Gallup tells us that Americans oppose Obama’s handling of health care by a 49-43 percent margin; only 35 percent of Independents approve (down from 55 percent just a month ago).
Sen. Diane Feinstein is miffed at the White House’s heavy-handed political organizing efforts.
Sen. Claire McCaskill doesn’t think it’s right to call the health-care protesters racists.
Those citizen protests at town halls are gaining admirers: 34 percent of respondents say they’ve made them more sympathetic to health-care opponents, 21 percent less so. Independents are more sympathetic by a 2-1 margin; 51 percent say “angry attacks” are “democracy,” while 41 percent say it is “abuse.” Why it’s almost as if Americans approve of voters taking matters into their own hands.
Could it be they are spending too much money? “The federal deficit climbed higher into record territory in July, hitting $1.27 trillion with two months remaining in the budget year.”
The New York Times is agitated that Karl Rove played a role in removing a U.S. attorney who was not prosecuting corruption and voter fraud cases in New Mexico. An outrage! But wait. It was a bad thing to insist prosecutors do their job? Pretty soon we’ll be demanding that the Justice Department throw the book at voter intimidation.
Mickey Kaus wants the president to just say no to rationing. Perhaps if Obama hadn’t spent trillions already this year, people might not be so cost-conscious. But now cost matters, and in a government-run plan without tort reform, rationing is the only way to control costs. So rationing is not just an uncomfortable subject of discussion; it’s the heart of ObamaCare.
Daniel Henninger observes that “to an independent voter or moderate Democrat, President Everyman is starting to look like a salesman for the superstate. One keeps waiting for the president to give this swath of his non-statist constituency something to hang onto. Instead, they see liberal Democrats pistol-whipping the Blue Dog dissenters with nary a peep of objection from the world’s most reasonable man.”
Alice Rivlin doesn’t think we should be popping champagne corks yet: “If you have lost your job, the worst may not be over for a long time. If you have a job, you may still lose it. The main reason for optimism is that the rapid deterioration of the economy has slowed down. Production and sales may even start increasing gradually in the next few months. For many businesses, the worst may be over. But don’t expect a bounce. Scared consumers are hanging on to their cash, bemoaning the lost value of their houses and trying to reduce their debts. They won’t rush back to the mall to buy things they don’t absolutely need. Employers will be cautious about hiring until they are sure the recovery is robust, so unemployment will remain high for several years.” Several years?
So maybe we should dump cap-and-trade once and for all. “The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) released a study Wednesday that found under a high-cost scenario the House global warming bill could reduce economic growth by 2.4 percent and cost 2 million jobs by 2030.”
Michael Barone on health care: “When a politician tries to stop debate, it’s a sign he’s losing the argument. Obama seems to have let the House Democrats overplay their hand. He ignored the fact that in our system neither party ever has all the advantages.”
Support for the president is clearly declining, and the Rasmussen polls, which did best in predicting the election results, show a sharp decline in Obama’s support and an especially sharp rise in strong disapproval. Rasmussen polls using automated calls, which avoids the “social desirability” response whereby people give the answer they think is most socially acceptable. This factor has always been a problem in polling around “politically correct” issues, and questions about support for the first African-American president are certainly prone to this problem.
One other thing:
The Republicans have failed to increase their own levels of support to any significant degree, i.e. Democrats are becoming less supported, but Republicans are not becoming more supported.
The Republicans need to move to the center–they need a Republican equivalent of the emergence of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council that led to two presidential terms for a Democrat in the presidency of Bill Clinton.
The reasons for the emergence of the DLC are similar to the situation for Republicans now: the Democratic Part had been captured by its extreme left wing at a time when the country’s moderate-conservative political center had emerged strongly. So the Democrats created a moderate-liberal center that led them to electoral success.
The problem for the Republicans is similar now: the party has been captured by it most extreme conservative components while the country is in a moderate-liberal state of mind.
If the Republicans insist on the most extreme positions within their party, they will have the comfort of the paranoia, the resentment, and the moral superiority of the dispossessed, but they will not run the government or control the national agenda.
On the other hand, if they move to the moderate-conservative center, they will capture and benefit and gain election from the inevitable swing back to the moderate center as voters become disenchanted with hard-left Obama and Pelosi.
Republicans cannot afford not to be moderate-conservative. This is where the electoral and political action will be. They should imitate the DLC.
Maybe if you read more than the top line, you’d understand why Gallup chose the words it did.
About a third of people aren’t paying attention to the debate, according Gallup. That’s why they answer that “they don’t know enough to say.” But if you look at people who are following the news very closely, 50% say their view of the budget is generally positive, and 40% generally negative. “These views of this highly attentive group are essentially the same as they were last month,” says Gallup.
In fact, the number of those informed people who report being generally negative about Obama’s plan has declined by 4 percentage points since last month.
Since your slanted reading of the Gallup poll was the foundation for the rest of your rhetorical house of cards, I hardly need to bother with it. Suffice to say, the stock indices have been climbing and are a bit higher than they were when Obama took office. So clearly, the market must not share your concerns. It is signalling that investors are confident and comfortable with Obama’s plans.
#3 Eric – 40% negative in the Age of Obama, is your cause of celebration? wow, that does say a lot.
“It is signalling that investors are confident and comfortable with Obama’s plans.” ok, when the market drops off, I challenge you to post on this blog that the investors are losing faith and are uncomfortable with Obama’s plans. I didn’t see that from Jan. 20 until now.
@eric You heard it here first folks. The market just looooves Obama. Big guv is gud for prosperity.
