Yesterday, the Barna Group released the results of a survey it conducted comparing President Obama to Mitt Romney and Rick Perry on four key "character or competency qualities that voters often evaluate when selecting their preferred candidate."
The four characteristics examined were perceived honesty, intelligence, philosophy of government, and leadership ability and Barna added together each candidate's "excellent" or "good" ranking and determined that on three of the four characteristics, President Obama came out on top (Romney came out on top in the category of leadership ability.)
Barna is well-known for its excellent research and polling on the evangelical community and reports that, in contrast to voters on the whole, evangelicals placed Rick Perry at the top of every category and that his scores were generally higher than the scores of Obama and Romney combined:
Among evangelicals the candidate with the top score was Mr. Perry in all four categories – leadership (30% excellent versus 9% for each of his two peers); honesty (26% excellent, compared to 18% for Mr. Obama and 9% for Mr. Romney); intelligence (42% excellent rating, dwarfing the 26% given to Mr. Obama and 20% to Mr. Romney); and philosophy of government 25% excellent, 15% for Mr. Obama, 6% for Mr. Romney). Note that on all four attributes, evangelicals rated Mr. Romney last (although his scores tied him with Mr. Obama regarding leadership ability).
