Let's take the day off from picking over the ruins of our own miserable riots and try to cheer ourselves up over Barack Obama's good fortune. What good fortune? I hear you ask. Surely he has just been humiliated over the US budget debacle and the decision of a cowboy credit rating agency to tweak America's triple-A credit status. His standing in the polls is sagging, now below 40%.

Well, yes, that's all true. And he has not been a particularly brave or effective president either. Democrat or Republican, I'd be pretty disappointed, too. But election campaigns are about choice of both candidate and their policies. So Obama's luck lies in the near-unbelievable fact that the Republicans look determined either to pick a loser or refuse to vote for someone who could win.

In the past few days, newspapers have been full of reports about the Republican field, as displayed at the Iowa "straw poll" – a pretty phoney beauty contest ("institutionalised bribery" – Sunday Telegraph) even more fixable than next January's Iowa caucus – and not displayed, in the sense that two wannabe presidents, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, stayed away.

The straw poll was won by the Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, who is this season's Sarah Palin, though not so wacky or whimsical. She who has five children, has fostered 23 more, and is an evangelical Christian conservative popular with Tea Party activists. Last winter, I argued here that ex-governor Palin was and is unelectable as president ("That's not a prediction, it's personal guarantee").

From this distance, Bachmann ("the Queen of Rage") looks a better bet, but not much better. She talks better and she knows more – hey, she's been to Washington in the day job – but she is likely to frighten independent voters, who will decide the 2012 presidential election.

The president, seeking a second term, ought to be a sitting duck. Eloquent and clever, he is too didactic – an ingrained Democratic vice, much as it is in the Labour and (yes, Nick Clegg) the Lib Dems – and fails to reach into American hearts the way a Reagan or Clinton could. He leaned to the left, then trimmed to the centre – or do I mean right? - and failed to provide decisive leadership from the White House.

It doesn't prevent knuckle-dragging congressfolk like Florida's Allen West dismissing him as "a low-level socialist agitator, which is more or less Tea Party-speak for "child molester" or "bank robber" – though, as Robin Hood types, bank robbers do have a following.

As ex-Dem-turned-Reagan-speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Obama has also proved a hard man to like outside his core constituency. That's bad. More to the point, unemployment remains stubbornly high – over 9% is historically fatal for incumbents – and Obama's fiscal stimulus has petered out.

Clever, rich people such as George Soros, as well as mere economists and politicians, argue that the stimulus wasn't big enough and was withdrawn too soon in favour of debt fetishism – the kind of premature debt reduction that is helping squeeze the British economic recovery, too. Yes, I know the UK has (so far) avoided a market panic over its creditworthiness – excellent – but that is to replace one problem with another. We are likely to discover which is worse quite soon. Back to the 30s?

Clever, rich people such as Warren Buffett, also argue – he did it again this week – that rich people are not taxed enough in America; also that there is a class war (his class, the rich, has declared war on the poor, and is winning, he says) and needs to be taxed more. Hey, Buffett has only made £30bn or so, sitting there in Omaha – it's the Norwich of Nebraska – quietly investing and ignoring the Wall Street herd.

So what does he know? He's probably a high-level socialist agitator! That's how Tea Party thinkers think, and how their wannabe candidates encourage them to think. Fortunately, most of them are such no-hopers – remember flaky Newt Gingrich, for example? His staff quit en masse last month; they sacked their candidate! – that they're barely worth mentioning. I do have a soft spot for Ron Paul, a veteran Texan congressman (he's 75) who is a libertarian and at least consistent. For instance, he is anti-war.

Which brings us to Rick Perry, governor of Texas for a record 10 years and the latest bright star to burst on the Republican firmament. Perry sat out Iowa but announced his candidacy last weekend to steal the straw poll's thunder. OK, that's a legitimate tactic. And Perry can, and does, point to the fact that 40% of all new jobs created in the US since mid-2009 were created in the lone star state – 1m during his tenure as governor. Surprise surprise, Perry credits his business-friendly policies.

Well, we're all in favour of business-friendly policies, Indeed, we're so business-friendly around here that we fight valiantly to protect many businessmen from their own macro-economic stupidity.

Alas, it gets worse from here on. Governor Perry's version of brash Texan – admittedly, he's the real deal, not a Yale-educated counterfeit – makes George W Bush look like a Greenwich Village pinko. He's a committed Christian, which is OK, too, until you learn he recently staged a religious rally attended by 30,000 supporters. I'd say that will make a few independent voters nervous, too, even before they hear the killer Perry/Bush joke: "Bush was the smart one."

A few stats from the FT before we leave Texas. Oil and immigration may explain quite a lot of Texas's economic success. The state often thrives when other parts of the US are suffering – and vice versa. It's all tied to world oil prices. But unemployment in Texas is still 8.2% – not much below the US average. The state has very low wages, has more people on health insurance than any other, and also has 17% of its population living below the poverty line, according to the 2009 US census.

At this stage most Europeans won't need to be told that Governor Perry (61) opposes gay marriage and abortion, supports Texas's death penalty (to be fair, that's only prudent) and doesn't think much of manmade global warming as a theory. Oh yes, he has also hacked off supporters of his former patron, ex-president Bush II, by being rude about him. Bad move: ask Saddam Hussein.

So you can see why thoughtful Republicans still look to boring Mitt Romney (64), ex-governor of Massachusetts ("Burn more gas, freeze a Yankee" used to be a popular car bumper sticker in Texas; they had Massachusetts in mind), to be the moderate candidate to defeat Obama in the middle ground. Ah, but he's a Mormon (deeply mistrusted, but less than last time) and organised a state health plan that looks too much like Obama's health reform to Tea Party types.

In the old days, the party bosses would have tapped Romney or the ex-Utah governor Jon Huntsman (51) on the shoulder and the party would have fallen into line. But Huntsman is also a Morman: one who speaks Chinese and accepted the Beijing embassy from Obama – bad stuff ! Pro-gay, pro-climate change reform: no thanks.

As Andrew Hacker points out in the current edition of the New York Review of Books, "for practical purposes (US) national parties have ceased to exist". So there are no levers to pull. If the ideologues pick one of their own – it's what Labour did with Michael Foot in 1980, the Tories with William Hague in 1997 – they lose the centre ground. But if Romney, Huntsman or even Minnesota's ex-governor Tim Pawlenty (he favours cutting anything you can find on Google) – win through to become the candidate, the zealots may do what they did to John McCain in 2008 or Bob Dole in 1996: stay at home and not vote.

That's the point Hacker's article really hammers home: the sweeping Republican gains in Congress in the midterm elections of 2010 were on the usual 40% turnout; Obama was elected in 2008 on a 61% turnout. Yet it is the Republicans who think they have a mandate from the American people. Enthusiasm rather than money – Obama had plenty of that too – decides these things, a willingness to vote.

On the evidence, Obama is well placed to win again once voters have had a chance to savour what the uncompromising 2010 Congress has done for them: not much. Give 'em Hell, Harry! Truman pulled it off in similar circumstances in 1948 by attacking the record of a pro-business, low-tax Congress; this Congress, says Warren Buffett, no less, is the friend of billionaires.

Winning shouldn't be too difficult – even for Obama, even in a double-dip recession, which we hope won't blight the US – or Tottenham.