Found via the Instapundit, a new MSNBC headline trumpets, “Poll: Obama loses ground on health care — NBC/WSJ survey also shows a drop in his overall job-approval rating.” Or as Jennifer Rubin puts it, “Obama Is Tanking: Is It Unemployment … or Is It Him?”
As Jonah Goldberg notes, this highlights the Catch-22 our 44th president is caught in:
[Thomas Frank of the Wall Street Journal] might need to contemplate the fact that Obama’s personal popularity is falling precisely because of the “reforms” Thomas Frank endorses. It’s a nice catch-22. Socialized medicine needs Obama to be popular in order to pass, and socialized medicine is making Obama unpopular.
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Gosh, maybe if he governed as the moderate centrist he originally held himself out to be (or was percieved as by say, David Brooks, Chris Buckley, etc.) instead of attempting to transform a wildly diverse economy into a command and control corporatist version as much as possible before November of 2010, his poll numbers wouldn’t be listing so soon into his administration. Or as Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart tells MSNBC in the above-linked article, “This is a president who needs a vacation.”
With all the bombast displayed by the Democratic party and its supporters of Obama being compared to FDR, JFK, LBJ, MLK and a host of other great historical figures, the only person I see him even coming close to is Jimmy Carter — hardly a cause for celebration and fond memories. This is what happens when we elect politicians based upon charisma and image rather than plausible constructive ideas and experience. Anyone who understood Obama’s past voting record and (lack of) genuine political experience on a national and international level could not be surprised, or dismayed at his tanking poll numbers, or that he is not a “moderate”.
Why is it that when Sarah Palin’s poll numbers tank, the polls are unreliable and nobody pays attention to them? When Obama’s poll numbers tank, it’s the missing chapter from the New Testament?
It’s true that his poll numbers are declining but the Republicans don’t have one single candidate who’s poll numbers are rising in any form what so ever. The shining star is the “Klondike Dimwit” Sarah Baraquitter who is now down to 40% approval. Don’t think Democrats should worry about anything just yet. They need to get the health care reform put through and put people back to work or NO Democrats will be getting re-elected.
Frankly, the mistake that Team Obama made these last few weeks is to focus the public’s attention on his healthcare package. They were perfectly content in their “ignorant bliss” up till then, and he had to go and get their attention. When you’re messing with somebody’s personal business, it’s best not to tell them about it.
Reminds me of the Rumsfeld attributed (actually Jed Babbin) quote … “going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion“. Obama should leave the accordion at home.
Syntax, one reason is that the poll numbers of the sitting President are just a tiny little smidge more significant than the poll numbers on a now-retired Alaska governor, strange as that may sound.
Like it or not, those polls (even if skewed or wrong) have a direct impact on just how much arm-twisting the President can do to get tough bills passed, like the ones he is proposing as we speak.
Add to that the simple fact that any time a media organization thought to be sympathetic to the “Left” or “Right” reports something that goes against their own sympathies, people sit up and take notice. If ‘Mother Jones’ lays into Bush over a Dubai ports deal or a Harriet Myers, yeah yeah, whatever. But when National Review and Weekly standard do, he (Bush) had damn well better take notice.
Many of these polls orginate from the MSM, and have been repeatedly deconstructed for favoring Democrats. If those polls show Obama tanking, there’d better be alarms going off in the White House.
Hope that clarifies it for you.
And just to speak to the general theme here, I have noted in many blog comments that, over the past year I have heard many an MSMer opine about “Obama’s superlative political skills, etc”…. and since moment one I have not seen a hint of it. Yes, he got nominated and elected, no small thing, but if you want to deconstruct that, the biggest factors in his success had nothing to do with any strategy on Obama’s part. I speak of the relentless MSM bias against Bush that stretched long before Obama showed up, the real and perceived mistakes in prosecuting the Iraq War (which Bush won, BTW), the general issue of race and the desire to move beyond it, and the “interesting” and still under-investigated financial events of September 2008 that killed the McCain campaign.
What did Obama ever do that marked him as some sort of master strategist? Anyone? Bueller? He was a good speaker compared to Bush… or McCain. That’s about it.
And now, he is in this fix because he is NOT a “master politician” at all. He has put all his political eggs in baskets that cannot hold them, he has squandered his huge favorable poll numbers, he has antagonized the middle and done little to reward his friends, and he has given no one any reason to think that, one year from now, his strategy will gradually be revealed to us all, a la Reagan from 1981-1984.
I see nothing other than a day to day response to events, and that response based on nothing to do with history or precedent, but rather standard leftist shibboleths doomed to fail. And he hasn’t even left himself much room to move to the center down the road, while our most likely foreign policy surprises will come from the very people whose side he seems to take at every opportunity.
In the immortal words of Admiral James T. Kirk….
“Khan, I’m laughing at the ‘superior intellect’.”
Syntax missed the Messiah being booed as his motorcade arrived for YET ANOTHER health care town hall. As a lefty, his brain damage will not allow him to process that free Americans will resist this enslavement via the medical system.
Have you seen the Obama Joker poster>