Gallup: Bin Ladin Now Bin Forgotten

I still think that Obama has some kind of long-lasting small adjustment to his favorability. I think a president is the sum of his accomplishments and failures, and Obama now has exactly one accomplishment. Not enough to overcome all his myriad failures, but still, he's got one win where before he had none.

( If you doubt me, check out my 2 for 2 record on Huckabee and Trump. (I'm not retracting, I'm reloading.)

But it looks like any improvement for Obama will be so small that you can completely miss it.

Obama's approval rating is now at 46 percent, equal to his approval rating in the last tracking poll conducted before Obama addressed Americans late on May 1 and informed them of bin Laden's death. Forty-four percent of Americans now disapprove of the job Obama is doing as president.

According to the Gallup poll, Obama's approval rating crested at 52 percent after the bin Laden killing. His disapproval rating never fell lower than 40 percent.

Obama will run partly as a "foreign policy president," which is what presidents run as when they're failures on all things domestic. See George Bush the elder; see also John McCain who, while not a president, could not (or at least did not) point to any domestic policy hope and change and mostly ran as the guy who pushed Bush the younger to the right on Iraq.

That's usually not a strong pitch to the public.

Obama will also run, Howard Fineman guesses (probably correctly), as a "values" president, i.e., he has the same values of the average American citizen, such as destroying the economy, pilling up trillions in fresh debt, showing he's "business friendly" by practicing crony capitalism and thuggish coercive "capitalism," pushing the gay agenda, and other such bedrock American values.

But he has to run on those dubious values because his record isn't dubious so much as disastrous.

The Public Doesn't Like Endzone Dances, Either: Modestly funny SNL sketch poking some minor fun at Obama for now running on "a verb, a noun, and Osama bin Ladin," as Joe Biden might have said in 2008.

The funny parts are the two stand-up cliches. And they're just okay.

posted by Ace at 02:17 PM

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