Zogby shows a majority (or plurality, I forget) rate O either fair or poor. Of course numbers can change. More to the point, the GOP has no prominent spokesman for the public to focus on as a personification of the party (other than maybe Rush, who is a polemicist, not a politician). The GOP starting lineup is decidedly unReaganesque, but stylistic inadequacies can’t be wished away and substantive ones are equally unavoidable in a group that largely endorsed or acquiesced in the Bush-Paulson antics. Until an easily recognizable face is put on conservatism nationally it will be hard to know how it’s actually doing.
You righties continue to amaze me with your lack of intelectual integrity. The markets lost a third of there value in Bush’s eight years. That is remarkable and you’ll never find another two term Pres with a worse record.
As for deficits and government spending, I do believe you need to look at your own party. It was Bush and his Republica friends in Congress that squandered the $200 billion+ surplus that they inherited in 2001. Look at the govs own charts and you’ll see that our country wouldn’t even have any debt if it weren’t for Reagan and the two Bushes. For God’s sake, this is a ridiculous argument.
And if you think the media has been soft on Obama then I’m afraid there is no hope for you.
Demotologist,
You were probably right in line with Newt Gingrich and Larry Kudlow in 1993 when they and other “conservatives” were telling us how rotten Bill Clinton’s 1993 Deficit Reduction Act would be for our markets and our economy. I mean, how could Clinton push through all of that spending, hiring all those cops(crime was a big issue then), AND raise taxes on the wealthy and expect the economy to boom? What an idiot that Clinton was huh?
The markets more than tripled under Clinton. Will you righties ever learn?
Jennifer – “fewer people”, not “less people.”
Obama cannot answer tough questions without his BS TV showing him the answer or sometimes he never answer at all. Maybe because it is above his pay grade?
Obama’s poll is falling faster than his sinking ship.
K Hays, I wish there were “fewer” smart alec posters here.
Hey, somebody tell Bart the market’s down today! Obama must be a bad president after all.
Slade demonstrates the danger of trying to synch a presidency with the stock market performance. The following data is taken from Yahoo Finance:
The week of January 18, 1993, the Dow opened at 3256.8. The week of January 16, 2005, approximately two years later, the Down opened at 3869.4. This represents an annualized gain of 9% per year. Very nice, but…
…from that point to the beginning of January, 2000, the Dow rose to 11,522.6. This represents an annualized gain of 28.8% per year for five straight years.
Have I picked the beginning of January, 1995 for a reason? Yes, I have. That was when Republicans took control of Congress. It was after that point that two of the largest changes in federal fiscal policy in three decades occurred: Congress and Clinton conspired to reform welfare, and Congress rejected Clinton’s budget proposal and together they balanced the budget (and most likely, NAFTA contributed to some of the gains in the 1993 to 1995 period, which was another example of Clinton and Gingrich working together).
So if you wanted to judge things politically, it could be argued that the effect of Clinton working with the Republicans to promote a center-right fiscal policy was roughly four times more stimulative for the stock market than raising taxes to reduce the budget deficit.
But political changes aren’t as important as policy changes. Clinton’s budget policies in 1993 were effectively the same as Bush I’s policies in 1990. And Obama’s policies thus far are largely the same as Bush II’s policies for the last several years (but on steroids).
So if you think that what Bush did has hurt the growth of equities, you’d have to concede that what Obama is doing is going to continue to hurt equity growth or at least make a more persuasive argument than “righties” supported Bush in what he was doing. Most fiscal conservatives opposed Bush’s policies generally and demanded more constraint for years. The fact that they are now making the same argument against Obama’s policies- and adding to it opposition to tax increases- has more intellectual honesty than pretending that what is going on so far is somehow fundamentally different than what happened in the last administration. Bad fiscal policy is bad fiscal policy, whether done by a (D) or a (R).
“Support for the president is clearly declining, and the Rasmussen polls, which did best in predicting the election results, show a sharp decline in Obama’s support and an especially sharp rise in strong disapproval.”
I kknow this is the theme Neo-COns and wing-nuts like to bray – unfortunately, it’s not backed by truth…
Go look at Rasmussen trends – total disapprove has hovered between 38 and 43 percent for almost two months – While total approve for the same period has hovered between 61 and 56 percent – so, PLEASE define sharp…
turlock — nicely said. It is indeed intellectually consistent to oppose the Obama spending plan that is absurdly bigger than the deficit spending you also opposed under Bush. It is INconsistent to rail about Bush’s deficit spending, but become an advocate for Obama’s, which he is not even trying to pretend will not be enormously bigger.
Warpublican:
You either don’t know how to read the polls, or more likely, you don’t want to acknowledge the truth. Obama’s Presidential Approval Index on Rasmussen has gone from +15 in mid February to +4 in mid March, where it continues to reside. That reflects a dramatic change in strong approval and strong disapproval numbers. His loss of support among Independents has been expecially striking. Take a look at pollster.com. Your hard-left, faux post-partisan, faux centrist, faux competent president is sliding fast. How far down will he go?
I understand Obama’s strategy of trying to ram through as much as he can, as quick as he can. His approval ratings a very high, and like all president’s will only go down. He holds huge majorities in both houses of congress, and as is typical in off-year elections will likely lose seats (but not control) in 2010. So…ram through as much as you can TODAY.
However, I think this is a tactical error. The people just aren’t buying it. IMO Obama will not be able to sell the massive increase in debt as essential. I think he should have focused almost 100% on fixing the economy…with maybe one other “big” initiative like health care (which truly can be linked to economic recovery). IMO his big govt proposals for energy and education should have waited until after the off-year elections in 2010…or depending on the rate of economic recover, until after his reelection in 2012.
With this tactical error, and lack of focus on economic recovery, he puts everything at risk.
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