Tag: approval rating
Obama’s Success Has Driven Republicans Out Of Their Minds

Obama’s Success Has Driven Republicans Out Of Their Minds

On the day that Donald Trump finally acknowledge that President Obama was born in the United States and that the GOP nominee can’t win without declaring “victory” and attempting to terminally muddy the waters on the issue that made him a conservative hero, the president’s approval hit 54 percent in the Gallup daily tracking poll.

For some perspective, Ronald Reagan was at 53 percent in early September 1988, according to Gallup. And in early September of 2008, George W. Bush was at 31 percent — a number that would only be impressive if it were first two digits of a shortstop’s batting average.

These numbers matter not because a contemporary approval rating is the final verdict on the tenure of a president or the achievement of any individual. Gallup’s last measure of Martin Luther King Jr.’s popularity in 1966 had him at 32 percent approval, closer to W. Bush than to Obama. Opposing the Vietnam War and launching the Poor People’s Campaign made Dr. King a prophet reviled by many in his own time, not a savvy politician.

However, this measure of Obama’s popularity, which is at heights not seen since the years following his two electoral college landslides, gives us a nation’s sense of the president’s effectiveness after nearly eight years. And it suggests he benefits from some perspective provided by the candidates who may replace him.

Almost no honest person thinks President Obama would be denied a third term in November were he permitted to run. Yet Republicans continue to act as if he’s a drowning failure like George W. Bush, tied to an anchor made of a cartoon Jimmy Carter and an even more corrupt Richard Nixon.

It isn’t just Obama’s approval ratings to prove the lie in that delusion.

A U.S. Census report found that middle class incomes rose at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2015 as poverty fell — one year after Obamacare went into full effect and two years after we raised taxes on the rich, two Obama policies Republicans assured us would destroy the economy. The last seven years haven’t been perfect, the gains of 2015 are still digging us out of the mess the last Republican president left us with, just as our foreign policy is an endless attempt to deal with the hell Bush and Cheney unleashed in the Middle East.

But when it comes to steering us from a depression, launching a green energy revolution, expanding LGBTQ rights, insuring 20 million and uniting the world in an effort to fight climate change, President Obama’s legacy must be ranked with the most consequential presidents of the last century, especially if the gains he inspired are not reversed.

But Republicans seem intent on doing just that — deregulating Wall Street, un-insuring millions, bending the tax code back toward the rich, empowering those who’d discriminate against same-sex couples or the sick and unleashing carbon polluters. And Obama’s success only seems to make them more determined to do all of this as soon as possible.

It would be easy just to blame the billionaire funders behind the party for engineering an agenda that only benefits them. But the hatred they’ve sewed within their party, with decades of highly effective marketing that has created an self-sustaining media often infused with the coded racism of dog whistle politics, has fostered a monster that threatens the mad scientists who built the laboratory that gave him life.

By nominating the birther-est birther who ever birthed, the GOP revealed that was seeking a nominee who not only disagreed with President Obama but reviled him and considered him less than an American. But the party’s depravity was even more evident during the GOP primary when not one of his opponent called out the racism behind Trump’s birther campaign, which lasted well after President Obama’s long-form birth certificate was revealed.

Hatred of Obama is so strong that Republicans are joining in Trump’s sick assertion that Vladimir Putin — who has gutted democracy and the economy in Russia — had been a better leader for his people than President Obama.

When conservative anti-Obama/Clinton agitpropper Dinesh D’Souza expressed his admiration for Putin’s love for his country, several Twitter users noted that if Obama loved America enough to deal with critics the way Putin does, D’Souza would be dead.

Unwilling to back off his dictator worship, D’Souza noted that famed chess master and Putin critic Garry Kasparov is still alive.

Kasparov’s response?

Trump’s lying attempt to pin birtherism on the Clinton campaign, his insinuation that Clinton should face death because she supports gun safety legislation and his argument that black people are a unitary blob of impoverished fools who’ve been tricked by the Democratic Party are all common tropes in the comment sections of Republican blogs. But now this hateful propaganda has passed up through the articles into the mouth of the party’s nominee for president. The party has become the people it used to hide.

