Catch-44

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.

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.”