The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 23% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-five percent (45%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -22. That’s the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for this president.
Daily Presidential Tracking Poll – Rasmussen Reports™.
BP, immigration, Sestakgate, end of the O-care bounce, and the Dow.
We are determined to encourage thoughtful discussion, so please be respectful to others. We also provide a set of Commenting Options - comment/commenter highlighting and ignoring, and commenter archives that you can access by clicking the commenter options button (
). Go to our Commenting Guidelines page for more details, including how to report offensive and spam commenting.
Actually JEM, I agree with all your points.
What I want to know is what the new Republican Congress,and then the New Republican President is going to do about the economy. More ReBubbling?
Wow, that might be a record!
What to do is an interesting question, while I know you and I do not agree on the gold standard, there is still the duty to protect the value of the dollar, and we clearly are not doing that now. The Fed is promoting massive liquidity and only the more dire issues surrounding the Euro have given us some breathing room. And on a daily basis when the world thinks Europe can be OK – China announced it wouldn’t sell its European debt – we see oil move up and the Euro rise. As I write the Euro is up to 1.23 and oil is sniffing $74 a barrel and the 10 yr US Bond has moved higher 20 basis points. What we have is a window, and so any US politician’s array of options will be dictated by how bad it is at that time. I tend to believe Europe will manage to keep most bondholders busy for the next few years so I will attack your question with the assumption we have a little more time.
Really I think what you need to do are a few primary things and I think you will have the political capital to do them both. One, re-evaluate laws which “privatize profit and publicize risk”. You really need to attack Freddie and Fannie hard, re-write what I assume will be a bad financial reform bill, restate the supremacy of bankruptcy laws, kill Sarbanes, and get rid of bills like the CRA. They are the engines of bubbles. Publically state there will be no “evolution” of employment law. Employers would like that.
Absolutely flatline the budget – and it will be politically popular, symbolically important and financially sound. This means you lay off people and cut the costs of all the rest. Everyone knows the govt overpays and has overly generous benefit packages. Introduce them to the real world. This has the added bonus of ticking off the public sector unions. If I was feeling really ambitious I would by executive order outlaw the unionization of public sector employees. There is no feedback mechanism to restrain their appetite. A great deal of our govt financial woes are as a result of the AFSCME and the SEIU.
The last area is entitlements. Very difficult but I think there would be some options here. Of course I would kill Obamacare day one, it is a budget busting, care rationing, monstrosity. In its place I would promote moving seniors in Medicare into Medicare Advantage accounts and cap the govt subsidy. If the govt contributes say $7000 a contract to Medicare today – it will do the same 5 years from now. Individual seniors can then determine the coverage levels they wish to pay for. This helps decrease the upward cost of Medicare and might make the program sustainable in the short term, plus would eliminate the cost shift from Medicare to private insurance; we have bigger issues in healthcare but that would be a start. On SS I really think you need to find a bridge to privatization and my thought would to be make SS optional, with another approved but privately held account option available, funded by an amount equal with the current taxes. I would probably start with under 30 types.
Thats a thought of what I would do.
@ Rex Caruthers:
Probly, way things are going, sad to say, but depends on events and the popular will developed on the basis of those events. An optimist might say that the bases of a dynamic and even explosively growing economy merely need to be unleashed. Quite an optimist.
I perceive the popular will to be greatly in favor of fiscal restraint. The questions are how long that will last if the economy doesn’t respond very favorably, and whether exogenous or seemingly exogenous events might come to dominate instead. If JEM’s assessment of Obama is correct, and you say you agree, then we have not yet begun to suffer the full effects.
If JEM’s assessment of Obama is correct, and you say you agree, then we have not yet begun to suffer the full effects.
Correct,but not complete. I see Obama as a political opportunist,who,against all odds,got himself elected. In terms of Operational&Financial Ability,that’s not his strength. He’s the Sales Guy who ended up as CEO over the CFO&COO. That being said,his opposition should be cautious about his weaknesses,because he’s a fanatic competitor,and if he wins in 2012,how will the Republican Ego recover from that if he’s as weak as they charactorize him.
@ Rex Caruthers:
Indeed. As I’ve pointed out before, even Jimmy Carter was reasonably well-positioned going into the last week of the 1980 campaign to be re-elected. If the Republicans merely succeed in convincing people that we’re going over the falls, the Democrats still might convince people that they’re offering a more comfortable barrel.