This isn’t to say Republicans aren’t torn.

A small but vocal group of conservatives think that Trump is a terrible racist. But they’re a tiny minority compared the the vast majority of the party who think he’s a wonderful racist. And even those who oppose Trump with all their being are willing to take the logical step to support the only candidate who can beat them. The hatred of Democrats is so ingrained that they’d rather elect a man who they don’t trust with access to nuclear weapons.

There’s some horrible justice to the GOP’s flaming hatred of Obama becoming the inferno that could destroy the party.

They could have embraced the changes America is going through. Instead they waged a war on voting like we haven’t seen since the 1960s. They could have acknowledged the mistakes of economy built to drive heath to the top. Instead they nominated the personification of welfare for the rich. They could have passed bipartisan immigration reform. Instead they walled themselves into a obsession with deportations.

Either Republicans are about to be rewarded for stirring up hatred at immigrants, refugees and vague foreign interests of all sorts, the way Republican Pete Wilson won an easy reelection in 1994 by stoking similar fires, or they’re exacerbating the demographic trends that could eventually deny them the White House forever.

Either way, they invited into our politics an existential threat — one that could consume just the GOP, or all of us.

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama addresses the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 46th annual Legislative Conference Phoenix Awards Dinner in Washington, September 17, 2016. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

Compared To Current Candidates, Obama Is Looking Good

Compared To Current Candidates, Obama Is Looking Good

Small wonder that President Barack Obama is enjoying his highest approval rating — now at 51 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll — since his second inaugural. Voters need only take a cursory survey of the shenanigans on the campaign trail to conclude that the man occupying the Oval Office deserves respect, admiration and appreciation.

But it isn’t just in comparison to the current crop of candidates that Obama’s political and intellectual gifts are clear. Judged against the panorama of American presidents, Obama will come out in the topmost tier — a leader with courage, tenacity, wisdom, character, even glimmers of brilliance.

He came into office in 2009 riding a wave of giddy enthusiasm about his election as the nation’s first black president. But that enthusiasm was soon overwhelmed by an equally potent backlash fueled by resentment, racism and fear of the demographic change — the challenge to white privilege — that his election represented. That backlash has supplied formidable opposition to every single initiative Obama has proposed, a force of resistance, reaction and repression that has been willing to damage the country to jeopardize his presidency.

Historians will reckon with that force when they judge Obama’s accomplishments. Despite resistance, he dealt ably with the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a financial near-collapse that forced hundreds of thousands of people into foreclosure, that bankrupted businesses and individuals alike, that propelled unemployment into the double digits. While wages are still stagnant (they’ve been stagnating for decades), unemployment is now down to 5 percent, near a historic low.

Perhaps Obama’s greatest domestic accomplishment was pushing through the Affordable Care Act, the biggest expansion of health care since Medicare was passed. Democrats have been attempting to expand access to doctors and hospitals since the era of Franklin Roosevelt; Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to push through an expansion in the 1990s but failed. While Obamacare is hardly perfect, it has given millions of Americans access to health care and aided economic security.

As for foreign policy, Obama is the president who finally brought down Osama bin Laden, the terrorist who was the architect of the 9/11 atrocities. He’s also employed a policy of drone strikes that has alienated some on the left and caused no small amount of heartburn in foreign capitals. But he doesn’t shy away from making tough calls.

Still, Obama’s decision-making on national security and foreign policy has met more criticism from moderate thinkers and centrist pundits than any other element of his presidency. He is out of step with the hawkish “Washington consensus,” as The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg recently reported. The president thinks before he speaks. He appreciates nuance. He isn’t high on saber-rattling. He doesn’t believe the might of the U.S. armed forces, considerable though it may be, can solve every problem.

Count me among those who believe a break from the “Washington consensus,” which approved of the invasion of Iraq, is a very good thing.

