While Democrats will blame George W. Bush somehow, President Obama’s approval ratings are beginning to reflect the lack of actual accomplishment achieved by the Obama Administration so far.
According to Rasmussen, President Obama has a 44% approval rating and a 55% disapproval rating. Those numbers are pretty bad, especially when one notes they are on the heels of President Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. No recent President has been that disliked as quickly by the voters. President’s Obama’s numbers are similar to those of President Bush in December 2005 in the wake of the Katrina fiasco.
Rasmussen’s numbers also show that President Obama is losing ground with a key part of the coalition that elected him: white moderates. Only 36 of independent people surveyed approve of the President’s job performance, only 37 % of whites overall do.
According to Real Clear Politics, 60% of Americans think that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and Republicans for the first time in years actually hold a lead in the generic Congressional polling.
How did this happen to a President who entered the White House with rock star approval ratings? There are several reasons.
First, the President appears to be a weak leader on his signature issue, heath care reform. Candidate Obama was clear on what he wanted to do, agree or disagree with his ideas. President Obama seems to sit back and want Congress to do the heavy lifting. When the White House let slip out a “deadline” of the Labor Day recess for health care reform to be passed, but left it up to Congress to do it, the White House was schooled in Washington politics. As the fall passed on, Congress’s version of health care reform kept being morphed into a mishmash of ideas that seems to create more government involvement with little real change. That lost the moderates and some liberals for the President and emboldened the conservatives in their opposition. Thus, with the President seeming out of control of events, his approval numbers on health care plummeted, along with his overall approval ratings.
Then, there are national security issues. The decision to close GITMO might have seemed appealing to the Left of America, but facing the reality of terrorists being tried in civilian courts has not set well with middle of the road Americans. Also, imagine the potential anguish if for whatever reason, some of the cases are dismissed. There will likely be a new Attorney General by 2011 if that happens.
Then there is Afghanistan. The President made the right decision committing to victory in Afghanistan, but that commitment cost him considerable goodwill among liberals and some moderates. Further, the President’s gratuitous deadlines offended conservatives and did nothing to calm the left.
That brings us to the stimulus and bailout spending that has yet to be felt by most Americans. Government actions seem to help big business, labor unions and government, but not people by and large who are unemployed and hurting. There is angst in America that the change that America bargained for is not going to happen.
Indeed, Obama has done little, if anything, to make those who felt disconnected in November of 2008 feel connected today. The President spent thousands of taxpayer dollars taking his wife on a date night to New York. He spent thousands of taxpayer dollars to travel to Europe to lobby for his hometown political cronies to get the Olympic Games, and failed. There was the infamous “beer summit” that made police officers around the United States feel, right or wrong, that they did not have a friend in the President of the United States.
The President embraces plans that will force people to buy health insurance or be fined and wonders why people don’t embrace the plan. The President embraces an energy plan that will raise the energy bills of working families by hundreds up to thousands of dollars a year and wonders why they cannot make up that with the $11 a week tax cut his stimulus bill gave them.
One Obama voter summed up the mood of moderate and liberal voters when he referred to the President as “George W. Obama.” Conservative voters have dubbed Obama as “Jimmy Carter’s second term.” The rock star status is gone because serious leadership blunders have been made. Whether or not the Obama Administration accepts that, and deals with it, will determine the success or failure of the Obama Presidency. The first year was a tough for President Obama, and rough on us all.
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