According to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll out today, in comparison with the approval ratings for modern elected presidents in December of their first year in office, Obama’s standing is the worst. The latest survey puts the president’s approval at 49 percent, with 46 percent disapproval. That is Obama’s narrowest margin of the year.
As a reference point, when he was inaugurated in January, Mr. Obama scored a job rating of 64 percent approve/25 percent disapprove in the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. To have seen the gap shrink from 39 percentage points to just 3, all in his first year in office, is staggering; the slide has been both rapid and consistent. And what must worry the White House and Democrats most is that this unprecedented drop is not tied to a single event (like, say, Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon) but rather to Obama’s entire governing agenda, from A to Z. The public is rising up against Obamaism, in almost all its particulars. This administration is therefore weaker than many people think – and if ObamaCare passes, it will be weaker still.
President Obama, like President Clinton before him, will need to make some fairly dramatic midcourse corrections. Whether he does or not is another matter (Obama strikes me as significantly more liberal and ideological than Clinton ever was). In any event, these are difficult days for modern liberalism. The high hopes and expectations of Obama and his supporters are crashing down all around them. And those who pronounced the death of conservatism earlier this year look sillier and sillier with every passing month.