boom anyway, reducing the country’s AAA rating for the first time.

China, the major holder of US debt, cleared its throat and started making noises about reducing the deficit. That had barely begun to sink in, when news of the hideous loss of 30-plus US troops in a helicopter crash/shootdown occurred, focusing renewed attention on a war Obama made his own, even if part of his strategy is a planned withdrawal. Could it get any worse? Why, yes, there’s a double-dip recession on the way — indeed, it began months ago, and is only now starting to show up in the stats.

So why is this man smiling? Possibly because he’s looking at the polls, which tell a bizarre story. Obama’s disapproval rating is higher than his approval (running about 55%-45% averaged across several polls), 65%-70% of people feel the country’s going in the wrong direction, and when people are asked to choose between Obama and any Republican candidate, they choose the latter by 6% (about 48%-42%). By any measure, those are bad numbers.

Unless of course, you compare them to the other guy’s numbers. For if Obama’s 10% approval gap is serious, Congress’s — a Republican Congress’s — are catastrophic, approval dipping below 20%. Four times as many people disapprove as approve of Congress, the public face of which is Republican speaker John Boehner. True, Boehner inherited a low-approval rating for Congress — about 30% when Nancy Pelosi was in charge. But from there they have, almost inconceivably, gone down.

Furthermore, when you go to the specifics of who people would prefer to Obama, an even stranger effect emerges. Any Republican candidate in general will do — but none in particular. When Obama is put up against real contenders for the GOP nomination, he comes out trumps. That he easily beats Michele Bachmann by 12%-15%, or Governor Rick Perry (who is yet to announce) by 8%-10%, is no surprise; but more interestingly, he’s also leading solidly against Mitt Romney by about 3%-6%. Not only do these results include Michigan — where Romney’s father was governor — but they also include a Fox news poll, something the network has not been desperate to promote.

This bizarre result points to the dilemma of the Republican party going into next year — for the first time in its history it has no front-running candidate who is a moderate (yes, in this respect, John McCain was a moderate). The fact that Romney — a Mormon, anti-abortion, hardline conservative (in his current image at least) — is seen as the party centre’s candidate, demonstrates how far the party has wandered from the mainstream of American life.

Clearly many people are desperate to vote for someone other than Obama; but the current set-up of the party will not allow it to be offered to them. Tim Pawlenty, an early candidate for the centrist spot, launched in a lacklustre fashion and quickly fell away; Jon Huntsman, whom Obama appointed as ambassador to China, is hoping to make a late run, which is far from impossible (late, as in starting a mere six months before the first primary).

But whatever happens to those latter candidates, they — and Romney — will have to negotiate the reef of the primaries, which may tear the hull of their campaign to pieces. The questions they face there — on religion, abortion, education, immigration and a range of other issues — have to be answered from the Right; and such answers will provide a magazine of ammunition, that can be fired back at them across the remaining 10 months of the campaign.

Romney, in particular, faces a double dilemma — he must tack to the right on social issues, and then explain how he introduced a health-care system identical to that which has become “Obamacare” in republican ideology. Since the widespread dislike of Obama’s health-care package is one of the Republicans’ best weapons, one would have doubts that Romney will ultimately make it through — if another acceptable candidate presents.

That obviously wouldn’t be Bachmann — but it might be Rick Perry. The Texas governor, who recently held a come-one-come-all pray-in, attended by more than 30,000, to see whether God wanted him to run for President, terrifies the GOP centre. He’s forceful, dashing, folksy without being twee, gives the air of stern and deliberate authority — all things that other religious right icons, from Huckabee to Palin, have striven for, unsuccessfully, in the past.

In recent years, Texas has become a boom state — largely by filleting public services to a degree where it has about the worst school and public health system in the country — while the rest of the country wheezes and gasps, and though resources, size and the proximity of Mexico also play a large role in their success, Perry will be able to build a forceful mythology around commonsense know-how. There was never any chance that Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin would win the Republican nomination; indeed, one could never even credibly picture it. A Perry-Pawlenty (or Perry-Rubio) GOP ticket for ’12 strikes me as so plausible that I can see the convention acceptance speech in my head as I type.

There are signs that the Democrats can see it, and perhaps hope for it too. For while there is every chance that Rick Perry might be capable of playing down his religious and separatist heritage (he mused about the possibility of Texas seceding in 2009 — playing to a local gallery of course, but, given the history, what a tune), the Democrats would be relying on the paradox that he could gain the nomination by convincing enough Republican moderates — at the same time instantly losing the party the chance of recapturing northern “Reagan Democrats”, who would be turned off by the explicit religiosity, southernness, and the implicit theme that small-town life is the “real” America.

The Republicans lost many of the Reagan Democrats in ’92,and they have never got enough of them back — which is why their electoral college vote has never risen above 300 (out of 538) since, and why the Democrats has never fallen below 240. A Pawlenty or a Hunstman could do it; a Romney might. Team Obama would be betting that Perry couldn’t, and are doubtless lending the voices in their hearts to that prayer meeting, whispering “run, Rick, run”. One reason why, as fresh chaos piles up around him, Barack Obama can still walk, smiling, across the White House lawn.

Of course, should this be proved wrong, and on January 20, 2013, President Perry rises to take the oath, then the US and the world will change decisively — a result that, albeit alarming, would certainly mark the return of big P politics. Run, Rick, run …