This is excellent news!
http://www.examiner.com/x-2913-Boston-Republican-Examiner~y2009m3d24-New-Zogby-poll-bad-news-for-Obama-jobapproval-ratings-fall-to-5050
New Zogby poll bad news for Obama: job-approval ratings fall to 50-50
March 24, 4:29 AM · 3 comments
Remember all those ridiculous comparisons of Obama to Lincoln by an adoring and compliant media before he was even sworn in and had served a single day in the Oval Office?
What a difference two months makes.
When you start out your term from the heights of Mt. Olympus, there is only one way to go — down. And, for Obama, the fall has been rather precipitious, only because the expectations for his presidency were so unrealistic and utterly devoid of any connection with reality.
A new Zogby poll confirms what Obama does not seem willing to accept: the New Messiah gig is up; the campaign is over. George Bush has retired to his ranch in Texas and the "we've inherited all these problems" line is no longer resonating with the public. Obama is now at the helm, and on his watch, his Administration has been badly floundering and is adrift.
It's hard to know which is more laugable: the fact that the former community organizer, devoid of any substantive expereince, has now been exposed as unequal to the task at hand, or that his fans in the media are surprised that his popularity, which they have consistently overrated, is plummetting.
Obama's fall from grace is a combination of his demonstrated incompetence and his credibility problem, or what I have characterized as the "Obama gap" — the glaring inconsistency between his words and his deeds. During the presidential campaign, many of Obama's statements strained credulity ("I don't think that my church is particularly controversial"), but a swooning media simply chose to ignore them. Since the press continued to not only entertain wholly unrealistic expectations about Obama, but treated him as a demi-god (i.e, unwarranted and ludicrous comparisons to Lincoln), he thought, with ample justification, that he would continue to be immune from any criticism. As such, he brought with him into the White House his capacity for telling whoppers.
A few of my favorites: He holds an anti-earmark press conference one day, then the next, signs into law a legislative behemoth that contains some 9,000. His budget projections have been exposed by the Congressional Budget Office as based on a lot of fuzzy math, yet in light of the staggering trillions in debt he wants to incur, he asserts with a straight face, that he will cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.
He knew months ago about the AIG bonuses, yet when the matter was publicly disclosed, he feigns ignorance, and whips up a mob frenzy with this indignation of "Wall Street Greed." Is it any wonder he can't fill much needed vacant positions at the Treasury Department. Who would want to work there, only to find one day they are the objects of vilification and voter wrath, stoked by the very man who soght their counsel?
Amidst all the tumult occurring on his watch, Obama's preferred posture is to bask in the adulation of being a celebrity icon. It's the redemptive idea of his presidency that matters, not his capacity for governing. But Americans are growing weary of Obama the celebrity president. They want their president to lead, to actually make some hard choices, and not run to the West Coast for a sit-down with Jay Leno. As the public is slowly starting to realize, Obama has remained in campagin mode for the simple reason that he doesn't know how to govern.
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