Going over the threatening falls in a drum,
Doesn’t insure we won’t re-elect the bum,
If he goes not the way of Billy’s bro Carter,
We’ll probably all end up living by barter,
Burning for fuel the greenbacks that fold,
Digging up back yards for disks of old gold.
CK MacLeod wrote:
@ Rex Caruthers:
Indeed. As I’ve pointed out before, even Jimmy Carter was reasonably well-positioned going into the last week of the 1980 campaign to be re-elected.
Jimmy Carter beat Reagan,John Andersen beat Carter.
?? Carter beat Reagan??
Carter beat Reagan??
You’re Right,if Carter had all of Anderson’s votes,he still would have lost by 4 million votes,I don’t know how Anderson’s 6 million votes would have changed the Electoral landslide.
I’m sure it gives you confidence that once located,a 2012 Republican Candidate of the quality of Reagan,will,no doubt beat Obama.
Oh, I see, I didn’t understand what you were saying in your post, my bad.
Just for a little perspective, Real ClearPolitics’s poll of polls gives a different picture.
Not to say that Obama doesn’t have problems, potentially big ones, but I don’t think he’s where R’s daily tracking shows him just yet.
@ bob:
Polls go up, polls go down, different polls measure different things. If I wanted to make the anti-Obama case, I’d point out that RealClear covers a longer span of time, and that the only thing keeping O in positive territory, barely, is the bulge he gets from a series of “all adults” polls from earlier in the month. If I wanted to make the no-reason-to-panic case I’d drag out the comparative presidential approval ratings charts.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-presapp0605-31.html
JEM wrote:
Oh, I see, I didn’t understand what you were saying in your post, my bad
JEM.it was my mistake,I misremembered,and thought that when you added up Anderson’s and Carters votes in 1980,that it was close,but Reagan was still 4M votes ahead. However,the Landslide in the Electoral College(Reagan got 90%) bore little resemblance to the popular outcome,as happens from time to time.
@CK
Just so. As I said, some perspective. Wasn’t really tryng to make a case for Obama as much as noting that the R poll looked awfully lonely by itself.
If I was trying to make a case, I might mention R’s habitual tilt toward the R’s.
lawl.
never trust rasmussen statistics.
im right.
so is Nate, and so is Kos.
Ras is dirty.
look at the generic congressional ballot on the poll of polls.
pretty outlier, eh?
Excepr Rasmussen actually comes closest to predicting elections, Kate,
PPI, Gallup, Opinion Dynamics, CBS, all are progressively more off from each other, up to three standard deviations, and no I’m not touching
that ‘wretched hive of scum and villainy’ that is the UD, that oil slick is cleaner than that
@ narciso:
It’s called “shoot the messenger.” Some people have a lot of difficulty processing the difference between polls of registered voters and polls of likely voters and MOE. Ras openly describes his methodology. It measures what it measures, in the way that it measures it, nothing else. None of these polls qualifies as “scientific.”
Has Silver adjusted his opinions on Ras since January?
(bold face and italics in the original):
If you’re running a news organization and you tend to cite Rasmussen’s polls disproportionately, it probably means that you are biased — it does not necessarily mean that Rasmussen is biased.
I wrote a post on the attack on Rasmussen at the time.
Speaking of Kos and outliers, it will be interesting to see who’s closer, the polls putting Fiorina 20 points ahead in Kali, or the DKos/R2000 poll from last Friday putting her 20 points behind.
Interestingly, today’s Raz poll has the PAI gap closing all the way back down to -12. Very volatile number.
@ narciso:
heres why.
Ras is running a narrative scam and right before elections he switches back to honest polling so he can keep his rep.
Nate Silver is on to him…too.
Rasmussen is to polling as FOXnews is to news.
In an attempt to shape the narrative, Ras is giving y’all unrealistic expectations.
Consider his poll of Paul against Conway….
Paul 59%, Conway 34%
does this make any sense at all?
democratic turnout in the primary was 2x republican turnout in the same day.
pretty soon rasmussen polls will have the same credibility as FOXnews…..except at election time.
;)
i <3 the UD.
do you know why Michael Steele's RNC site got pranked? Balloon-juicers and other liberal griefers used the auto-link tool to hook the site to bondage, porn and sextoy websites.
The new AOS site has passed TTC (total troll control) where more that 50% of content is generated by trolls, griefers, mobies, and pranklinkers.
The rightwing techno-luddites that built the RNC site and AOS don’t even know what webtrolls and griefers are, let alone how to prevent attacks.
Because geek culture is impenetrable to conservatives.
There are no geeks in the GOP.