Obama snubbed that groupthink to negotiate a historic deal with Iran, a bold bet to try to halt their efforts to produce nuclear weapons. It will be years, if not decades, before foreign policy experts can assess its consequences, but the president was wise to try. And he got it done over the outlandish theatrics of a Republican-dominated Congress.

None of Obama’s many accomplishments would have been possible were he not a man of stellar integrity. His enemies have been greatly disappointed that they have not been able to sniff out scandal in his administration.

The president and his wife, Michelle, also display even-tempered and well-grounded personalities that resist pettiness and petulance, anger and affront, even in the face of vicious insults. And while most of the singularly offensive rants have come from the right wing, a few have been lobbed from the left. College professor and professional provocateur Cornel West has called Obama a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface.”

The Obamas have been a lovely antidote to the politics of personal destruction. By the time they leave, the president’s approval ratings should be higher still.


Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama arrives late to participate in a G-7 Working Session in Shima, Japan, Friday, May 27, 2016, during the G-7 Summit. REUTERS/Carolyn Kaster/Pool

On Eve Of State Of The Union Speech, Obama Enjoys Steady Rise In Polls

On Eve Of State Of The Union Speech, Obama Enjoys Steady Rise In Polls

By David Lauter, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — A month ago, looking at rising polls for President Barack Obama, we posed the question “trend or blip?” With several more weeks of data, there’s now clearly an answer — it’s a trend, small but significant.

As Obama puts the final touches on his State of the Union speech, his approval rating with the public has clearly risen enough to be consistently measurable and politically important.

The latest evidence comes from the Washington Post/ABC News poll, which finds 50 percent of Americans approving of Obama’s performance in office, with 44 percent disapproving. That’s a seven-point increase in that poll’s approval rating since the fall and the president’s best showing in nearly two years.

The increase in the Post/ABC poll is the biggest bump for Obama among seven recent opinion surveys. All but one of those, however, have shown increases.

The increases aren’t huge — on average, Obama has gone from approval in the low 40s during the run-up to the midterm elections to a position in the middle to high 40s in the most recent surveys — but they add up. In Gallup’s weekly averages, for example, Obama has gone from a nine-point deficit in early December to a two-point deficit so far in January.

Even though Obama won’t be running for office again, that trend matters. To preserve his policies against assault from the Republican Congress, Obama needs to rely on unity among Democrats. He’s far more likely to get that support if members of Congress see his approval with the public as steady or rising.

The example the White House wants to avoid would be that of Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush. His approval rating had dropped to the low-30s by the time of his 6th-year mid-term election and never recovered. Instead, Obama’s standing now more closely resembles that of Ronald Reagan at this point in his presidency, although it remains below that of Bill Clinton in his second term.

Obama operates in a far more polarized environment than did Reagan. In these times, presidents seldom manage to gain the support of the other party’s backers. Instead, they rise or fall based largely on their ability to keep their backers unified. Bush suffered from a sharp drop in support among Republicans. Obama, so far, has avoided a similar problem.

Indeed, Obama’s rise in recent polls has come about in part because of increased approval among parts of his coalition — most notably Latinos, who responded positively to his executive action shielding several million unauthorized immigrants from deportation.

He has also benefited from a steadily improving public view of the economy, brought about by significant improvements in the job market and declining gas prices.

Gallup’s latest survey found that 41 percent of Americans were “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with the nation’s economy last week. That’s up from just 28 percent a year ago. If economic conditions continue to improve, as most forecasters expect, Obama could look forward to at least somewhat more improvement in his ratings.

One last note — as many polls have found, the Post/ABC survey discovered strong public dislike for gridlock in the federal government. Two-thirds of those polled called the inability of the two parties to find common ground a “major problem.”

But that doesn’t mean the public is any more united than its elected representatives. Asked which way the country should head, 35 percent said the U.S. should follow Obama’s lead, 34 percent said it should follow the lead of the GOP in Congress and the rest either wished for some other choice or said they did not know.

The Post/ABC poll was conducted Monday through Thursday of last week among 1,003 Americans aged 18 and older. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

AFP Photo/Mandel Ngan