THE president is in trouble. A new Gallup poll shows Barack Obama losing by 2% to Mitt Romney in a hypothetical race held "today". Mr Obama is tied with Rick Perry. But the really interesting news is that the president wins by just 2% against Ron Paul, the guy most media gatekeepers assume too unelectable to be worth covering. For her part, Michele Bachmann, whose legitimacy as a serious candidate has been created largely by a self-justifying circle of relentlessly obsessive media coverage, loses in her hypothetical race against Mr Obama by 4%.

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I don't happen to think Mr Paul would actually pull 45% of the vote against Mr Obama, unless anti-war Democrats decided to line up behind an anti-war Republican who also wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and the cherished institutions of the American social-insurance state. I think what we're seeing here is something of an "anybody-but-Obama" effect, which bodes ill for the slumping incumbent; he should be leading Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann by more than the margin of error.

But we're also seeing that voters find Mr Paul a more credible "anybody" than Michele Bachmann, which is a fine piece of data in favour of the proposition that if the press is justified in neglecting Mr Paul, it ought to be even more painstaking in its neglect of Ms Bachmann. But I tend to think that a poll like this one suggests that the media's marginalisation of Mr Paul is not really fair. Were the media to cut Ms Bachmann's coverage by about half, and fill the gap with Mr Paul (and Gary Johnson, for Cronkite's sake!), I think we'd be somewhere in the neighbourhood of fair and balanced.