That is how the TPM got blindsided by the teabagger meme…..the UD.
Heres your scifi tag of the day….the republican website America Speaks Out has been taken over by engineer-moties….the only solution is to nuke it from space.
Abandon ship!
aww …..you put my comment in the spam bucket.
it was such a good one too.
>:(
@ CK MacLeod:CK….Nate is specifically calling out Ras to explain his methodology in both the posts i linked.
polling is not like tv news.
if Ras is scamming, he will be caught.
@ strangelet:
Twarnt moi, desconocidita, the spam filter ain’t a big fan of comments that mention sex toys, bondage, porn, etc. Heck, I’m Zeus of this here Olympus, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this comment gets filtrated.
@ strangelet:
That’s a pretty funny article about the R website. I stuck it in Recommended Browsing.
And, for the record, I think a party that can’t figure out what it thinks deserves to underperform, but the Ds are fielding such a tippy-top all-stupid team this year, they seem bound to give up a big part of the ’06-’08 imbalance.
You know it is conceivable there’s a little astroturf at work, or it could
be a Paulian thing, that would explain a lot
@ CK MacLeod: Highlander, do you see how culturally isolated the right has become?
There is no way their webdesigners and sys-ads could protect the AOS….they were underseige by webcreatures they had never even imagined….trolls, griefers, mobies and pranklinkers…..4chan avatars breathed into political life.
That is why the TPM got blindsided by the teabagger meme.
TPM means Talking Points Memo to me, Desconocidita. The other alternatives that come up on a quick search seem even less relevant. Could you maybe every once in a while speak in words for us crusty old cons? It kind of culturally isolates you when you speak in abbreviated l33t or whatever the neo-/post-l33t term for being fashionably incomprehensible is.
So a strangelet is something that may or may not exist, that explains a great deal
@ tachyon:
it may or may not explain anything.
but he’s got some charm.
She, Frog, at least I think so
she’s functionally she… as she as she wants to be… it’s the internet… you other guys know what TPM is?
CK MacLeod wrote:
Could you maybe every once in a while speak in words for us crusty old cons
TPM
might mean
http://downloadmirror.intel.com/15193/eng/D915GMH_TPM_QuickRefGuide01.pdf
As an HR guy, I am seeing the quiet killer and of course we all see the very public one.
Obama’s criticism of Bush’s handling of Katrina, which had some validity, is painful when you realize Obama’s performance with the BP spill is worse. It is hurting the cover he gets from the left because the environmental wackos (to borrow a phrase) are now taking shots at him. Jindal is waiting on someone to at least respond to his sand berm proposal to try and protect the Louisiana marsh and coastline. I think we are on almost 2 weeks now. The lack of leadership is there for all to see.
His handling of Arizona illegal alien situation has likewise bit him in a very powerful way. I think like 70% of the population is now in support of it and Obama’s lackeys who criticized without reading it (it looks like federal immigration statutes) just made his administration look stupid. The reason he cannot fight it is because the only argument he has – usurption of federal authority – has already been ruled on in the favor of the state vs the fed in a previous SCOTUS ruling. When you add on the incredibly stupid handling of the president of Mexico’s visit and congressional address you are losing blue collar democrats. PA 12 was won by a democrat who sounded just like a conservative republican, running against everything Obama stands for, such that if he now fails to vote like it, he will get wiped out in November.
Lastly healthcare. We all know it is unpopular with the important 60% in favor of repeal level being just broken. But more importantly is the role the nation’s employers (people like me) are playing in proving no you likely won’t keep your current plan, and the costs are going up. HHS’s inability to provide very basic interpretations of the laws requirements has every benefit department is slowing everything up. Word I heard is that everytime they make a decison the badness that we all said was there becomes obvious and the politics go a little further south. So they are being pressured to stop making decisions (just like their C in C) in order to stop the bleeding. With each delay, employers let their employees know they cannot answer their questions because the govt regulations aren’t complete. A vicious cycle.
Obama is a weak leader who has no ability to persuade anyone to his side. His support among black American’s is propping up his poll numbers, he is esssentially around post 2006 Bush numbers and still falling. He looks like a deer in the headlight, angry that the spot light on these other concerns is stopping his larger agenda. The GOP can still screw up (see Rand Paul), but Obama is dead in the ocean and taking on water. He will sink further. McMahon was a terrible choice in Connecticut – but if the GOP can pull that one one out the Senate will flip. Boxer is in a fight, and now Washington is in play. Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvannia, Delaware are probably already gone. And Obama will be a drag on each and every one of the rest.