James Pinkerton is always worth reading, but I think he’s stretching a bit when he offers “Four Reasons Why Obama’s on a Roll.”

He cites the spending freeze:

The freeze demonstrated that Obama has at least some independence from Congressional Democrats. And so we can see at least the glimmers of Bill Clinton-style “triangulation.” And Clinton, of course, was a two-termer.

Yeah, but Clinton’s triangulation involved at least a few heavy-duty policy concessions, most notably welfare reform and free-trade agreements. A spending freeze that is ignored by Congress is not going to convince disappointed independents that Obama is governing as a centrist.

He cites the Q-and-A with Republicans, and I, too, thought that was one of Obama’s better days. But I’m not sure how many Americans saw it, and even then President Obama subtly admitted that the health-care bill might have forced some Americans to give up their coverage.

He cites the decline in the unemployment rate, although his caveat sounds heavier than the initial argument:

Yes, yes, it fell to “only” 9.7 percent — a figure that would have the MSM talking about “depression” if the president were a Republican. Indeed, overall employment continued to fall, too, and so there’s reason to think that we could be in a “jobless recovery” — if, in fact, we have a recovery at all.

At some point, the condition of the economy becomes unspinnable. Somebody who’s unemployed knows if anybody’s hiring, and everyone that person knows can tell if they’ve been hired. When almost 20 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 can’t find a job, no amount of happy talk or statistical shift is going to change public perceptions.

Pinkerton’s fourth reason is perhaps the most intriguing, arguing that Paul Ryan’s budget plan will give Obama and Democrats the chance to use proposals like “partial privatization of Social Security and the voucherization of Medicare” to drive a wedge between centrists and independents and the conservative base.

Eh, maybe. But once the figure “1.6 trillion” crops up in Washington budget discussions more often than 4 8 15 16 23 42 crops up on “Lost,” I wonder if the usual “they want to push granny into the street” lines lose their impact.

Remember, senior Democratic officials were convinced that Scott Brown’s opposition to Obama’s new fee on Wall Street was a “game changer” that “proves our narrative on him as a typical, national, special interest loving Republican.” Maybe it was a game changer in the echo chamber of their frontal lobes, but most of Massachusetts shrugged at it. This is not the same anti-Bush, tired-of-Republicans, open-to-Democrats electorate that we saw in 2008.

Of course, this could change between now and November. But I don’t think that the same old tired attacks that we’ve heard in every other election are going to be what changes our current political environment.

UPDATE: Of course, this “roll” occurs as Obama’s approval rating hits 44 percent in the Marist poll.