It's rather amusing to see how the Beltway press corps has developed a completely new standard by which they judge president Obama.

Here's John Harwood in today's New York Times:

Inside Washington, President Obama is savoring a springtime resurgence: signs of economic recovery, victory on health care, the upper hand in the financial regulation debate. Outside Washington, not so much. Polls show the president with job approval ratings of 50 percent or lower, as Democratic strategists brace for a thumping in the midterm elections.

The political press has spent the last eight months erroneously claiming that Obama was suffering from “falling poll numbers.” But he wasn't. At Gallup, Obama's rating hasn't really budged from the 50 percent mark since late last August. So now some in the press have dropped the “falling poll numbers” approach, but claim that his is 50 percent approval is very, very troubling.

But is it? As I noted last week, these were the job approval ratings for recent presidents at the same juncture of their first term as Obama is now:

-Clinton: 52%

-Reagan: 46%

-Carter: 48%

-Ford: 47%

And yes, by all indications president George W. Bush was headed for the exact same polling spot, prior to the attacks of 9/11, which artificially boosted his ratings.

So basically, Obama's approval rating is right where recent presidents were, or even slightly higher than that. But in today's press corps, that's a bad thing.

UPDATED: it's doubly amusing to watch the media's hand-wringing about Obama's 50 percent approval rating, given the fact that his immediate predecessor left office with an approval rating that was nearly half of what Obama enjoys today.