Bingo. This is three hours old: A new Gallup poll finds President Obama with a new low job approval rating of 38%. At the rate at which his poll numbers are falling, he is on a pace to surpass the all-time low in the history of the presidency achieved by Harry S Truman, whose approval on February 9, 1952 was 22%. The man with the second lowest approval rating is Obamaâs nemesis and the man he has blamed repeatedly for his own failed presidency. That of course is George W. Bush, whose Gallup low of 25% was recorded on three separate dates in October of 2008. Obama has lost 14 percentage points in the Gallup poll in the last three months. With the economy continuing to list and unemployment hovering around 9%, it is not difficult to imagine the slide continuing. Equally discouraging for the president is his Rasmussen Approval Index rating, which is â26. The Approval Index rating is the difference between voters who Strongly Approve of the way the president is performing his role as president (currently 19%) and those who Strongly Disapprove (currently 45%). Rasmussen Reports writes: This is the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for President Obama. The previous low was â24 reached yesterday and also in September 2010. Additionally, the level of Strong Approval matches the lowest yet recorded. By way of comparison, President Bush had ratings near the end of his second term in the minus 30s. Perhaps most sobering of all is that in spite of the presidentâs recent executive order declaring backdoor amnesty for many illegal aliens, his approval among Hispanics fell to an all-time low of 44% percent, according to Gallup polling data released on Monday. That represents a decline of 41 points from the spring of 2009, when Obamaâs approval among Hispanic Americans peaked at 85%.
Obama's Gallup numbers show 12 states in play in 2012 August 15, 2011|By David Lauter, Los Angeles Times Twelve states constitute the likely battlegrounds for the 2012 election, based on Gallupâs state-by-state ratings of President Obamaâs approval level. The ratings, which aggregate Gallup polling done from January through June, came out just as Gallup was releasing its latest tracking poll showing Obamaâs approval nationwide at 39%, the lowest in his presidency. If Obamaâs national approval remains stuck at that level -- or even in the low 40s â then state-by-state assessments probably wonât matter much. Historically, presidents donât win re-election with that sort of approval rating.
We're all in trouble either way. Soon as the general population figures that out, maybe we can get out of this mess. I won't be holding my breath.
$14 trillion here and $14 trillion there and soon you're talking about real money. Seriously, our GDP is $14 trillion, too. The problem is not the size alone, it's ability to pay, thus, the deficit. Our deficit is a bad thing (though our creditors do not seem anywhere near as worried about it as we are), but of course it rises sharply during a nasty downturn, like the present one, for two very good reasons. One, tax receipts are down, since business and employment are down. Two, spending goes up, for social safety net programs. Moving one of these variables alone simply does not make for such dramatic deficit growth as moving both (in "opposite" directions) does. I believe everyone here has agreed at some point in the recent past that, so long as we're talking about the other guy's taxes and important government expenditure (not ourselves, of course, ahem), some taxation is too low, and some spending is too high.
Your brain has atrophied from too much time in Canada. By Odumbo's own definition, he's unpatriotic. Yeah, yeah, it's Bush's fault... http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=226031