President Obama’s Gallup approval/disapproval rating is now 44 percent/48 percent, a new low.
As a reference point, Obama’s three-day average was 52 percent when Chris Christie beat Jon Corzine in New Jersey and Bob McDonnell destroyed Creigh Deeds in Virginia. And Obama’s approval/disapproval rating on January 20, 2010 — when Republican Scott Brown shocked the political world by winning the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy — Obama’s three-day average (January 19-21) was 49 percent/45 percent (it was 47/47 on January 20).
This matters because presidential approval ratings are an important, if not always a decisive, factor in political races — and right now Obama’s public standing is considerably below where it was last November and below where it was in January, when Democrats were getting pounded by GOP candidates.
The bad news for Democrats keeps rolling in, day by day. And as the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf continues unabated, the job picture remains bleak, trust in government reaches all-time lows, and disdain for Congress approaches all-time highs, there’s little reason for Democrats to view the midterm elections with anything less than anxiety bordering on panic.
That may change – but if it does, more likely than not it will change for the worse.
“Ms. Palin’s experience in government makes Barack Obama look like George C. Marshall,” David Frum, resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute.
I guess you’ll have to educate Frum as to the merits you speak of.
Of course, Karl Rove himself says Palin is a campaign decision, not a governance decision. The problem with that thinking, is that she has to clear the competence/comfort hurdle before she can have any positive impact at the polls.
I don’t think the Obama camp will engage for the simple fact that if he does, he will call scrutiny to his own weaknesses and lack of experience. That’s why the pick of Palin has been a strategic pick. I’m pretty sure McCain considered the weakness of Palin’s inexperience, but he also understood that this part of the calculus would not change the fact that it is Obama, who with his inexperience, is sitting atop the ticket and not as the No. 2.
The ad ends with John McCain saying: “I’m John McCain & I approve this Message”.
Would it be (a) legal (b) a good idea, to change it to Sarah Palin saying: “I’m Sarah Palin & I approve this message”
Amit,
I think they all have to be approved by McCain under the campaign law that bears his name.
Will someone please enumerate for me the mandatory experience for the office of the president of the United States? But be careful in your answer, because I’m pretty sure I can find at least one “effective” president from the past who didn’t have it, or one “substandard” president who did.
My point; “experience” is not an accurate predictor of performance, one way or the other. This comes up over and over again. What am I missing here?
Raj, Frum is wrong. Nothing can make Obama looks strong or decisive–he’s isn’t.
“Of course, Karl Rove himself says Palin is a campaign decision, not a governance decision. The problem with that thinking, is that she has to clear the competence/comfort hurdle before she can have any positive impact at the polls.”
Now, why does Sarah Palin have to clear these hurdles, when Barack Obama was just ushered onto the Presidential scene with a speech he gave in 2004?
The mandatory experience for the office of the President of the United States is being a natural-born American citizen of at least 35 years of age.
Those are the only mandates, so by definition, nothing else is “mandatory.”
David Frum is part of the Beltway elite that wants the votes of the unclean masses but doesn’t want one of their number to take power. For the elite, you need an Ivy League graduate. And if your teenage daughter gets pregnant, you abort the child so it won’t interfere with HER Ivy League education.
NiteTrain: “My point; “experience” is not an accurate predictor of performance, one way or the other. This comes up over and over again. What am I missing here?”
Well, I generally agree with your point and most Obama people will. (You can only stretch the point so far. You aren’t going to pick a designated hitter whose never picked up a bat or a truck driver with no license.) The problem from the McCain side is that he spent months saying experience was what made him best qualified to be commander in chief and that the war on terror is the great challenge of our day. He then proceeded to pick a VP with a very thin resume, and only state-level experience, who he doesn’t know well. It’s stunningly inconsistent. And at 72, he needs someone who really is ready on day one to step in on matters of foreign policy and war.
Obama’s experience is a legit issue, and people have kicked his tires enough (for most) to be comfortable with him. Palin will face the same trial, only more intense, because the election’s only a few months away. That’s how our system works. It ain’t beanbag. You have to run the gauntlet.
(I said something very similar to this about David Brooks yesterday…)
I disagree with David Frum on many, many things, and as with Brooks I consider him to be a centrist more than a conservative. But he does not deserve the type of comments directed at him in #9.
His book on the 70s (“How We Got Here”) is excellent, and his blog on NRO is, too.
what media bias?
http://bokertov.typepad.com/btb/2008/09/media-idolizes.html
Let’s posit that Obama and Palin have about the same level of experience, and so do McCain and Biden. Let’s also posit that there’s only a 0.5% chance that the President (McCain or Obama) would die in the first year in office.
Vote for McCain/Palin, and you have a 0.5% chance of having a low-experience figure in the Oval Office.
Vote for Obama/Biden, and you have a 99.5% chance of having a low-experience figure in the Oval Office.
