Emphasis on “average.” He’s dipped below 40 in individual polls before but never in so many at the same time that the rolling average among them brought him into the thirties. Until today.

Luckily, Paul Krugman says ObamaCare’s destined to be a smash hit so this will all turn around soon.

That graph shows his job approval as of early this morning, when he was at 39.9 percent. The big mystery: Would Gallup’s new approval-rating data, released every weekday at 1 p.m. ET, nudge him back over the 40 percent threshold? Nope — he ended up dropping a point in Gallup too (and gaining one in disapproval), leaving him ever so slightly below 39.9 at the moment. If there’s a bounce coming from the big Healthcare.gov revamp, it hasn’t arrived yet.

Since we’re all about counting monthly numbers lately, let’s do a little counting for The One. Play around with RCP’s data tracker and you’ll find that his job approval was surprisingly consistent between early August, when he edged downward from -3.5 to around -7.5 net approval, to the beginning of November. A lot happened in that period — his Syria “red line” nonsense, the shutdown, and a full month’s worth of ObamaCare implementation. On September 1st, he was at -5.8. A month later, on October 1st, he was steady at -6.1. A month after that, having weathered a storm of bad press over Healthcare.gov and public irritation over the shutdown, he was surprisingly stable at -8.2. By December 1st, the bottom had dropped out at -15.5. At some point in the past few weeks, a sizable chunk of Obama/ObamaCare supporters, most of them surely Democrats, simply gave up. That’s his target audience for today’s O-Care pep rally, I take it — disaffected Dems who want the law to work or who wanted something more statist but were willing to settle for half a loaf for now. If he can get them back, it’ll give congressional Democrats a shot of confidence that the base will be there for them next year. If he can’t, well, there’s always that state visit to Tehran for “legacy” purposes.

Exit question: Is O-Care already in survival mode?