Back in 2008, when Barack Obama was running for President, Republicans, especially John McCain, said Obama did not have the experience to be president.
Democrats didn’t want to believe that. They thought it was OK to campaign on hope and change, and a new youthful perspective would be imprinted on the highest office in the land.
Of course, all that is ancient history now, and that youthful perspective has been imprinted not only on the presidency, but also throughout the US and around the world.
The latest Bloomberg News poll shows that democrats and republicans now know that experience is important, not to mention honesty and integrity, and probably a lot of other important nouns.
To virtually no conservative’s surprise, President Barack Obama’s approval rating has sunk to a new low. Obama’s ratings have been in a progressive downward spiral since the 2012 election, currently down at 44 percent.
The issue that caused this new low was the negotiated release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Guantanamo Taliban commanders, who may yet get back to the battlefield to kill more Afghans, Americans and others.
In the recent past, some polling experts said Obama would recover from the disastrous Obamacare rollout in October, 2013. In fact, Democrats were counting on the people’s notoriously short memories to resurrect their election chances. Unfortunately for Obama and democrats, and fortunately for conservatives, the disastrous Bergdahl swap and a series of other world and domestic incidents have kept his poll numbers not only low, but heading south.
The Bloomberg poll was conducted by Iowa-based Selzer & Co., from June 6 to 9. It wasn’t just a single issue that caused the slide – it was a range of important things. Obama’s performance was resoundingly rejected on the economy by 57 percent; healthcare by 58 percent; the budget deficit by 63 percent; on negotiating with House Republicans by 55 percent; and the Veterans Affairs wait list scandal by 51 percent. 51 percent disapproved of the Bergdahl swap.
J. Ann Selzer, founder of Selzer & Co., told Bloomberg News, “In the past, Obama’s likeability has stayed ahead of perceptions of job performance. It appears he is no longer likeable enough.”
Although many people are upset with the way illegal immigrants are flooding into the US and immigration reform was said to be the reason for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s stunning defeat last Tuesday, the poll didn’t show it as a major issue on most people’s minds. There are worse problems, according to their responses.
The top issues, according to The Wall Street Journal were:
Jobs 28 percent Health care 17 percent Declining incomes 16 percent Federal deficit 13 percent
Strangely, the Obama “executive order strategy” that panders to the Hispanic vote, at the risk of national security, barely rated a mention.
It seems that one key to the president’s steadily declining popularity is the respondent’s perception of the United States as a world power. 1,005 people took the poll and a stunning 58 percent of them said the US is in a sharp decline. Even so, half of those surveyed don’t think it’s the president’s fault, but 48 percent think Obama is weak and foreign leaders are challenging him. That would especially be Russia’s Putin, and others who don’t like the US, but also allies.
Obama’s lowest poling numbers showed up in relation to the federal deficit. Sixty-three percent feel he is mishandling it, and 33 percent approve of how he negotiates with the Republican-dominated House.
So this tells us that hardcore Obama partisans would vote for him no matter what he does, even if the rest of the country is against him. Obama still has more than two years remaining in his second term, so we can probably expect more of the same.