I would rather have the less experienced figure at the bottom of the ticket than the top.
The other interesting point of comparison is John Edwards. Edwards was a first-term Senator when he was the VP nominee, and he had no significant government experience prior to being a Senator. By any reasonable count, Edwards had less experience then than Palin does now–and yet you didn’t hear this breathless terror over whether he had sufficient experience.
If she shows that she can speak credibly to national issues, she’ll be fine. She has far more executive experience than Obama does, commanding a government with over 12 departments, 25,000 employees and $10B budget. She’s performed fabulously. While she’s been doing that, Obama’s been running his Senate office and following David Axelrod along on the campaign.
notice how it’s become a contest between obama and palin? this can’t be good for obama.
Chris,
Maybe a speech pushed Obama onto the presidental scene. But it’s his competence to play at that level that has kept him there. He built a great organization, got himself up to speed on the issues, showed he can communicate, motivate, control (more often than not) a narrative, navigate the media, look the part, and counterpunch. I think these are all objective truths.
Palin will have to prove some of these things too.
raj, my only point is that the top of one ticket has been reduced to arguing his comparison to the bottom of the other ticket.
http://www.nationalenquirer.com/sarah_palin_at_war_with_her_daughter_over_pregnancy_wedding/celebrity/65370
raj, sorry… just saw you were prob responding to a different chris
OK, anyone who takes the National Enquirer seriously can officially go play in the kiddie pool.
As for experience, what I think is clearly relevant is this: what have you actually accomplished in your life, both in politics and out? Gov. Palin has a considerable list, including a very effective and productive term so far as governor. Sen. Obama . . . edited the Harvard Law Review but, according to his campaign, wrote almost nothing for it . . . left no lasting mark as a lawyer, or in teaching law . . . warmed a chair in the state legislature . . . has done nothing of significance in the U. S. Senate . . . that is the inexperience that bothers me.
Anyone ignoring the class component of this is being naive. The Palins are utterly alien beings to much of the Beltway punditocracy. They appear to them as white trash hicks, with a barefoot and pregant teenager in tow. Nothing could be worse than being stuck with a child at seventeen. Presumably Bristol Palin won’t be going to college now and will spend her time caring for a child and husband. I think this appears utterly unnatural to much of the Beltway elite. How can you let this distressingly fecund family anywhere near the corridors of national power? Alaska is one thing, it’s barely removed from a state of savagery, obviously.
rob- yu don’t take them seriously at your peril
The McCain-Palin campaign would like nothing more than to debate the relative creds of Senator Obama and Gov. Palin. It is a trap that Senator Obama would dare not enter.
Waiting in the wings, Senator Clinton’s exclamation: “…Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2004″
By the way, this new veep standard is rather a new one. For much of the history of the country, very little non-political thought went into the selection of the Veep nominee. Just think of all the non-entities who have held that post. Can you even name many of them off the cuff?
Obama is asking people to roll the dice on the presidency itself. His experience is strikingly limited for the top spot. He’s essentially done nothing of note in his few years in the senate but run for president. Palin at least has led a state. So now Obama’s defenders are reduced to saying that running a presidental campaign alone qualifies one for the presidency. There’s something very circular about that.
Ultimately, though, it’s all about judgment of the person. If Obama convinces enough people that he has the smarts and strength of character and judgment to do the job, okay for him. Palin, though going for the number 2 spot, needs to do some of that too. Her problem is she has a shorter time frame in which to do it.
When Dan Quayle was selected by Bush 1, at least that was in early August, I believe, and the most intense media bashing naturally had eased by the fall (though the debate didn’t help!). But in the end, people did realize they were voting for president first, not vice president, and Bush 1 won by a landslide. That Bentsen would have beaten Quayle was beside the point.
Actually, the best part of a Democratic response to this ad is that AGAIN they would be comparing their PRESIDENTIAL nominee against the Republicans’ VICE-Presidential nominee. And that comparison always favors the GOP.
Actaully it has not been the Mccain postion all along that that Obama lacked experince.
That attack came mostly from the Clintons. It didn’t work. That’s why Mccain had to go w/ palin. It gives him a different line of attack. He can be the change and reform candidate too.
I think the power of the MSM is overrated. Everyone knows they are biased and discounts them as such. They are doing more damage to themselves and their reputations than they are doing to Palin. That is why they are in decline. This will accelerate that trajectory. they have become thier own worst enemy.
BTW, while no defender – the National Enquirer is the only ‘media’ outlet to actually go after JohnEdwards. Kind of ironic huh ?
I like Frum. But he’s pro-abortion and not at all what you’d call a cultural conservative. As of his last book–which argues that the GOP should take back power by becoming more like the Democrats–I’m not even sure he’s conservative at all outside of national security issues. Palin, and McCain’s selection of her, refutes everything Frum argues for on all counts. No surprise he’s not a fan.
