PBA: There’s one more that you forgot. Our dear Dr. Hall. Unless you think that he fits into your third group.
The Repubs need to put up a quality individual; someone with no skeletons in his closet. Because you know that an Obama scandal get put in the public media for a half day, and a republican scandal gets beaten to death daily. There has to be nearly nothing on such a person. He also has to be really naturally likable. That way, maybe some of you fence sitters will see through the media painting of the GOP winner as some sort of ogre. Also the ideological purists on the right (TEA party types, including thye one and only Rush) have to not let the perfect become the enemy of the good and decent.
The repubs in general beat him comfortably now. But once it is pinned down to a specific induhvidual, each one has his own private mum that makes it more difficult to compete.
A single candidate that can overcome all that doesn’t really exist in the group of people out there today. The closest one, IMHO, would be Mike Huckabee, who regretably did not get in.
So yes, I think there is a chance that Obama can lose, but we should not be overconfident. There are hoards of people out there who are unemployed, but love Obama, because he gives them unemployment benefits, rather than getting his regulatory bodies out of the way, and allowing those same people to get a productive job.