http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090821/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_poll Poll: Americans losing confidence in Obama WASHINGTON – A new poll says that Americans, concerned over the future of health care reform and anxious about the growing federal budget deficit, are losing faith in President Barack Obama. The Washington Post-ABC News survey found that less that half of Americans — 49 percent — say they believe the president will make the right decisions for the country. That's down from 60 percent at the 100-day mark of the Obama presidency. The poll published Friday says Obama's overall approval is 57 percent, 12 points lower than it was at its peak in April. Fifty-three percent disapprove of the way he's handling the budget deficit and his approval on health care continues to deteriorate. The national survey was conducted Aug. 13-17 and has a sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Teh sux0r!! I always find it funny how these questions are framed to illicit the response the pollster wants. P.S. basso is pissed off he didn't get to post this
I guess these polls only mean something when Obama's numbers are down and don't mean zip when his numbers are high. Very consistent.
but he sure did his first 9 months...even pre 9/11 Obama's being exposed as nothing more than a typical politician
The American political system is purposely designed to limit radical divergences in policy. The President sets the tone and the course but he does not make law. (unless he exceeds his constitutional limits and makes policy with executive orders and signing statements) The American people are use to problems being neatly solved within a one hour format. They have lttle patience or depth of understanding. The stimulus money isn't even spent yet the program is a failure. The massive political process of health reform has only begun but any dissent is a failure. The disillusionment was entirely predictable, in fact I believe I predicted it during the campaign. In the electronic information age lacking any journalistic integrity, fomenting dissent is easy. We elect presidents for four years so I'm not too concerned about daily popularity fluctuations. I want Mr. Obama to just keep his down and keep grinding.
Well progressives are loosing trust with Obama as he is appearing like a weak appeaser who can't take on the minority, but determined conservative remnant. ********* Op-Ed Columnist Obama’s Trust Problem PAUL KRUGMAN Published: August 20, 2009 According to news reports, the Obama administration — which seemed, over the weekend, to be backing away from the “public option” for health insurance — is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives. Well, I’m shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise. A backlash in the progressive base — which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory — has been building for months. The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it’s also a proxy for broader questions about the president’s priorities and overall approach. The idea of letting individuals buy insurance from a government-run plan was introduced in 2007 by Jacob Hacker of Yale, was picked up by John Edwards during the Democratic primary, and became part of the original Obama health care plan. One purpose of the public option is to save money. Experience with Medicare suggests that a government-run plan would have lower costs than private insurers; in addition, it would introduce more competition and keep premiums down. And let’s be clear: the supposed alternative, nonprofit co-ops, is a sham. That’s not just my opinion; it’s what the market says: stocks of health insurance companies soared on news that the Gang of Six senators trying to negotiate a bipartisan approach to health reform were dropping the public plan. Clearly, investors believe that co-ops would offer little real competition to private insurers. Also, and importantly, the public option offered a way to reconcile differing views among Democrats. Until the idea of the public option came along, a significant faction within the party rejected anything short of true single-payer, Medicare-for-all reform, viewing anything less as perpetuating the flaws of our current system. The public option, which would force insurance companies to prove their usefulness or fade away, settled some of those qualms. That said, it’s possible to have universal coverage without a public option — several European nations do it — and some who want a public option might be willing to forgo it if they had confidence in the overall health care strategy. Unfortunately, the president’s behavior in office has undermined that confidence. On the issue of health care itself, the inspiring figure progressives thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat who talks of “bending the curve” but has only recently begun to make the moral case for reform. Mr. Obama’s explanations of his plan have gotten clearer, but he still seems unable to settle on a simple, pithy formula; his speeches and op-eds still read as if they were written by a committee. Meanwhile, on such fraught questions as torture and indefinite detention, the president has dismayed progressives with his reluctance to challenge or change Bush administration policy. And then there’s the matter of the banks. I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing. But I’ve had many conversations with people who voted for Mr. Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money. When I press them, it turns out that they’re really angry about the bailouts rather than the stimulus — but that’s a distinction lost on most voters. So there’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that’s why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar. Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted. But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him. It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled. Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable. So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/opinion/21krugman.html?_r=1
Barring another cataclysmic event to bind us, this country will probably never see a wide consensus of opinion again. There are no headlines in centrist agreement.