RE: my Frum comment. I’m sorry if I went over the line with Frum, but sitting here in the provinces, I can’t tell you how much distaste I have for much of the Beltway elites, both conservative and liberal. To them this is a club you very much have to have the right “credentials” for joining. Even Bush 2 had to be accepted because he came from New England aristocracy and was Ivy League. There’s a huge class component to the Palin Upror in the Beltway right now. The best thing that could happen to DC is to let some new blood in, but the old blood won’t have it. Obama? Don’t make me laugh. He’s the same old elite mentality (urban, Ivy League, lawyer, academic leftist), he just comes in slightly different packaging.
I have read much of Frum’s writings, and I have never picked up on the idea that he is anything other than anti-abortion. I would admit that the issue does not seem to take quite the priority for him that it does for me, but still…
And even if he were not pro-life, and even if he were a conservative *Only* on “national security issues”– well, national security is a substantial part of American politics today.
being conservative on national security issues means you agree with pat buchanan and ron paul. i doubt david frum is in this catagory in fact I know he isn’t because he called conservatives who were opposed to the iraq war “unpatriotic” back in 03
It seems that the MSM and others in the Obama camp fail to appreciate the fact that the best they can realistically hope for in this Obama vs. Palin experience debate is getting the voters to believe that Obama is a bit more experienced. (I suspect a much different outcome would occur if you held a debate–as each non-rabid voter will in his or her own head–as to who is the bigger phony.)
Win the battle, lose the war.
And on the abortion question, I think Palin really illustrates a fascinating moral question. Pols routinely say they are personally pro-life, but what would they really do if the test came? Abortion is such an easy option today. Would these pols and these media types really let their child be “punished with a baby” and have her life “ruined,” etc.? You know the life track for a lot of these people, conservatives as well, is go to college first, establish your high-powered career, marry (maybe) in your late thirties or forties, have one kid or adopt, or maybe get a cat.
To these people it must be inconceivable that someone like Bristol Palin could be even on the horizon of a vice-presidential candidate. It’s just so lower class! All the best people get abortions. One could (and should) say they shouldn’t have had sex, but much of the elite takes it for granted that teens will have sex, so that logically cannot be the objection. It has to be that they find the idea of Bristol Palin having a baby unbearably distasteful. Even the fact that the two teens are marrying doesn’t erase the stigma, because elites find the idea of anyone marrying before college simple mind-boggling. All the best people sleep around with multiple sex partners in college (using birth control of course!).
I can’t forego mentioning the example of Campbell Brown, who was hectoring the McCain spokesman the other day about Bristol Palin’s shame. She’s a liberal, so I assume she has no problem with birth control or abortions. So where does she see shame? Let’s look at Campbell, shall we?
Born 1968. Father a Lousiana pol (who did jail time for political corruption apparently, but, no matter). Graduated from Regis University, went into journalism.
At 38 married Dan Senor in 2006, at 39 had a baby in December 2007. So here’s Campbell, back at work again, despite having a baby less than a year old (does that make her a bad mother?). Be that as it may, it’s a very different life experience from that of Bristol Palin, isn’t it? I’m sure, like much of her ilk, she can’t imagine a teen getting pregnant, keeping the child and sacrificing a “career.”
Pedant – “the Beltway elites”
I tend to agree with you, but it’s important to remember that many if not most of today’s beltway elites were “trailer trash” to the beltway elites before their patrons brought them to Washington. I’m thinking of the entourages that followed Jimmy from the peanut farm, Ronnie from the backlot, and Bill from the poultry packing plants.
Them chickens is got lipstick on, but they’s still peckin in the dirt.
Frum’s a neocon, of course. I know this word gets horribly over-used, but there really are some. And paleocon Pat Buchanan and his sis Bay love Sarah Palin. That alone should be giving Frum heartburn. On the plus side for Frum, Pat is worried about the neocons “getting to” Sarah.
Oh, the media’s definition of “white trash” is a protean one.
Bill Clinton came from an extremely trashy background, but I guess the Ivy League school was supposed to wipe that away. Except that he gets to the White House and has Monica Lewinsky performing oral sex on him while he’s on the phone with Arafat. There’s class for you.
And this guy gets ovations at the Dem convention this year.
pedant- they already have gotten to her. she blew off an appearence at a pro life convention to meet with lieberman and other AIPACS and pledged her fealty to the boyz in tha hood in tel aviv
“My point; “experience” is not an accurate predictor of performance, one way or the other.”
I’m not so sure – there’s experience that does matter – executive vs. legislative.
Someone on the NRO Corner dug up this stat:
5 greatest Presidents – 4 had Governor/Commander/Mayor executive experience (only exception: Lincoln).
5 worst Presidents – ALL had only Senate or House of Reps experience – no executive experience.
So – odds are much better w/ Presidents that have executive experience; odds are much more likely you get a dud if they only have legislative experience.